Chapter 2
rye
. . .
The last customer finally leaves at ten-thirty, guitar case bouncing against his hip as he pushes through the front door of The Songbird. I turn the deadbolt with more force than necessary and lean against the worn wood, listening to the silence settle around me like settling dust.
Another Thursday night, another dozen dreamers hoping someone in the audience might change their lives.
Most nights I love this—the raw hope, the willingness to bleed on stage for strangers.
Tonight feels different. Heavier. Like the weight of all those unfulfilled dreams, it is pressing down on my chest.
“That kid with the banjo.” Jovie emerges from behind the bar, silver hair escaping her bandana. “Played the same song three times in a row.”
“He was nervous.” I start collecting empty beer bottles from tables, their clink creating a familiar rhythm. “First time on any stage.”
“Nervousness doesn't make repetition sound better.” Jovie’s voice carries the dry humor of someone who’s watched thousands of musicians crash and burn. “Though I suppose we all start somewhere.”
The venue feels smaller in dim lighting, stripped of the magic that transforms it during performances.
Twenty round tables crowd the space between the bar and the stage, each one bearing scars from years of elbows and drinks and dreams being discussed over cheap beer.
A single microphone stands center stage, waiting for tomorrow’s batch of hopefuls.
I work my way toward the front, gathering bottles and wiping down surfaces that will be sticky again by this time tomorrow. We serve beer and wine only—nothing requiring more than thirty seconds to pour. This place exists for music, nothing more.
“Speaking of starting somewhere,” Jovie pauses in her glass washing, fixing me with the look that means she’s about to say something I won’t want to hear. “When’s the last time you played?”
My hands pause on the table I’m cleaning. “I play every day.”
“Not what I mean.”
She’s right. Playing lullabies for Lily doesn’t count. Neither does humming along to the radio while I balance books or absently strumming during sound checks. Jovie means real playing. The kind that opens something in your chest and lets strangers see inside.
“I manage this place. That’s enough music for me.”
Jovie snorts and instantly covers her mouth and nose, but it’s too late. I’m laughing and avoiding her question. “Rye Hayes, you couldn’t sell that story to a blind man.”
I move to the next table, scrubbing at a ring that probably won’t budge no matter how hard I attack it.
The Songbird has seen better decades—paint peeling around windows, floorboards creaking their own percussion section, upholstery held together by stubbornness and duct tape.
But it’s mine in every way that matters, even if the bank disagrees.
“Mama called earlier,” I say, changing the subject. “Wants to take Lily camp shopping this weekend.”
“That woman spoils your baby rotten.” Jovie’s tone suggests she thinks this is exactly as it should be. “How’s Lily feeling about fifth grade?”
“Excited. Terrified. Changes her mind every five minutes.” I spray cleaner on the bar and work my way down its length. “She’s been humming this tune for weeks. Something she made up.”
“Wonder where she gets that from.”
The comment hangs between us like smoke from a cigarette someone forgot to put out. Jovie doesn’t push—she never does—but her meaning settles into the space anyway. Lily’s musical gifts didn’t appear from nowhere. Talent like hers needs roots.
I finish at the bar and move toward the sound booth, checking connections and powering down equipment. The mixing board still bears scratches from the previous manager, a songwriter named Cole, who vanished one day, leaving only a note that read, “Gone to find my muse in Memphis.”
The cash register opens with its familiar scrape. Tonight’s take won’t cover much—Thursday nights never do—but it’ll keep the lights on another week. I count bills and separate coins while Jovie finishes stacking chairs, our movements falling into the choreography of three years working together.
“You heading straight home?” Jovie asks, hanging her apron on its hook.
“Need to check tomorrow’s schedule first.”
Jovie nods and gathers her purse, a leather creation large enough to smuggle instruments. “Tell Lily I said hello. And Rye?”
I look up from counting twenties. “Yeah?”
“That tune she’s been humming? You should listen to it. Really listen. Sometimes the next generation knows things we forgot.”
She lets herself out the back door, leaving me alone with her words echoing in the empty venue. The Songbird settles around me like an old sweater, familiar and comfortable despite its imperfections.
I make my way to the tiny office tucked behind the stage, flipping on the lights that illuminate walls papered with years of promotional materials.
Band photos, concert posters, newspaper clippings yellow with age—the visual history of Nashville’s independent music scene.
My desk sits beneath a window facing the alley, buried under booking forms and vendor invoices.
The filing cabinet in the corner requires a specific combination of pulling and sweet-talking to open properly.
Inside, folders organize three years of my life into categories: Contracts, Receipts, Correspondence, Emergency Contacts.
Everything necessary to keep a small venue running depends on determination and caffeine.
I’m reaching for the folder marked “Friday Lineup” when my fingers brush against something I’d forgotten was there—the hard edge of a guitar case pushed deep into the back corner.
My breath catches.
The case bears scars from a thousand miles of road wear and twice as many dreams deferred. Faded venue stickers cover its surface like battle wounds: The Orange Peel, Eddie’s Attic, The Bluebird Cafe. Places I once believed I belonged.
I should grab the folder and pretend I never touched it. Should lock the cabinet and go home and continue the life I’ve built around the absence of music.
Instead, I pull it out.
The case opens with a sigh, revealing the Martin D-15 I haven’t held in four years.
Its mahogany body gleams despite neglect, though the strings hang slack and probably need replacing.
A notebook rests in the accessory compartment—pages filled with chord progressions and half-finished lyrics written in handwriting that looks like mine but belongs to someone I used to be.
I flip through pages without reading the words. Reading them would hurt too much, like pressing on a wound that never quite healed. These songs represent a version of myself that believed music could fix anything, that the right combination of melody and truth could save what was breaking.
