Chapter 3
REBECCA
The wine bar was called The Piazza.
Not a plaza. Not a piazza like Italy, though that was closer.
In Charleston, a piazza was what everybody else in the world called a porch—long, columned, running the full length of a house, built to catch the cross breeze off the water in the days before air conditioning made suffering optional.
I'd learned that from a historical marker I'd stopped to read on my third day in the city, still getting my bearings, still feeling the disorientation of a place that assumed you already knew its language.
The bar had taken its name seriously. The entrance was through an actual piazza—a long covered porch on the side of a narrow three-story building on Queen Street, strung with low Edison bulbs and lined with wrought iron chairs that were mostly full on a Wednesday evening.
People sat with their glasses and their conversations in the warm amber light, the city moving quietly past them on the sidewalk, and the whole thing had the feeling of being invited into someone's private world.
It was charming in the way Charleston kept being charming at me, unexpectedly and without apology.
I stood at the entrance for a moment longer than I needed to.
The email had said six o'clock. It was five fifty-eight.
I had my guitar case on my back and my good boots on—the brown leather ones I'd bought secondhand at a shop in Pigeon Forge the summer I turned nineteen, the ones I'd resoled twice because they fit my feet like they'd been made for them.
I'd worn my dark jeans and a cream-colored top that Tasha had talked me into borrowing, which was nicer than anything I owned outright.
My long, brown hair was down. I'd curled it that morning with Tasha's iron before she woke up, just a loose wave, nothing too done.
I looked fine. I knew I looked fine.
I just didn't quite believe it, yet.
Inside, the space opened into exposed brick and more of those Edison bulbs strung low over a bar that ran the length of the room.
Bottles stacked floor to ceiling behind a bartender who looked like he'd been hired for his cheekbones as much as his knowledge of natural wine.
The clientele was the kind of Charleston mix I was starting to recognize—old money in linen, young money in denim, tourists who'd read about the place in a magazine.
The bartender pointed me toward a small, raised platform near the window without being asked, which meant the owner had told him I was coming.
That helped. Someone was expecting me. I wasn't just a girl who'd wandered in off the street with a guitar on her back and an expression like she was waiting for someone to ask her to leave.
Even if that was how it felt.
I set up quickly, efficiently, the way I always did. Guitar case flat on the floor, latches up, lid back.
The Gibson inside was the one real thing I owned—a used J-45 I'd saved up for over two years, bought from a shop in Knoxville the winter I turned twenty-one.
It wasn't new. It had scratches on the body and a repaired crack along the binding that a luthier in Key West had fixed for sixty dollars and a pitcher of beer.
But the sound it made was warm and full and true, and every time I lifted it out of the case, I felt the relief of holding something that hadn't let me down yet.
I tuned by ear. Adjusted the strap. Sat on the stool they'd set out and ran a few quiet chord progressions while the room did what rooms do—shift slightly, recalibrate, absorb the fact of me.
I didn't look up while I did it. I never did, at the start. It was easier to find the music first and the audience second.
You know what your problem is?
I pressed my thumb against the low E string and let the note die.
Clayton's voice had a way of arriving uninvited. It always had.
He was two years younger than me and had spent most of our childhood making an art form out of knowing exactly which nerve to find and exactly how hard to press it.
Not cruelly, not always—sometimes, it was just the careless cruelty of a boy who hadn't learned that words had weight.
But sometimes, it was deliberate, and the deliberate kind was what stuck.
You think you're something. Standing up there like anybody came to see you.
He'd said that the night of the Caton's Chapel Community Fair, when I was sixteen and he was fourteen and I'd played three songs on a little plywood stage while our family watched from the grass.
Mama had cried. Daddy had clapped so hard his palms went red.
Even our other siblings had gone quiet in the way that meant something had landed.
And Clayton, sitting beside me afterward on the tailgate of Daddy's truck, had said it like he was doing me a favor. You think you're something. Low and even. Almost bored.
I hadn't played at the fair the next year. I'd said I didn't feel like it, and nobody had pushed, and that had been that.
It took me a long time to connect those two things.
The first set went forty minutes.
I started with something easy—a Dolly song, naturally, because Dolly was the map I always navigated by.
"Coat of Many Colors," which was about poverty and dignity and a mother's love, which meant it was about my whole life compressed into three minutes and forty seconds.
I played it simply, just the guitar and my voice, no embellishment, because the song didn't need any.
Dolly had written it that way on purpose. Plainness was its own kind of power.
A few heads turned. Not many. That was fine. It was early, and people were still settling into their wine and their conversations, and I was background music, for now. That was the job. I knew the job.
I moved through a couple of originals—nothing too sharp, nothing that would demand attention I hadn't been invited to take.
