Chapter 2
Three years earlier, I had fifty pages of a novel and a thesis committee that thought I was the real thing.
The pages lived in a manila folder on the corner of my desk in the Vanderbilt MFA office I shared with two other students — one who wrote about the American West in sentences so spare you could hear the wind in them, and one who wrote about his mother’s kitchen in sentences so long you could taste the garlic.
My folder sat between a coffee mug with a chipped handle and a stack of student papers I was supposed to grade for the intro workshop I TA’d on Thursdays.
The novel didn’t have a title yet. It was about a woman who discovers that the life she chose is not the one she’s living, and I thought at the time that this was a metaphor.
I was twenty-four. I thought a lot of things at twenty-four.
My advisor, Dr. Linden, had read the fifty pages twice and marked them up with a green pen he reserved for work he considered serious.
“You have a voice,” he told me during office hours, leaning back in his chair with the green pen tucked behind his ear.
“Most people in this program have technique. You have a voice. Don’t lose it trying to sound like a writer. ”
I took that with me. I carried it the way you carry a compliment from someone whose opinion costs something — carefully, protectively, turning it over in private like a coin you don’t want to spend.
I was going to finish the novel by spring. I had a plan. I had a schedule taped to the wall above my desk — draft chapters cross-referenced with workshop deadlines and TA hours, color-coded, precise. I was the kind of person who made schedules. I was the kind of person who kept them.
Then I met Cade Calloway in a bar off Broadway in downtown Nashville, and the schedule came down.
It was a Thursday in October. Joss had convinced me to go out — Joss, who had graduated from the MFA the year before and was already working at a literary magazine in New York but flew down for homecoming weekend because she missed the cheap beer and the live music.
We walked into a place called The Drop that smelled like peanut shells and had a band playing country covers too loud for conversation.
The bar was crowded. The floor was sticky. I didn’t want to be there.
“One drink,” Joss said. “You’ve been in that office for nine straight days. You smell like thesis.”
“I don’t smell like thesis.”
“You smell like thesis and anxiety and that terrible coffee from the machine in the hallway.”
“The coffee is free.”
“The coffee is free because no one else will drink it.” She steered me toward the bar with a hand on my elbow. “One drink. Talk to a human being. Then I’ll drive you home and you can go back to being a monk.”
I ordered a beer I didn’t want and leaned against the bar and tried to look like a person who was having a good time, which is a skill I had not yet learned. Joss was better at this. Joss was better at most things that required other people.
The hockey players arrived at ten, loud and loose from a home win, still carrying the game in their bodies.
You could tell which ones they were before they opened their mouths — the size of them, the way they moved through the crowd like the crowd was supposed to part.
A group of six or seven, all broad shoulders and easy confidence and the particular energy of men who had just spent two hours doing the thing they were best at.
Cade was the one who looked like he was in charge.
Not the tallest, not the loudest, but the one the others oriented toward — the way planets orbit, not because they choose to, but because the gravity is there.
Dark blond hair, a nose that had been broken at least once, a grin that knew exactly what it was doing.
He ordered a round for his group without looking at the menu and tipped the bartender like a man who wanted to be remembered.
He noticed me the way men like him notice women — a quick scan, an assessment, a decision.
I didn’t look like the other women in the bar.
I was in jeans and a sweater that had ink stains on the cuffs and my hair was in a bun held together by a pen.
I looked like exactly what I was: a grad student who’d been dragged out against her will.
“You’re not having a good time,” he said. He’d materialized beside me at the bar, which was a trick I hadn’t seen coming.
“I’m having a fine time.”
“You’ve been holding that beer for twenty minutes and you haven’t taken a sip.”
I looked down. He was right. “Maybe I’m savoring it.”
“Nobody savors a three-dollar domestic.” He grinned. It was the kind of grin that had probably gotten him out of a lot of trouble and into just as much. “Cade Calloway.”
“I know who you are.”
“Do you?”
