Chapter Four - The Road to Larkspur
CHAPTER FOUR
The Road to Larkspur
At six twelve in the morning, Nashville learned my marriage was in trouble. I knew because my phone told me before I reached the interstate.
I had turned it on long enough to send Priya one message from the parking garage—Leaving town. You have authority on the rights issue. Call only if I have to decide something.—and the notifications came through before I could switch it back to silent.
The first headline called Eli’s dedication “the moment of the night.”
The second asked whether America’s favorite love song had a new muse. The third used a photograph of Sadie smiling at Eli under the stage lights and cropped out the thirty feet between them. I did not open any of them.
I drove. The city thinned slowly. Glass and concrete gave way to gas stations, low shopping centers, wet fields, then stretches of road where the hills began lifting at the horizon.
Morning had arrived gray and undecided, the kind that made every windshield look slightly dirty.
My suitcase lay in the back. Beside it, the plastic bin held twenty years of my handwriting.
I checked the rearview mirror more often for the bin than for traffic.
At a stoplight outside the city, my phone buzzed against the passenger seat.
Eli. His name stayed on the screen until the call ended. A voicemail appeared.
Then another call. I turned the phone facedown and took the next ramp.
There had been years when I could tell what Eli needed from the timing of a call alone.
One ring and hang up meant he had remembered something but was walking onstage.
Two calls close together meant a problem somebody else had failed to solve.
A call after midnight from a different time zone meant he wanted my voice, not an answer.
This was simply repetition. He wanted access.
For once, wanting it did not create an obligation in me.
I stopped for gas forty miles later. A television inside the convenience store was tuned to a morning entertainment show.
I saw Eli’s face before I heard the sound.
The clerk had the volume low, but captions crawled beneath the footage.
COUNTRY ICON’S “MUSE” DEDICATION HAS FANS TALKING.
They showed the moment again. Eli turning toward Sadie.
Sadie’s uncertainty. His mouth forming the word.
Muse. Then the broadcast angle changed, and there I was in the first row. Only three seconds. A woman standing. A man beside her reaching for her wrist. A camera swinging after her too late. The hosts spoke over the clip while a bright graphic appeared beside them.
WHO IS MRS. MERCER?
A smaller banner crawled beneath it: ELI MERCER SITS DOWN THIS MORNING AFTER AWARD-SHOW CONTROVERSY. I registered the words only long enough to resent that he was already back under studio lights while I was still driving away.
I almost laughed. Sixteen years of being useful enough to disappear, and apparently leaving a chair was what made me interesting.
“You need a receipt?”
I looked at the clerk. He was holding out the paper.
“Yes. Sorry.” He glanced at the television, then at me. Nothing registered.
“Pump six.”
“Thank you.” Outside, cold air hit my face. I folded the receipt into my wallet because I had always kept receipts. Gas. Hotels. Equipment. Meals that became expenses. Proof that money had gone somewhere for a reason. The habit irritated me suddenly.
Then I thought of Priya’s three boxes.
Composition. Home demo. Released master. Evidence was only another name for remembering accurately. I kept the receipt.
By eight, people had found my social accounts.
I knew because the follower count on an old private account began jumping every time I stopped at a light.
The account had not been updated in three years.
The last photograph was a bowl of peaches on our kitchen counter.
Now strangers were requesting access to it by the hundreds.
Some profile names included Eli’s face. Some included Sadie’s. One message preview read, PLEASE TELL ME HE DIDN’T— I disabled notifications without reading the rest. The road climbed. The steady rise gave me something physical to follow.
Cell service dropped to one bar, then disappeared entirely around a long wooded bend.
The silence that followed felt different from turning the phone off.
I had not chosen it. The mountains had. I lowered the window an inch.
Cold pine air entered the car. Since the theater, I had heard almost nothing that did not belong to Eli. Tires over pavement.
Wind along the door. A loose object rolling somewhere in the trunk whenever I turned.
Ordinary sounds. Unamplified. Larkspur Falls announced itself with a weathered green sign, a narrow bridge, and a speed limit low enough to feel personal.
I had first come here as a child. Summers, mostly. My aunt believed air-conditioning weakened character and television ruined conversation, so I had spent July afternoons reading on the cabin floor while box fans pushed hot air from one room to another.
When she died, she left me the cabin and enough instructions to make selling it feel like disobedience. I had kept it.
Mostly closed. Mostly waiting. Alder Ridge Road was another twelve miles beyond town, but my stomach had begun aching somewhere after the last gas stop.
I could not remember eating since lunch the day before.
The Switchback Cafe sat where it always had, on the corner across from the library, with fogged front windows and a hand-painted sign that had been repainted without ever becoming straight.
