27. Home
Home
CASH
The Farmhouse — Early April
T he tour starts in a week.
Eight cities, theater venues, six weeks on the road.
Derek has sent the itinerary four times, each version slightly revised, which is Derek’s way of communicating that things are running well and he would like acknowledgment.
I have acknowledged the itinerary each time without comment on the revisions, which is my way of communicating that I trust him to handle the details.
We have been working together for six years. This is a functional arrangement.
This morning, I am on the porch with my coffee, looking at the property in the April light, trying to fix it in my mind the way you try to fix something you know you’re about to leave for a while.
The pecan tree at the property line has its leaves back.
I did not see this coming. I have been watching that tree since October, and it has been bare and a little battered-looking for the whole of the fall and winter, and then one week in April, it simply had leaves again, as things do when they have been dormant long enough, and the conditions are finally right.
The fields are green.
I bought this property in January, and I am looking at it in April, and, in a way, the January transaction did not fully convey, understanding that I own something that changes.
That responds to seasons. That will look like this again next April if I take care of it.
It will be different again in the fall, and I will be here to see it all.
Emmett is at the fence line. He is watching me.
He has been watching me more closely this week.
I think he knows I’m leaving. Horses understand more about the routines of the people around them than the people generally understand about themselves.
Emmett has been watching me more closely than usual since the first Tuesday in October, when he pressed his nose into my chest in the south paddock, and I staggered back half a step.
I put my hand on his nose. He breathes against it.
“Six weeks,” I tell him. “I’ll be back.”
He flicks an ear.
He is not entirely reassured, but he accepts this.
* * *
The farmhouse has changed.
I did not decorate it when I moved in. I brought the things I needed, left the walls bare, and told myself I would deal with it eventually. The emptiness did not bother me. I was used to spaces that were functional and impersonal; I had been living in them for the better part of fifteen years.
Then Angel came to the farmhouse door with her guitar case in January, and came back the following week, and the week after that. Somewhere in the accumulation of evenings, she started doing what she does in the barn: noticing what a space needs and quietly providing it.
There is a photograph on the kitchen wall now.
A print she found at a shop in East Nashville, a wide, empty road in flat country, taken at dusk, the sky taking up most of the frame.
She set it on the kitchen counter one evening and said, "I think this goes here.
" I agreed. She hung it herself with the focused efficiency of a woman who does not need help with a level.
There is a small succulent on the windowsill above the sink. I don't know where it came from. It appeared one day, and I have been watering it without comment, and it seems to be doing fine.
There is a guitar stand in the corner that I bought, and the Guild on it, and a stack of notebooks on the kitchen table that have multiplied over the winter as the new songs have come.
Not for the next album, those are in a separate folder.
Just songs. Songs I am writing because I am writing now, as I used to before I understood that writing was something that could be extracted and sold and turned into a product, and then spent years trying to find my way back to it.
The back room is being converted.
It’s not a full recording studio. I have access to proper studios in Nashville for that. It’s something smaller. A room where I can play at three in the morning without worrying about the neighbors, record, and sit with the work before anyone else has it. Derek called it a vanity project.
I said: Probably.
He said, "The accountant could make it work ."
I said: Good.
It will be finished by the time I get back from the tour.
I am looking forward to it in the way I have not looked forward to anything in two years: not with the anticipation of a man preparing for the next professional obligation, but with actual want.
I want to come home from the tour, and go into that room and play.
That is information I would not have had six months ago.
* * *
Sycamore Ridge — Morning
Angel is in the office when I cross the field.
She has her coffee, her spring cohort files, and the focused expression she gets when she is doing intake work, which she takes most seriously because it determines everything that follows.
She does not look up when I come in, which means she is in the middle of something, so I pour myself a second cup from her pot, lean against the door frame, and wait.
After a few minutes, she sets the file down.
“Leon is doing better,” she says. “He let Dulcie approach him on his own terms yesterday. Didn’t initiate it, but he didn’t back away either.”
