Chapter 9
REBECCA
The donut shop was called Proof, and it was the kind of place that had no business being as good as it was—four small tables, a chalkboard menu, a glass case with maybe a dozen varieties and a handwritten sign that said we run out when we run out, no exceptions, no hard feelings.
He held the door.
I went in ahead of him and the smell hit me first—warm sugar and yeast and something with cardamom in it, the kind of smell that reached into your chest and made you feel like you were somewhere safe.
The woman behind the counter had flour on her sleeve and the expression of someone who genuinely loved her job, which I recognized because I'd been looking for it in myself for years.
He came up beside me and studied the case with the serious, focused attention of a man evaluating a tactical situation.
"Okay," he said. "This is a problem."
"What is?"
"There are too many good options. I need a minute."
"Take your time," the woman behind the counter said pleasantly.
"Ma'am, I appreciate that. I do. But I want you to know this is genuinely difficult for me and I'm doing my best."
She laughed. He had that effect, I was noticing. The laugh-out-of-people effect. He deployed it without seeming to try, which probably meant he'd been doing it his whole life and didn't know it was a thing anymore.
We ordered—he got three, I let him talk me into two, which took approximately four seconds of effort on his part—and took the table by the window because he guided us there with a hand that didn't quite touch the small of my back, but almost. I was aware of the almost the way you were aware of lightning before it landed.
He sat across from me and broke one of his donuts in half and ate it like a man who'd been thinking about donuts for a while. I ate mine more carefully, the way I ate things in front of people I was trying to make a good impression on. Which I was doing. Which I hadn't admitted to myself yet.
"So," he said. "Where are you from?"
"East Tennessee," I said. "Little town called Caton's Chapel. It's outside Sevierville, which is outside Gatlinburg—"
"Smoky Mountains."
"You know it?"
"Driven through. Beautiful country."
"It is," I said, and I meant it the way I always meant it, with the mix of love and restlessness that I'd never quite figured out how to separate. "It's—yeah. It's real beautiful. Touristy in the parts people know, but if you get off the main roads it's something else entirely."
"That's where you grew up? Off the main roads?"
"Pretty far off." I picked at the edge of my second donut. "My family's been in that area for generations. My daddy's people, anyway. We're mountain people. We don't move around much."
"But, you do."
I looked up. He was watching me with that direct, unhurried attention, like he had nowhere to be and nothing to do but this.
"I do," I said. "I'm the one who—yeah. I move around."
"Why?"
Nobody asked that directly. Most people asked where have you been or where are you going, the forward and backward of it, but not the why underneath it. I took a breath.
"I wanted to see what else there was," I said. "I wanted to know if the world was as big as it felt from where I was standing."
"Is it?"
"Bigger," I said.
He smiled at that. Not the big grin—a smaller one, private and real.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"Rebecca."
"Rebecca." He said it back like he was trying it out. "That's a real name. Not a nickname."
"My mama named me after Dolly Parton."
He tilted his head. "How does that work? She doesn't look like a Rebecca."
"It's her middle name. Dolly Rebecca Parton.
" I smiled, the automatic smile I always got when I talked about her.
"My mama's a big fan. Has been her whole life.
She said if she had a daughter who might could sing, she was going to name her after Dolly, and when I came out—" I shrugged. "Here we are."
He was grinning now, the full one. "Rebecca Dolly?"
"Rebecca Lynn," I said. "Dolly's just—that's just the inspiration."
"I like it," he said. "Rebecca Lynn from the Smoky Mountains named after a country legend." He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms and looked at me with an expression I couldn't entirely read. "What do you do when you're not playing guitar at restaurants?"
"Wait tables at the same restaurant, mostly."
"The Carolinian."
"The Carolinian." I paused. "That's actually my job. The playing today was—their regular guitarist cancelled and Luis needed somebody last minute."
"Luis Soto."
"You know him?"
"Read his name tag when I paid." He tilted his head. "So, you're a waitress who plays guitar, or a guitarist who waits tables?"
The question landed somewhere soft. I looked down at my donut.
"I don't know yet," I said honestly.
He didn't fill the silence. He just let me have it, which was unusual. Most people filled silences.
"I want to be a musician," I said. "That's the real answer. I want what Dolly has—not the fame exactly, just the—the thing where you make something and it reaches people. Where your voice means something to somebody who needed it." I stopped. "That sounds—"
"It doesn't."
I looked up.
"It doesn't sound like anything except true," he said.
I didn't know what to do with that, so I ate the rest of my donut.
"Did you study music?" he asked. "School, or—"
There it was.
I felt the familiar cold move through me, the reflex tightening. I kept my face where I'd learned to keep it.
"I didn't go to college," I said. Light. Easy. The prepared answer. "Went straight into working."
"Okay," he said.
That was it. Okay. Like it was the most ordinary thing, like the answer had required no courage from me and no adjustment from him. He reached for his second donut.
And then, because something about him made the truth harder to keep managed, I heard myself say, "I wanted to.
Go to college. I wanted to go to the University of Tennessee and study music.
But my family didn't have—" I stopped. Started again.
"Nobody around me knew how to navigate the financial aid stuff.
My parents never went. We didn't know about scholarships, or—my choir teacher thought I maybe could've gotten a music scholarship but by the time anybody said that out loud, it was too late to apply. " I looked at the table. "So."