I parked. For a minute, I stayed in the car. There was no strategy in stopping. No lawyer had advised it. No publicity team knew where I was. I was hungry. That was enough. A bell rang when I opened the cafe door. Warmth reached me first.
Then coffee. Then butter and something sweet baking somewhere behind the counter.
Four people occupied the room: two older men in work jackets arguing quietly over a folded newspaper, a woman with a laptop, and someone in the back booth reading a paperback with both hands around a mug.
Nobody looked up long enough to recognize me.
I had not known how badly I needed that until it happened. Behind the counter, a woman with iron-gray hair was sliding biscuits from a tray onto a plate.
“You eating or hiding?” she asked.
I stopped. She glanced at me.
“Either is allowed. Hiding costs the same as coffee.”
There was no softness in her voice. No concern carefully wrapped around curiosity.
“Eating,” I said.
“Good answer. Sit anywhere except the table under the vent unless you like freezing.”
I chose a booth beside the window. A minute later she arrived with coffee I had not ordered and a menu I did not open.
“You look like eggs.”
I blinked.
“Is that an insult?”
“Depends how you feel about eggs.”
A laugh escaped me. Small. Unprepared. Her mouth tilted.
“There. You’re alive enough for breakfast.”
“I’ll have whatever is fastest.”
“That would be me bringing you a spoonful of peanut butter.”
“Second fastest.”
“Eggs.”
“Then you were right.”
“I usually am before nine.”
She started away.
“Wait.” She turned.
“Can I get them scrambled?”
“They were going to be scrambled.”
“How did you know?”
“You look like somebody who doesn’t need to make one more decision.”
Then she left. I sat very still. The observation should have bothered me.
Instead, I wrapped both hands around the coffee.
It was too hot. I drank it anyway. No one asked why I wore yesterday’s black dress beneath a cardigan pulled from my suitcase in a gas-station bathroom.
Nobody asked about the makeup that had mostly disappeared from around my eyes.
No one asked why my phone kept lighting silently on the table until I put it into my bag. The cafe did not have a television. I noticed that only after several minutes.
There was a chalkboard near the register with the day’s soup, a corkboard layered with notices for piano lessons, firewood, a lost orange cat, and a town-council meeting.
A jar beside the till collected dollar bills for somebody’s roof repair.
The woman with the laptop glanced at my dress once, probably because it was eight thirty in the morning and I was dressed for an award show, then went back to her screen.
It was not privacy exactly. People noticed things here. They simply did not seem to believe noticing entitled them to an answer. I had forgotten that distinction.
A man came in carrying a cardboard box of apples and called to the woman behind the counter that the north road had washed gravel across one curve. She thanked him, took the box, and told him his tab was still overdue. The room absorbed the information without urgency.
Road. Weather. Breakfast. Debt. Problems that stayed the size of themselves. The woman returned with eggs, toast, and fried potatoes.
“I didn’t order potatoes.”
“They came with the plate.”
“I can pay for them.”
“I would hope so.”
That almost made me laugh again. She topped off my coffee.
“You passing through?”
“I have a place up on Alder Ridge.”
Her eyebrows lifted.
“Seasonal?”
“Family.”
“Whose?” The question tightened something in me because for years, the easiest answer to questions about myself had been Eli. My husband is— We’re here because Eli— Eli has a place—
Eli needs— I set down my fork.
“The Bennett cabin,” I said.
She looked at me more carefully.
“Up past the old fire road?”
“Yes.”
“Been shut a while.”
“About fourteen months.”
“Then you’ll want the water run before you trust it, and check the back steps before carrying anything heavy. Freeze lifted one of the boards last winter.”
“You know the house?”
“I know the ridge.”
She held out her hand.
“Ada Reeves.” I wiped my palm on my napkin before taking it.
“June.” Ada waited without pressing, just long enough that I understood she was asking for whatever came after it. On television, I was Mrs. Eli Mercer. Online, apparently, I was WHO IS MRS. MERCER?
At home, my name appeared on utility accounts, tax records, and the occasional charity invitation somebody else had addressed. I thought of the gold card taped to the theater seat.
MRS. ELI MERCER.
I thought of my name absent from the song credits.
Then I looked at a woman who had no idea why any of that mattered.
“June Bennett,” I said.
Ada shook my hand once.
“All right, June Bennett.”
No recognition. No change in her face. No story rushing in to replace me. She released my hand and nodded toward my plate.
“Eat before it gets cold. Alder Ridge will still be there when you’re done.”
She walked back to the counter. I picked up my fork.
Outside the window, Larkspur Falls went on with its morning as though I had arrived carrying nothing remarkable at all. I had introduced myself and no explanation followed. I ate my breakfast under my own name.