Chapter 7
REBECCA
The call came in two hours before the lunch rush.
It was Luis Soto, the manager, and he had his apologetic voice on—the one he used when he needed something and already knew he was going to get it because he was going to make it very hard to say no.
"Our guitarist cancelled," he said. "Last minute. Family thing, I don't know. I need somebody for the lunch set. Two hours, maybe two and a half. Hundred and fifty dollars plus whatever goes in the tip jar."
I was standing in my kitchen in my socks, holding a coffee mug, looking at the window.
"Luis—"
"I know you play. Priya told me. Said you've been gigging around town."
Of course, Priya had told him. Priya talked the way some people breathed—constantly, without deciding to.
"That's different," I said. "That's—those are places where nobody knows me."
"Rebecca."
"The people at The Carolinian know me as a waitress."
"They know you as someone who works hard and shows up on time, which is more than I can say for my guitarist, apparently." He paused. "A hundred and fifty dollars. Cash."
I looked at the ceiling.
A hundred and fifty dollars cash would close the gap. Not all the way, but close enough that I could breathe without the stone in my chest pressing so hard.
"Okay," I said. "Okay, I'll do it."
I almost talked myself out of it three times on the walk over.
The first time was at the end of my street, when I thought about walking into The Carolinian through the employee entrance with a guitar case on my back instead of my work apron in my bag, and the look on everyone's face when they realized what was happening.
The second time was when I stopped on the sidewalk outside and watched the lunch setup through the window—the white tablecloths going down, the candles being lit, the whole careful machinery of service that I understood and belonged to—and thought about standing in front of it instead of inside it.
The third time was when I actually pushed through the door.
Priya saw me first. Her eyes went to the guitar case and back to my face and she smiled the smile of a woman who had made something happen and was pleased about it. "Oh good," she said. "You're going to be great."
"Don't," I said.
"You are."
"Priya, I swear to God—"
"There's a little platform set up near the window. Luis put a stool out. You want water?"
I wanted to leave. I wanted to go back to my apartment and sit on my bed with my guitar in my lap and play for nobody, the way I did when it felt safe.
I wanted the music to be mine and not a performance, not something I had to deliver to people who knew me as the girl who refilled their water glasses.
But I also wanted the hundred and fifty dollars.
I set my case down by the platform and opened it and lifted the Gibson out and the familiar weight of it in my hands did what it always did—settled something. Like picking up a tool you knew how to use. Like the guitar didn't care who was watching. It just wanted to be played.
I tuned quietly, quickly, back to the room the way I always started. A couple of the servers drifted past. One of the kitchen guys I didn't know well leaned out to look and then went back to whatever he was doing. Nobody made a thing of it.
I exhaled.
Okay.
Okay. I could do this.
The lunch crowd came in the way lunch crowds did—gradual at first, then all at once, the tables filling up with the Charleston mix of business people and tourists and couples who'd walked off the historic district streets and followed the menu board in.
I started soft, background stuff, filling the room without demanding it.
I played the way I played at The Piazza—present but unobtrusive, a current running underneath the conversation rather than over it.
It was fine. It was actually fine.
After the first twenty minutes, the self-consciousness started to lift, the way it always did once the music took over from the nerves. My hands knew what to do. My voice knew what to do. The room was just a room.
I was halfway through an original—one of the gentler ones—when I felt the string go.
The G string snapped with that bright crack that every guitarist knew and dreaded, the sound of a small catastrophe arriving without warning. The note died wrong. I felt it under my fingers before I heard it—the sudden absence of resistance, the way the chord collapsed.
I stopped playing.
The room noticed. Not all of it, but enough. A few heads turned.
I kept my face neutral. Smiled, small and controlled, the way I'd learned to smile through things. "Sorry about that," I said into the space. "Give me just a minute."
I set the Gibson across my knee and reached for my bag. I kept spare strings. Of course, I kept spare strings—I wasn't an amateur, I'd been playing long enough to know that strings broke at the worst possible moments, which was all moments. I kept a full set in the front pocket of my case.
Except I'd restocked everything last week except the G string.
I knew it the second my fingers found the empty slot in the little string envelope. I knew it the way you knew a thing you'd been meaning to fix and hadn't yet.
My stomach dropped.
"Hey, sweetheart."
The voice came from a table to my left. Two men, late forties, one of them with a glass of white wine that was clearly not his first of the day, even at this hour. He had the loose, unguarded look of a man whose afternoon had started early and was going well.
"You gonna play or just sit there looking pretty?"
The other man at the table said something low to him. He waved it off.
"I'm just saying. We're eating." He gestured broadly at the room, ambassador of a constituency that had not elected him. "Whole place is waiting."
My face stayed where I'd put it. Neutral. Polite. The face I'd worn through a thousand bad tables and thoughtless comments and men who thought waitresses existed for their entertainment. I knew this face. I could hold it, indefinitely.