That was before Jason left. Before I learned that loving a musician means watching them choose everything else over you. Before I understood that single mothers don’t get to chase dreams that won’t pay for groceries.
A car door slams in the alley, startling me back to the present. I close the notebook and snap the case shut, pushing it back where it belongs. Some things are better left buried.
The Friday folder reveals tomorrow’s lineup: three acts, all local, all hungry for their fifteen minutes. Small crowds, smaller pay, but they keep the doors open. That has to be enough.
I lock the cabinet and kill the lights, gathering my purse and keys. Outside, the Nashville night is still alive, with music and laughter reverberating through the streets. I swear this city never sleeps, and when it does, it’s never for long.
The drive home takes fifteen minutes through neighborhoods changing faster than longtime residents can track.
East Nashville gentrifies in patches—restored Victorian houses next to empty lots, craft coffee shops sharing blocks with auto repair shops that remember when this area housed actual working families.
Every time a new restaurant goes in or a new house goes up, I think, this is it; this will change the area.
Nope.
My house occupies a corner lot on a street lined with oak trees older than the city itself. The mortgage stretches my budget thinner than it should, but Lily deserves a yard for her bicycle and a front porch where she can sit with her books without traffic noise drowning out her concentration.
The porch light illuminates my mom’s Buick in the driveway. She’s probably asleep on the couch with a romance novel open across her chest, reading glasses sliding down her nose.
I let myself in quietly, hanging the keys on their hook and slipping off the shoes worn smooth by three years of standing on concrete floors. The living room glows with light from a single lamp, and, sure enough, Mama sleeps on the couch with a paperback face down on her lap.
The stairs creak despite my careful steps. Lily’s door stands slightly open, soft light spilling into the hallway. I peek inside to find her sitting up in bed, notebook balanced on her knees, pencil moving across the page with the intense focus she reserves for things that matter most.
“Hey, baby.” I step into the room, noting the camp clothes laid out for tomorrow and the water glass on her nightstand that she never remembers to drink. “What are you working on?”
“Just writing.” She closes the notebook quickly, but not before I catch a glimpse of musical notation mixed with words I can’t read from this distance. “Mama, can you sing that song tonight?”
“Which song?”
“The one you promised. About the Mockingbird and the Storm.”
My chest tightens. I made that promise three weeks ago during a bedtime conversation about birds and weather and how some creatures survive by learning new ways to sing when their old songs no longer work.
Lily asked if I could write a song about it, and I said yes without thinking—the way you do when your ten-year-old looks at you like you hold all the answers.
“I’m still working on it,” I tell her, settling on the edge of her bed and smoothing the covers around her legs. “Songs take time.”
“But you write songs all the time. I hear you humming.”
“Humming isn’t the same as writing.”
Lily fixes me with the look she inherited from her grandmother—the one that sees through excuses and demands better. “You could write it if you wanted to. You just don’t want to.”
The accusation lands closer to home than I care to admit. She’s right, of course. I could write her song. I could face the instrument gathering dust in my office and find the melody that’s been circling my subconscious for weeks. I could give my daughter what she asked for.
I could become the songwriter I used to be.
“Some songs need to find their own time,” I say instead, offering the kind of non-answer that parents use when they can’t explain their own failures.
Lily nods, but I catch disappointment flickering across her face before she hides it. She’s too young to understand that sometimes protecting the people you love means protecting them from the parts of yourself that broke too badly to fix.
“Will you stay until I fall asleep?”
“Of course.”
I adjust her pillows and pull the covers to her chin, then settle into the chair beside her bed.
This ritual hasn’t changed since she was small enough to curl against my side during thunderstorms. Now she’s all arms and legs, growing into the person she’ll become while I try to figure out how to be the mother she needs.
Lily closes her eyes, but her breathing doesn’t settle into sleep immediately. Instead, she starts to hum—soft and unconscious, the melody floating through the dark room like something she can’t help but release.
The tune stops my breath.
It’s complex without being complicated, the kind of melody that sounds simple until you try to replicate it. The rhythm shifts between measures in a way that shouldn’t work but does, creating a sense of movement that makes you want to follow wherever it leads.
This isn’t casual humming. This is composition.
“Lily,” I whisper, but she’s already drifting toward sleep, the melody fading as her breathing deepens.
I sit in the darkness listening to the silence she left behind, wondering how my ten-year-old daughter can create something so fully formed while I can’t string together three chords without my chest seizing with panic.
The melody lingers in my head as I slip out of her room and down the hallway to my own bedroom.
It follows me through my nighttime routine—brushing teeth, washing face, changing into pajamas worn soft from too many washings.
Even after I turn off the lights and settle under the covers, I can hear it playing in the space between sleeping and waking.
Lily inherited more than my stubborn streak and her father’s dark eyes. She carries music in her bones the way some people carry stories or prayers. And unlike her mother, she’s not afraid to let it out.
Tomorrow, I’ll ask her about the song.
Tomorrow, I’ll listen to whatever she’s writing in that notebook and try to understand how she makes creating look so effortless.
Tomorrow, I’ll figure out how to be the kind of mother who nurtures gifts instead of hiding from them.
But tonight, I lie in the dark listening to my daughter’s melody echo through the house and wonder if some talents skip generations for a reason. Maybe Lily can do what I couldn’t. Maybe she can take the music I buried and turn it into something beautiful.
Maybe that’s enough.
The melody follows me into sleep, where it weaves through dreams of stages I’ll never stand on and songs I’ll never write. In the dreams, I’m not afraid of the music. In the dreams, guitar strings don’t feel like barbed wire against my fingertips.
In the dreams, I remember what it felt like to believe that songs could save everything, even the people who write them.