He was quiet.
"That's the whole story," I said. "It's not—I'm not looking for sympathy. It's just what happened."
"I know," he said.
I made myself look at him. His expression wasn't pity. It wasn't the performative empathy of someone who wanted credit for caring. It was just level and real, the face of someone who'd heard a hard thing and wasn't going to make it worse by over-handling it.
"For what it's worth," he said, "you play like someone who's been in school your whole life. Just a different school."
Something moved in my chest.
"You're from Texas," I said, because I needed to change the direction of things before my eyes did something embarrassing. "I can hear it."
He smiled. "Valentine, Texas. Born and raised."
"Is that near anything?"
"That is the whole question about Valentine, Texas," he said. "The honest answer is, no. It's about as far from anything as you can get without falling off the edge of the map. Two hundred and something people, one blinking light, and the best sky you've ever seen in your life."
"That sounds like home," I said.
"It was."
I noticed the past tense. I didn't ask about it.
"What do you do?" I said.
"Consulting," he said, easy and smooth. The kind of easy and smooth that meant the word was technically true and also nowhere near the whole answer. I'd waited tables long enough to know when somebody gave me a receipt instead of a story.
"Consulting," I repeated.
"It takes me places." He met my eyes. "Like Charleston."
The way he said it—like Charleston was the point, like the place and the moment and me sitting across from him were connected parts of the same answer—made something in my stomach go warm and liquid.
I thought about the Battery. The free walk along the harbor seawall.
The live oaks and the parks and the way the city opened up in places that didn't cost anything.
I thought about the coffee shop on King Street where you could sit for hours with one cup.
I thought about the way I'd been cataloguing these things since I got here—the free things, the cheap things, the dates that didn't require money I didn't have—and I thought about how he'd just paid for the donuts without making it a thing, and how I didn't know what any of this was yet or what he expected and I couldn't afford to find out the wrong way.
I thought about the kind of man he probably was. The kind who took women to places with wine lists. The kind for whom a spontaneous lunch and donuts was the casual version of something, not the ceiling.
I thought about what I was, by comparison.
A waitress from a mountain holler with a used guitar and a gap where her education was supposed to be.
"You're quiet all of a sudden," he said.
"Just thinking."
"About what?"
I shook my head. "Nothing important."
He leaned forward. Put both forearms on the table. The shift in posture brought him closer—not much, the table was small, but enough that I could see the color of his eyes properly now. Green with something warmer underneath, like creek water over copper.
"Rebecca Lynn," he said.
"Yeah."
"What are you thinking about?"
"I told you. Nothing."
"You went somewhere," he said. "Just now. Your face changed."
I looked at him. At this man who'd walked across a restaurant for me and crouched on the floor and fixed my guitar without being asked and then paid for donuts and sat across from me like there was nowhere he'd rather be, and all I could think was why.
"Can I ask you something?" I said.
"Anything."
"Why are you—" I stopped. Tried again. "You don't know me."
"Not yet."
"So, why are you—" I gestured vaguely at the table, the donuts, the whole situation.
He didn't answer right away. He looked at me for a long moment—not uncomfortably, not in the way men sometimes looked that made you feel assessed. More like he was deciding how much truth to use.
"You walked into a room where you were scared," he said. "You played, anyway. Then, something went wrong and you held your face together and didn't flinch. Then, you played something real." He paused. "I wanted to know who does that."
I didn't have an answer for that. I didn't think he expected one.
We sat there a moment. The donut shop did its warm, quiet thing around us. A couple came in and stood at the case deliberating, and the woman behind the counter gave them the same cheerful patience she'd given us.
He stood up.
I thought he was leaving. I started to reach for my guitar case, already assembling the graceful exit, already composing myself for the walk home alone.
Then he came around the table.
He stopped beside my chair. I tipped my head back to look up at him, which brought him into close proximity in a way that made my breathing adjust without my permission.
He reached out and tucked a strand of hair back from my face. His fingers barely grazed my cheekbone. The touch lasted less than two seconds.
"Can I?" he said, low.
I didn't ask what. I just—nodded.
He bent down and kissed me.
It was soft. Unhurried. The kind of kiss that didn't ask for anything except to be what it was—a man who'd made a decision and was seeing it through, without apology.
His hand came to the side of my face, careful, and I felt the warmth of his palm against my jaw and the solid, certain presence of him and everything in my chest that had been braced and managed and held-carefully-together since I'd walked out of Caton's Chapel loosened by one degree.
He pulled back.
I opened my eyes.
He was watching me with that expression—the focused, serious one he'd worn at the end of my set, before the smile came back.
"I'm Tommy," he said.
I laughed. I couldn't help it. It came out surprised and real.
"Rebecca," I said. "Which you already knew."
"Rebecca Lynn," he said. "Named after a legend." His thumb traced the edge of my jaw once, lightly, and then his hand dropped. "Come on. I'll walk you home."
I picked up my guitar case. My heart was doing something it hadn't done in a long time, maybe ever—not the nervous flutter of being on stage, not the anxious thrum of not enough money, but something quieter and more frightening than either of those.
Something that felt a lot like wanting.
I didn't know what to do with Tommy Dane.
I didn't know yet that I was going to have to figure it out.