2. The Pecan Tree #2
“Ivy says it was here when the Harmon family built the property. Which was a long time before either of us.”
He looks at the tree a moment longer.
“Panhandle’s full of trees like that,” he says. “Old things that look half-dead and just keep going.”
I turn towards him.
He seems to realize what he’s said and pulls his hat a fraction lower.
Emmett has appeared at the east paddock fence, pressed against the rails, watching this exchange with the frank interest of an animal who has opinions about everything and the social standing to act on them.
Cash sees him. Something in his face changes. Not much, but enough. The set of his jaw loosens slightly. He raises a hand in Emmett’s direction, a small gesture, almost involuntary, like a greeting he didn’t plan.
Emmett stretches his neck toward the fence rail and blows out a breath.
Cash almost smiles.
Not quite. But the shape of it is there.
“Second session is Friday,” I say. “Nine AM.”
“Don’t be early,” he says, before I can.
Dry. The faintest edge of something that might be amusement if it were given the room to develop.
“You learn fast,” I say.
“I learn when I need to.”
I finish my fence check. He goes back the way he came, hands back in his pockets, hat back down.
I watch him without meaning to.
Then I go back to work.
* * *
Evening
I update the session logs at five-thirty, recording what happened, what I observed, and what needs follow-up.
Under Cash Wilder’s file, I type: Second session confirmed Friday. Participant settled into the farmhouse. Initial fence-line contact was unremarkable.
I stare at the word unremarkable .
Then I leave it.
Ivy comes in while I am closing down the office, pulling her barn jacket on, ready for evening checks.
“Garrett Cole called,” I tell her.
“I know. He left a voicemail, too.” She pulls her hair back with the efficient economy of someone who has done it ten thousand times. “What did he want?”
“To confirm the schedule for the horse thing.”
Ivy’s hands pause for exactly one second.
“He said that.”
“Three times.”
She finishes with her hair. Her expression does not change, but there is something in her eyes that I have come to recognize as a sort of fury she keeps very contained and very cold.
“I’ll return his call tomorrow,” she says.
“I handled it.”
“I know you did.” She picks up her folder. “I’ll call him anyway.”
I wonder, what is that phone call going to sound like?
I almost feel sorry for Garrett Cole.
Almost.
* * *
Nashville — Evening
Dean pops into my head on the drive home.
It doesn’t happen often. Less than I used to. But the day has loosened old things, like a change in weather does, the pressure dropping, the air shifting, and suddenly there are thoughts you didn’t send for standing in the doorway of your mind.
I was nineteen. I had written a song I thought was good.
Not privately good. I had plenty of those, songs I wrote at two AM and never played again, songs that were for me what a journal entry is for some.
This was different. This one had something true in it, the kind of true that holds still when you press on it, that doesn’t shift or soften or turn into something else under examination.
I trusted Dean with it because I trusted Dean.
He was my boyfriend. He was kind, mostly. He liked music as if it were something that happens to you rather than something that comes out of you. I thought that was fine. I thought it didn’t matter.
I sang it for him in the kitchen of his apartment on a cool, March evening. I didn’t know he was recording it on his phone.
He laughed.
Not the laugh of someone being cruel. The laugh of someone who is genuinely surprised and doesn’t think about what they do with that surprise.
He called his roommate in. Played it back on his phone. Said listen to this, isn’t that something, in the tone people use for things that are charming and small.
I stood in his kitchen and understood that I had made a mistake.
Not about the song. About the person I’d sung it to.
The door locked that night. Not dramatically. Not with tears or a scene or a confrontation. Just closed, how a door closes when there is no longer a reason to keep it open.
I broke up with Dean two weeks later. He was confused. He didn’t connect the two things. I didn’t explain.
I have not sung in front of another person since.
This is not a wound I carry dramatically.
It is simply a fact about my life, just like it is a fact that I do not eat cilantro, and do not enjoy driving on the highway in the rain.
A preference formed by experience. A door that is closed because I closed it, for reasons that made sense and still do.
I pull out of the drive at half past five with the October dark already full and the cold coming in at the window seams.
The farmhouse light is still on when I drive out.
I see it in the rearview mirror, small and steady in the dark field, the yellow square of a window in a house where a man who hasn’t written anything in four months is sitting with whatever the silence is doing to him.
I watch it until the road curves.
Then it is gone, and I continue the drive home in the dark.
I turn onto the highway.
I crack the window despite the cold.
I sing, alone in the truck cab, but this time it’s a melody I picked up somewhere this week that doesn’t have words yet.
The sound goes nowhere.
That is the point of it. That has always been the point.
I believe this.