5. Yeah
Yeah
CASH
Sycamore Ridge — Evening
I walk over to the barn at five-thirty on a Tuesday evening because Emmett has been favoring his right foreleg.
Not dramatically. Nothing that Kit flagged, nothing that showed up in the session notes. Just a subtle thing I noticed at the end of the afternoon; he shifted his weight when he turned, a slight unevenness that was probably nothing and that I had not been thinking about for three hours.
I tell myself this is a professional concern for a program animal.
I tell myself this, crossing the field in the early dark, hands in my pockets, frost already forming on the grass.
I am in the barn with my hand on Emmett’s foreleg before I finish the argument with myself about why I am here.
The leg is fine.
Cool and settled, no heat, no swelling.
Suddenly, he takes my hat.
Not dramatically. He simply dips his head as I straighten up and lifts it off with the precision of a horse that has done this before, or has enough confidence in his jaw that the technique is inherent.
He stands there with my hat in his mouth.
"Give that back."
He does not give it back. He holds it with the calm of a horse that is making a point and is prepared to wait.
I reach for it. He moves his head back three inches. Not running. Negotiating.
"Emmett."
He looks at the barn door. Then at me. Then at the barn door again.
I reach again. He steps back two more inches and chews it slightly, which is not so much a threat as a statement of position.
I sit down on the bench and wait.
He waits too.
After three minutes, he walks over, sets the hat on the bench beside me, and returns to the far end of his stall with the satisfied quality of an animal who has made his point.
I pick it up.
I look at it.
I put it back on.
I don't know what the point was. I assume it was valid.
I straighten up, brush the hay off my jacket, and become aware that I have just driven 200 yards across a frozen field in the dark to check a leg that did not need checking.
There is a word for that, and it is not a professional concern.
I am still working out what to do about this information when Angel comes around the far end of the barn with a feed bucket and stops when she sees me.
She looks at Emmett, then at me. She does the calculation in about one second.
“He’s fine,” she says.
“I know. I checked.”
“I checked this afternoon.”
I know what she means by that. She means: I already knew he was fine, which means you didn’t come here for the horse.
I don't enjoy being read this accurately. It is one of the more uncomfortable features of the program, which has several, none of which I was adequately warned about in Hayes’s description.
“I had a feeling,” I say. “It was wrong. I’m leaving.”
Then the rain arrives, and I don’t leave.
It comes in fast from the southwest, as Tennessee weather does.
No warning, no gradual build, just suddenly the sky opens.
The temperature drops five degrees at the same moment, and the metal roof of the barn makes that banging-on-metal sound roofs do in rain, announcing the fact with considerable enthusiasm.
I get inside.
* * *
Angel is in the tack room.
She is sitting on the battered wooden bench along the far wall with a paperback open in her lap, boots crossed at the ankle, entirely unbothered by the rain hammering the roof six feet above her head.
She looks up when I come through the tack room door, rain-damp and slightly out of breath, and her face does the thing it does, the brief, complete assessment, quick as a blink.
She goes back to her book.
I’m in the tack room doorway, rain-damp and without a good reason to leave, and survey my options. The rain is not easing. The tack room has two choices of seating: the bench Angel is on, and the far end of the bench Angel is on.
I sit on the far end of the bench.
She does not comment on this.
The rain reverberates off the metal roof and fills every available silence with the particular white noise of water on steel, steady and enormous and strangely comfortable. I have not found many things comfortable in the past two weeks. This qualifies.
I lean back against the wall.
Angel turns a page.
* * *
We sit like that for a while.
Not talking and not performing. There is a difference, and this is the latter.
The rain is loud enough that silence doesn’t require maintenance.
We are two people in a small room, waiting for the same weather to pass, and that is a simple and sufficient explanation for the situation, requiring nothing further from either of us.
I watch the rain through the tack room’s small window. The barn lot is already puddling. I am glad I wore my jacket.
Angel reads.
The tack room smells like saddle soap and old leather, and the rain coming off my jacket.
She reads with complete attention, just a person, a book, and the rain. I can’t see the cover from here. I don’t ask.
The thing about sitting in a small room with a person who does not require anything from you is that it creates a specific kind of space. Not empty space. Something else. The kind of space where things you haven’t said out loud have room to exist without immediately becoming a problem.
I have not had that kind of space in a long time.
I did not realize I was missing it until now, sitting on a bench in a tack room in the rain, aware that the woman three feet away is not waiting for me to perform anything.
It comes out the way things come out when you stop managing them.
Without deciding to. Without a lead-in, a frame, or the preparation I give to what I say out loud. It’s just the measured assembly of words into shapes that communicate what I mean without communicating more than I intend.
Just out.
“I haven’t written anything in four months,” I say.
The rain keeps going. Angel doesn’t look up immediately. She finishes the line she’s reading, which I appreciate more than I can explain, and then she closes the book on her finger and looks at me.
She doesn’t say anything yet.
She is waiting, I understand, to see what I do with the fact that I have said it, whether I walk it back. Whether I qualify it, frame it, or turn it into something manageable, I produce the statement that requires less from both of us.
I don’t.
“Four months,” I say again. “Nothing real. A lot of things that sound like songs until you play them back.”
“What does it feel like?” she says. Not quite a question. More like an opening. “When it’s not coming.”
I look out the window at the rain.