“You play center for Nashville. You scored twice tonight. You hold the franchise record for assists in a single season.” I didn’t follow hockey.
Joss did. Joss had been talking about this team all week, and I had a good memory for details I didn’t care about.
“You also tipped the bartender forty percent, which is either generous or a performance.”
Something shifted in his face. Not offense — interest. The grin stayed, but the eyes got sharper. “What’s your name?”
“Emory Tate.”
“What do you do, Emory Tate?”
“I’m an MFA candidate. I write fiction.”
“Fiction.” He said it the way people say it when they’ve never met someone who does it — not dismissive, but curious in a way that told me he had no idea what it meant. “Any good?”
“My thesis committee thinks so.”
“But what do you think?”
That was the thing. That was the exact thing that got me — not the grin, not the shoulders, not the gravity.
He asked what I thought. In a bar full of people who would have asked what my thesis was about or whether I’d been published or whether I could make a living at it, Cade Calloway asked what I thought about my own work.
And he looked at me while he waited for the answer like the answer actually mattered.
“I think I’m the real thing,” I said. “But I’m not finished yet.”
“Then finish.”
We talked for two hours. He was loud and certain and argued about everything — he thought Hemingway was overrated, which was wrong, and that the best stories were the ones people told about themselves when they thought nobody was listening, which was right.
He asked questions and listened to the answers and laughed at my jokes like he meant it.
He walked me to Joss’s car at midnight and didn’t ask for my number. He asked what I was reading.
“Marilynne Robinson,” I said.
“Is she good?”
“She’s the best.”
“I’ll read her. Then I’ll tell you what I think.”
He texted me three days later: Finished Gilead. The old man broke me. You were right. Dinner?
Dinner was a place on 12th Avenue South where the pasta was good and the lighting was bad and he showed up ten minutes early, which I later learned was the only time in his life he’d been early for anything that wasn’t hockey.
He wore a button-down with the sleeves rolled up and he’d brought the book with him — pages dog-eared, spine cracked, a coffee stain on the cover — and he set it on the table between us like evidence.
“The letter,” he said before I’d even sat down. “The letter at the end, where the father writes to his son about the light on the water. That’s the best thing I’ve ever read.”
“You’ve read one book.”
“It’s the best thing I’ve ever read.”
I sat down. I ordered wine. He ordered beer and didn’t look at the menu because he already knew what he wanted — in restaurants, in hockey, in everything.
Cade Calloway was a man built for certainty.
He moved through the world like a puck on clean ice: fast, committed, no second-guessing.
It was thrilling to be near. It was exhausting to keep up with.
I should have finished the novel. That was what the schedule on my wall said — draft chapters three through five by November, workshop chapter four in December, full draft by spring.
I should have said no to dinner and yes to the desk and stayed the person I was before a hockey player read Marilynne Robinson because I told him to.
Instead, I said yes. To dinner. Then to the second date, where he took me skating at the practice rink after hours and I fell three times and he caught me twice and missed once because he was laughing too hard. Then to the month. Then to the year.
Cade Calloway loved like he played — full speed, no hesitation, the kind of commitment that felt like certainty because he’d never learned the difference.
He called every night when the team traveled.
He drove to campus between practices to bring me coffee — not the free coffee from the machine in the hallway, but coffee from the shop on Elliston Place that I’d mentioned once and he’d remembered.
He read my pages. He read all fifty of them in one night and texted me at two in the morning: The woman in your novel is going to burn the house down.
I can feel it. Don’t let anyone talk you out of it.
Nobody talked me out of it. I talked myself out of it, one reasonable decision at a time.
We were married eleven months after the bar.
Eleven months — the same number as the calls I would make three years later, but I didn’t know that yet and the symmetry would have meant nothing.
A big wedding — his family, my family, two hundred guests who knew his name and a handful who knew mine.
Rowan was my maid of honor. She stood beside me in a dress the same shade of blue as mine and held my bouquet during the vows and smiled at Cade with a warmth I read as sisterly pride, because what else would it be?