“That’s different from week one.”
“Week one, he was performing compliance. Now he’s just present.” She picks up her coffee. “It usually takes longer. He’s been paying attention.”
I flash back to a session in October when I was performing compliance, and a woman with a clipboard noted it without expression and went back to her chart.
“Good teacher,” I say.
It’s the direct gaze she uses when she thinks I am deflecting something. I am not deflecting. I mean it.
“Tell me about the program,” I say.
She sets her coffee down.
“The program.”
“Yours. The one you’re building.” I pull out the chair across from her and sit. “Ivy mentioned you’ve been working on the proposal. I want to hear it.”
She is deciding, with Angel’s characteristic precision, how much of this she is ready to say out loud. Things that are spoken become more real than things that are still inside. She is careful about that threshold.
Then she tells me.
Veterans, primarily. She has been researching the gap in equine-assisted services for people returning from deployment, the specific quality of reentry that is not about trauma processing in the clinical sense, but about finding a way to be still in a civilian world that moves at a rhythm they have lost access to.
Some foster alumni. Young adults who aged out of the system and never learned how to trust anything that did not have an obvious exit.
“People who need a space where nothing is required of them except showing up,” she says. “And where something alive responds to who they are rather than who they’re supposed to be.”
“Like what Emmett does.”
“Like what Emmett does.”
She has been looking at land. Not far from here, in fact, it’s a neighboring property that butts up to the other side of Sycamore Ridge.
It has a small barn, two paddocks, and room to expand.
The owner is an older woman who is retiring and has been asking around for someone who would use it the way it should be used.
“Ivy knows her,” Angel says. “She’s been putting out signals for a year. I went to look at it last month.”
“And?”
She is quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that means the answer is significant.
“It’s right,” she says. “The land is right. The barn is right. The paddocks face east, which is what you want in the morning.” She pauses. “I put in a preliminary inquiry last week.”
I look at her.
“Angel.”
“I know.”
“That’s—”
“I know.” She meets my eyes. “I’ve been waiting to know if I meant it before I said it out loud. I mean it.”
The woman who builds her world small on purpose. Who keeps what is hers inside, where it is safe. Who said I don’t tell people things quickly, and I’m not going to change that about myself.
She has told me this.
On purpose.
“I’m going to be here when you open it,” I say.
“Okay.”
We drink our coffee.
Outside, the spring cohort is arriving. Car doors slam, and I hear the sound of Dulcie in the south paddock. Kit’s voice carries in the wind with the clear authority she brings to first sessions.
The ordinary morning of a place doing its work.
* * *
Nashville — Afternoon
The tour prep meeting is at two.
Derek’s office. Derek, Jana, and the touring manager, Phil, who has been running tours for 30 years, communicate primarily about logistics and look mildly offended by anything that cannot be expressed as a schedule item.
Phil runs through the itinerary. Eight cities, six weeks, venue contacts, production notes, and press obligations at each stop. Jana has a media strategy she presents with the focused energy of someone who has been doing this a long time, is very good at it, and would like that acknowledged.
I acknowledge it. I say yes to the things that are reasonable and no to the things that are not, and the meeting moves through its paces with the efficient machinery of an operation that has been running on its own for years.
I used to feel, in these meetings, like the production and not the producer.
Like the thing being managed rather than the person doing the managing.
Today I feel like myself.
It is a distinction I did not have six months ago.
Toward the end, Derek says, “One more thing. The label wants to discuss the timeline for the second album. Not a commitment, just a conversation.”
“November,” I say. “I’ll have a conversation with Marcus in November.”
Derek makes a note. Phil looks at his schedule. Jana mentions the narrative window.
I drink my water and look out the conference room window at the Nashville skyline.
I have been coming to this building for six years, and the skyline has never changed, and I have never once thought about what it looks like from inside the building rather than from the outside.