Nobody has asked me that. Derek has asked me about timelines. Marcus has asked me about creative direction. Jana has asked me about the narrative around the block, how to position it, whether we lean into it or work around it. Nobody has asked what it feels like.
“Like there’s something I should be reaching for,” I say. “And my arm won’t move.”
I look back at her when I say it.
She holds my gaze with the steady, complete attention she gives to things she is taking seriously. No slight forward lean of someone pretending to care. Just present. Listening, which is different from waiting to respond.
“Yeah,” she says.
One word.
But there is something in it, a weight, a specific gravity that the word doesn’t usually carry.
Not in agreement exactly. Recognition. The particular sound of someone who knows what you mean, not because they’ve been told but because they have been there, in that same reaching place, with the same arm that won’t move.
I look at her.
She does not explain what she means. She does not offer her own version of the story or turn the conversation toward herself. She just lets the word sit between us with its full weight, and I find that I want to know what she meant by it more than I have wanted to know most things in recent memory.
I don’t ask.
Not because I’m not curious. Because I understand that the space she just gave me is the same space I need to give back to her, and pressing would be a different kind of taking than the kind I’m used to guarding against, but taking nonetheless.
* * *
The almost-kiss doesn’t happen the way I would have expected.
There is no moment I can point to where either of us moves toward the other.
The bench is narrow, and we have been on it for 40 minutes.
The rain is still coming down, and at some point, the distance between us has grown shorter.
Not dramatically. Not in any way that requires acknowledgment.
Just the natural geometry of two people in a small space who have stopped being deliberate about the coordinates of their presence.
I become aware of it, like a temperature change. Not at the moment it happens, but slightly after, when the new state has already arrived.
She is reading again, or not reading perhaps, maybe just looking at the page, which is different. I can see that from here. The book is open, but her eyes are not moving.
I am looking at the rain.
Or I was.
The tack room is warm, like small spaces that have been occupied for a while, the kind of warmth that is partly the space and partly the people in it. The rain on the roof is a constant.
Emmett shifts in his stall. The sound of it, his weight moving, and the creak of the wood makes me turn at the sound.
She turns at the same moment.
We are closer than I had calculated.
Not close enough that anything is required, but close enough that I am aware, with complete and sudden clarity, of the exact distance between us.
She finds me looking, and her face goes still, like she is deciding something.
The rain keeps going.
Neither of us moves.
There is a moment, not long, the length of a held breath, the length of a decision being made, where the space between us has a quality I don’t have precise language for. Not tension exactly. Something softer than tension. And heat, which rises in the small space between us.
Something that would resolve, I think, if either of us let it.
She looks away first.
Back to the book. A small, deliberate return to the page, the reinstatement of the prior arrangement.
I look back at the rain.
Neither of us says anything.
The rain eases ten minutes later, as Tennessee rain does, as abruptly as it arrives. Angel closes her book and stands, and says she’ll see me Thursday, and I say yeah, Thursday, and she goes to lock up the barn.
I walk back to the farmhouse in the dark, the wet grass soaking through my boots, her headlights sweeping the drive behind me as she pulls out toward Nashville.
I don’t turn around.
* * *
The Farmhouse — Night
I’m at the kitchen table with my guitar for a long time without playing anything.
This is not unusual. I have been doing this every night since I arrived, the guitar in my lap, the kitchen table, and the farmhouse quiet, different from Nashville quiet in ways I am still mapping.
What is unusual is that tonight the quiet doesn’t feel like a wall.
The kitchen window is dark. The field across it has gone completely black. The guitar is the warmest thing in the room.
Her words pop up in my head.
Yeah.
The weight of it. The specific gravity of a single syllable from someone who does not use words carelessly, who says the plain thing and means all of it.
When she said it, she wasn’t offering comfort.
She wasn’t building a bridge toward her own story. She was simply acknowledging and confirming that the thing I described is real and that she knows it firsthand.
What locks a person up like that?
I don’t know. I don’t know her well enough to know.
But there is something there — something behind the contained efficiency, behind the clipboard and the session notes and the even-voiced boundary-setting with label representatives who call the program the horse thing.
Something that has been locked up for long enough that she has built a whole life around the shape of it.
I play a chord.
G.
Then another. E minor. The same two I’ve been playing for weeks, going nowhere.
Then the memory surfaces. The tack room. The rain. The fleeting moment when we both turned at the same time.
And how she looked away.
Something moves in the back of my mind. Not a thought, not yet. Something earlier than a thought. The shape of something, the outline of it, the sense of a thing arriving from a direction I wasn’t watching.
I play the two chords again.
And then I play two lines.
They arrive as things used to arrive, before the block, not constructed, just there. Like they were already written, and I’m reading them off something I can’t quite see.
A voice behind a door I can't find the handle for,
A silence that's got the shape of something more.
A voice in a closed space.
A silence with the shape of something kept.
I play them twice. Three times. They hold. They are not good lines yet. They are rough and unfinished, and the melody is barely there, but they are real in a way that matters, like you can feel when something is true versus when something merely sounds like it might be.
I pick up my phone and record them before they can dissolve.
Then I set the phone down, sit with my hands on the guitar, and look at the dark window and the dark field beyond it.
Four months of nothing.
Two lines.
It is not much.
But it is the first thing in four months that I did not cross out.