But my hands had gone still on the guitar, and the room was quiet in the way rooms got quiet when something uncomfortable was happening and nobody wanted to be the first to name it.
I felt the old thing rise in my chest—the one Clayton had planted there years ago—who do you think you are, standing up there like anybody came to see you—
"I can help with that."
The voice came from my right.
I turned.
He was already on his way over from a table near the window—unfolding from his chair with easy, unhurried movement. He was tall. As if height were simply one of several things he’d been issued and hadn't thought much about since.
He was—
I registered the rest of him in pieces, the way you registered something that was too much to take in all at once.
Dark blonde hair, close-cropped, the kind that held its shape without effort.
A jaw that looked like it had been decided on by someone with strong opinions about jaws.
Eyes that were some color between green and something else, catching the light from the window as he crossed the room, and he was looking directly at me with an expression that was warm and certain.
He was broad through the shoulders in a way that his shirt made obvious without trying to.
He moved like a man who was comfortable in his body in the way that came from using it for real things—not a gym body, though he clearly wasn't a stranger to one—but the kind of physical ease that came from a life that demanded something of you and you'd met the demand.
He stopped in front of me. Up close he was—
He was very handsome. The word felt insufficient.
"What gauge?" he asked.
I blinked. "What?"
"Your G string." He nodded at the guitar. "What gauge do you run?"
"Thirteen," I said, and my voice came out normal, which was a small miracle. "Medium."
He reached into the front pocket of his jeans and produced a small, flat packet.
"You carry—" I started.
"Guitarist," he said simply, and held it out.
I looked at the string packet. Looked at him.
"Those are my gauge," I said.
He smiled. It was the kind of smile that probably caused problems on a regular basis—slow and genuine, reaching all the way up, with a quality to it like he found the world privately hilarious and was inviting you to be in on the joke.
"Good thing I pack light," he said.
He crouched down in front of me—right there on the restaurant floor, easy as anything, one knee down—and held out his hand for the guitar.
Something moved through my chest that I wasn't going to examine right now.
"I've got it," I said. "I can—"
"I know you can." He kept his hand out. Patient. "But you've got an audience and I've got nothing but time, and I string faster than most. Let me."
The man at the table to my left made a sound that might have been a comment. The handsome man with the green eyes glanced over at him—just once, just briefly—and something in that look was so quiet and so absolute that the other man picked up his wine glass and looked at it instead.
I handed over the Gibson.
He took it with both hands, the way you took something you knew the value of. He turned it and found the broken string and went to work, and I watched his hands—which was not something I'd meant to do, but couldn't seem to stop.
They were capable hands. The hands of someone who'd done difficult things with them and still came out knowing how to be gentle.
He didn't hurry. He didn't perform the task for the room.
He just did it—pulling the old string free, threading the new one through the bridge, turning the tuning peg with the practiced motion of someone who'd done this a thousand times, working up the neck.
He hummed something low under his breath while he worked, barely audible, just a habit, the way people hummed without knowing they were doing it.
The room had gone soft around us. Not silent, but softer. A few people were watching. I was aware of that the way I was aware of everything when I was embarrassed, which was acutely and with my whole body.
He plucked the new string. Adjusted. Plucked again.
Then he held the guitar back out to me, and when I took it our fingers didn't quite touch but the space between them was very small and I was extremely aware of that space.
"Try that," he said.
I played the chord I'd been on when the string broke. It rang out clean and true, the new string bright against the others.
He rocked back on his heel and stood up in one easy motion.
"There you go," he said.
"Thank you," I said.
I meant to say something else—something more, something adequate to the moment—but his eyes were on me and my brain had decided not to help.
He smiled again. Smaller this time. Private, almost.
"Play something good," he said.
He went back to his table by the window. Sat down. Picked up his coffee cup like nothing had happened, like he hadn't just walked across a restaurant and crouched on the floor and restrung another person's guitar with string from his own pocket, like it was the most ordinary thing.
I looked down at the Gibson in my hands.
The man at the table to my left had found something very interesting to study on the wall.
I took a breath.
I played.
Not the gentle original I'd been on. Something with more backbone—a song I'd written in Key West in a bad week, one of the ones I normally kept for myself.
I didn't plan it. It just came out that way, the way things came out when your hands were still buzzing from almost touching someone and the room needed to know you were still standing.
I played it through to the end.
When I looked up, he was watching me from his table by the window.
He wasn't smiling now. He was just watching, with the focused, serious expression of someone who had stopped doing anything else because this required his full attention.
Then he caught me looking. And the smile came back—slow and warm and just for me—and he raised his coffee cup in the smallest possible toast.
I looked back down at my strings before my face could do anything I'd regret.