Epilogue #3
"Let me think about it," I say.
Rex studies me for a moment with the particular patience of a man who has managed enough talent to recognize the kind of silence that means something other than what it sounds like. Then he collects the deck, stands, and buttons his jacket.
"The album," he says at the door. "We need to begin actual recording in eight weeks.
That's the contractual outside edge, Hayes.
Not a suggestion. If you miss it, they can freeze advances, reassign producers, and take control of the masters.
And they will spin it as creative instability, not artistic delay. "
"I know."
"Whatever is going on in your head right now," he says, and there is something almost careful in his voice, almost something adjacent to concern, "get it sorted. The label has been patient because you've earned patience. But patient has an outside edge too."
He leaves. I sit in the empty dressing room and listen to the arena being taken apart around me, and think about what it takes to keep a hollow thing running.
* * *
My Penthouse
My penthouse is on the thirty-fourth floor — high enough to see the whole city and feel none of it. It's in the Gulch, a neighborhood described to me as Nashville's most vibrant so many times that the phrase has lost all meaning.
It's vibrant, the way a screen is vibrant—bright and high-resolution, producing no warmth you can actually feel.
The city spreads out below every window. The Cumberland River cuts south through the grid, catching the downtown lights and holding them in a long smeared reflection.
Broadway is a stripe of neon from up here, the honky-tonks packed on a Saturday night, the sound of competing live music rising through thirty-four floors of glass and steel and dissolving into something more felt than heard.
To the east, the land flattens and then lifts again into low dark ridges against the sky — the kind of topography that reminds me, if I look at it long enough, of home.
I don't usually look at it long enough.
Nothing alive. Nothing that changes. I've lived here for four years, and the place has never once surprised me.
I drop my keys on the kitchen island and shed my stage clothes on the bathroom floor, and stand in the shower until the water goes from hot to barely warm.
Then I take my guitar — the Martin D-28 I don't tour with, the best one, the one I'm afraid of what a road case would do to — off its stand by the window and sit on the couch with the city behind me and wait.
Nothing comes.
I try the chord progression I've been circling for two months. Play through it once, change the second chord, play it again. It's competent—sonically identical to this apartment — clean lines, nothing wrong with it, nothing alive in it either.
I set the guitar against the cushion, lean back, and stare at the ceiling.
The notebook is on the coffee table where I left it three days ago. A cheap spiral-bound thing I bought at a gas station in Rivera Ridge — college-ruled, mottled black cover with a coffee ring on the front from a mug on the bunkhouse windowsill. the middle of an otherwise empty page.
I've read them so many times that I don't need to open them to see them.
She doesn't know my name from the radio, doesn't know the songs, or where they go. Only knows the part of me I'd nearly forgotten.
I wrote them on my fourth evening on the bunkhouse porch, the live oaks moving in the warm evening wind and the horses grazing in the last of the light below, the sky going from pale gold to the deep, clear blue that Texas evenings do in late summer when the heat finally lets go.
Four evenings in a row, I sat there with the notebook open and a pen in my hand, and those three lines refused to go any further.
I have written songs about grief and guilt and the road and the specific loneliness of being known by strangers, and not one of them cost me what those three lines cost me, and the reason for that is not complicated. I've avoided looking at it for seven months.
I pick up my phone. I don't call anyone. I scroll without purpose until I find the photograph I took on my last morning at Rivera Ridge before driving to the airport — not of Ivy, I didn't take any photographs of Ivy, I didn't have the nerve — but of the view from the bunkhouse porch.
The pasture in the early light, the horses standing in the ground mist, the live oaks strung along the fence line with the morning sun coming through them at an angle that turns every leaf gold and translucent.
The sky that particular washed blue of a Texas dawn before the heat climbs and bleaches everything out.
My brain supplies the smell of it. That's the thing I can't get past. I'm sitting in an apartment that smells of nothing alive, and my brain fills in the damp grass, and the horses and the warm-hay scent drifting from the open barn doors, and it does it every time I look at this photograph, as reliable as muscle memory.
Ivy had been at the fence line the morning I left, running the therapy horses through their morning exercise. The air was already warming up, the kind of dry Texas heat that settles in early and lingers, the smell of the horses and the dust they raised sharp and clean in my nose.
She hadn't come to say goodbye — she never chased endings, never forced moments that were already tipping away. When something was left, she let it go quiet rather than stand in front of it and ask it to stay.
But she was there when I carried my bag out to the rental car, and she looked up from across the yard, and we held each other's gaze for a moment that was maybe three seconds long and felt longer.
She didn't look sad. That's the part I keep returning to. She looked unsurprised — completely, patiently unsurprised, the way she looks at a horse that has done exactly what she expected it to do.
As if she had known all along that this was how it would go and had let herself be present for the in-between anyway.
It is the most generous thing anyone has done for me in recent memory. It makes me feel worse than if she'd been angry.
I set my phone face down on the table.
Outside, Nashville does what Nashville does on a Saturday night — loud and bright and relentlessly itself, the river holding the city lights, the music from Broadway faint and layered from up here, a siren rising and fading somewhere in Midtown.
All of it indifferent, going on with or without me — one of the city's more honest qualities.
I pick up the guitar. I play the three lines from the notebook — not as a song, just the chords under them, the progression that has been sitting under those words since the first night I wrote them. Then I stop.
I set the guitar in its stand. I turn off the lamp. I sit in the dark with the city spread out behind me, and I let myself think the thought I have been walking around with for seven months.
I want to go back.
I think through what that means — canceling the two private showcases next month, postponing the already-booked co-write sessions, and telling Rex the Vegas deck stays in his portfolio a little longer.
I don't want to just go for a visit. Not for a weekend or a few weeks or whatever counted as the last time.
Not only for some peace. I want to go back to Rivera Ridge Rescue and stay, for some undefined stretch of time, with no publicist, no tour schedule, and no leather portfolio on the table between me and a life I haven't chosen in longer than I can remember.
I want the bunkhouse, the early mornings, the sound of horses in the dark, and my cousin Cole's complete lack of patience for anything that isn't actual work.
I want the wooden fence rail.
I sit with it in the dark and let it be true, and it is the most awake I have felt in seven months.
I pick up my phone. It's after midnight, and Cole keeps ranch hours, so he's been asleep for 2 hours; I will call him in the morning.
I set the phone back down.
Outside, the city goes on shimmering. I sit in the dark, and for the first time in a long time, I am somewhere instead of running from somewhere.
In the morning, I'll call Cole — and start the kind of chain reaction that costs money, leverage, and the carefully managed reputation I've spent the last decade building.