I had songs I didn't play in places like this.
Songs I'd written at kitchen tables in Key West and on the floor of the apartment in Pigeon Forge the summer after high school, when I was trying to figure out what came next and the answer kept not arriving.
Those songs had teeth. Those songs were too much for a wine bar, for people who were here to be comfortable.
I saved the teeth for myself.
By the second set, the room had filled up enough that the ambient noise rose, and I adjusted without thinking—a little more resonance, a little more breath behind the notes. It was something I did naturally, the way you raised your voice in a loud room without deciding to.
My choir teacher in high school had called it presence. She'd said I had more of it than any student she'd taught in fifteen years and had written it in my yearbook and I'd read it so many times the ink had gone soft.
I'd never told Clayton about that. I'd learned, by then, to keep the good things away from him.
He wasn't a bad person. I'd made my peace with that—or I was making it, slowly, the way you made peace with anything that had worked itself into the grain of you.
He'd been a middle child in a house full of noise and not enough, and I'd been the one people looked at, which must have felt like something was being taken even when nothing was being given.
I understood it, the way I understood a lot of things that had hurt me.
Understanding didn't dissolve it. It just changed the shape.
What he'd left me with was a habit of watching the room while I played, reading it for signs of displeasure. Waiting for the moment someone's attention slid away and taking it as a verdict.
It wasn't a useful habit. It was the kind of thing I'd been quietly trying to unlearn for years, with the moderate success of someone who knew what they were fighting but not quite how to win.
Tonight, a woman near the window caught my eye and smiled—a real one. The kind that meant she'd been listening.
I held her gaze for a beat and smiled back.
That was something. That was enough to work with.
At nine o'clock, the bartender set a glass of water on the edge of the platform without being asked, and I took it between songs and drank half of it in one pull and said thank you and he nodded and went back to his bar. Small kindnesses. They added up.
The tip jar at the edge of the platform had been filling steadily.
I hadn't counted it—I never counted mid-set, superstition more than discipline—but I could see the paper bills folded over the rim, and I let myself feel good about that without doing the math yet.
The math could wait. Right now, I was still playing.
I closed with "Wildflowers," which was Tom Petty but felt like mine, or maybe felt like anyone's who'd ever needed it.
It was a song about belonging somewhere wider than where you started, and I'd been singing it since I was seventeen with the private conviction that it had been written directly for me.
That was the mark of a truly great song.
When the last chord resolved and the room gave me a quiet, genuine round of applause, I kept my head down for a moment before I looked up.
Not from shyness. Not entirely.
It was just—there was a second, right at the end, where the music was still more real than anything else, and I'd learned to live inside it as long as it lasted.
Clayton couldn't reach me there. Rent couldn't reach me there.
The four hundred and twelve dollars and the question where'd you go to school couldn't reach me there.
In that second, I was only what I could do.
Then, I looked up and the room was just a room again, and I was just a girl with a guitar and a tip jar and a walk home ahead of her.
I unclipped the strap and laid the Gibson carefully back in its case. Counted the tips with my back half-turned, the way I'd learned was less conspicuous. Sixty-three dollars on top of the thirty guaranteed. Ninety-three total.
I zipped it into my jacket pocket and felt the number in my chest shift, slightly.
Three hundred and seventy-nine dollars.
Now two hundred and eighty-six.
Still not enough. But closer. Closer was something.
Outside, I passed back through the piazza on my way to the street, the Edison bulbs warm overhead, the wrought iron chairs emptying out as the evening wound down.
A couple lingered at the far end, their voices low, her head tilted toward his shoulder.
I didn't stare. I just noticed, the way you noticed things when you were walking alone.
The night had gone damp and cool, the way Charleston winter evenings did—the kind that smelled like the ocean even when you couldn't see it.
I stood on the sidewalk for a moment and let it settle over me, the quiet that came after playing, when the noise in my head had burned off and left something cleaner behind.
I thought about calling my mama. She'd want to know how it went.
She always did—she'd ask in that careful way of hers, the way that meant she was proud without knowing exactly what she was proud of, and I'd tell her it went fine, real good, people seemed to like it, and she'd say of course they did, honey, of course they did.
I'd feel both full and empty at once, the way I always did after we talked.
Full because she meant it. Empty because I didn't know how to explain the size of what I wanted to a woman who'd spent her whole life not wanting too much.
I didn't call. It was late. I'd call tomorrow.
I shifted my guitar to my other shoulder and started walking, the warm amber glow of The Piazza's porch falling away behind me as I moved up Queen Street into the dark.
Somewhere a few streets over, a church bell counted ten.
I had a double shift tomorrow.
I kept walking.