Chapter 11
REBECCA
Istood in the stairwell for a full minute before I went up.
Not because my legs didn't work. They worked fine.
I just needed the stairwell—the neutrality of it, the peeling paint and the smell of old building and the single bulb overhead that flickered when the heat kicked on—to be a place where nothing had happened, yet.
Where I was still just a girl coming home from a gig with a guitar on her back and cash in her pocket and nothing to think about except the rent.
I needed sixty seconds of that before I went back to being a person who had been kissed in a donut shop by a man named Tommy.
I counted them out.
Then I went up.
Tasha was on the sofa with her legs tucked under her and a mug of something that smelled like chai, and she looked up when I came through the door.
"How'd it go?"
"Good," I said. I set my guitar case down by the door. Unzipped my coat. Hung it on the hook that was mine, third from the left, because we'd sorted that out in the first week without making it a conversation. "Luis paid me, like he promised."
I pulled the folded cash from my inner pocket and held it up briefly, and Tasha made the satisfied sound of someone who understood what a hundred and fifty dollars meant to the math of my life.
"How'd the playing go?" she said. "Before the money."
"Good. Really good, actually."
She studied me over the rim of her mug. Tasha had the kind of eyes that noticed things and didn't always say so, which I'd come to appreciate because it meant when she did say something, it was because she'd already decided it was worth saying.
"Something else happened," she said.
It wasn't a question.
I went to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water and drank half of it standing at the sink.
Through the window above the faucet I could see the top of the live oak across the street, bare-branched and silver in the afternoon light.
I thought about whether I could deflect this and decided I probably couldn't and also wasn't sure I wanted to.
"A man fixed my guitar string," I said.
Silence from the sofa.
"My G string broke mid-set," I said. "I didn't have a spare. And this man—he just—came over. Had one in his pocket. Restrung it right there on the restaurant floor."
"A man had a guitar string in his pocket?”
"He's a guitarist."
"Okay." A pause. "And?"
"And he walked me to a donut shop after."
"Which donut shop?”
"Proof. On—"
"Rebecca." Tasha set her mug down. "What happened at the donut shop?"
I turned around and leaned my back against the sink. The kitchen was small enough that I could see her face clearly from here, and her face was doing the thing it did when she was trying not to push too hard and finding it difficult.
"He kissed me," I said.
Tasha picked her mug back up. Set it back down. "Okay."
"In the donut shop."
"Okay."
"And then he walked me home and I kissed him on the jaw outside and came up here."
"You kissed him on the jaw?”
"On the jaw."
"That's a very—" She appeared to be choosing her words. "That's a very specific place to kiss someone."
"I know."
"Why the jaw?"
"I don't know. It's what happened." I pressed the heel of my hand against the counter. "It felt right."
Tasha was quiet for a moment.
"What's his name?"
"Tommy."
"Tommy what?"
"I don't know."
She looked at me.
"I know he's from Valentine, Texas," I said. "He's a consultant. He's tall. He carries guitar strings in his pocket and he restrings faster than most people and he doesn't fill silences when he doesn't have to, which almost nobody knows how to do."
"And you don't know his last name?”
"We didn't exactly—it didn't come up."
She nodded slowly, the nod of a woman processing information and finding it both insufficient and interesting.
"Is he coming back?" she said.
“I told him to come find me at The Carolinian." I paused. "I said if he tips well, maybe I'd buy the donuts next time."
Tasha stared at me.
"You said that?”
"I said that."
"Rebecca." She uncurled from the sofa and stood up with her mug. "I need you to know that is the most forward thing I have ever heard you say, especially to a man."
"I know."
"Are you okay?"
"I don't know."
She came into the kitchen and stood beside me at the counter and we looked out the window at the live oak together for a moment.
"Is he good-looking?" she said.
I thought about the jaw. The creek-water eyes. The way he'd crouched on the restaurant floor like it was the most natural thing and his hands had known exactly what they were doing with my guitar.
"Unreasonably," I said.
She made a sound that wasn't quite a word.
"The kind that makes you feel like you should double-check that he's actually talking to you," I said. "Like there must be someone behind you he's addressing."
"Oh, no."
"Yeah."
"Rebecca."
"I know."
I went to my room after that.
I needed the quiet the way I'd needed the stairwell—as a place where I could think without anyone watching me think.
I changed out of my good jeans and the borrowed top and hung the top carefully on Tasha's hanger, because it was Tasha's and Tasha was good to me and I wasn't going to stretch it out by leaving it in a heap.
I pulled on my old sweatshirt from a Gatlinburg 5K I did in high school and soft pants. I sat on the edge of my bed.
The Gibson was still in its case by the door. I could feel its absence from across the apartment the way you felt the absence of something you kept close.
I pressed my fingertips to my lips, lightly, in the place where his mouth had been.
Can I?
Two words. Low, careful, without assumption.
I had known exactly what he was asking and I had nodded without making him say it more plainly, and that had felt like the right grammar between two people who were figuring out where the other one started.
I lay back on the bed and looked at the ceiling.
The water stain was still there, still shaped like Tennessee, indifferent to what had happened to me today.
I found that comforting. The ceiling didn't know about Tommy.
The ceiling had no opinion about the fact that I had let a stranger kiss me in a donut shop on a Tuesday afternoon and then kissed him back on the jaw outside my building like a woman who did things like that, which I didn't. I didn't do things like that.
Or, I hadn't.
The thing was, I'd spent a lot of years learning to recognize the way certain men looked at women and understanding that the look was not, in fact, about the women.
The look was about the man. About what the man wanted and whether it was available and what it would cost him to get it, and in that equation the woman was a variable, not a constant.
I'd watched it happen to prettier girls than me in the restaurants along the tourist strip and I'd learned to clock it and stay out of the way of it.
Tommy hadn't looked at me like that.
Tommy had looked at me the way my choir teacher had looked at me the day she'd written in my yearbook—like she was seeing something important, something with a name, something she wanted to make sure she'd gotten down right before the moment passed.
Not the general fact of me. The actual me.
The girl playing the actual guitar in the actual room doing the actual thing.
I didn't know what to do with a man who looked at me like that.
I didn't know how to hold it without either dropping it or gripping it so hard I changed its shape.
I thought about money, because that was what I thought about when other thoughts got too large to carry.
I pulled out my phone and did the math. The hundred and fifty from Luis plus the tips from the jar—he'd handed that to me, too, an extra forty-two dollars in a rubber-banded roll that he'd pressed into my hand on the way out with a look that said this was not a one-time offer, if I ever needed it.
A hundred and ninety-two dollars total today.
Two hundred and eighty-six minus a hundred and ninety-two.
Ninety-four dollars short.
Ninety-four. From two hundred and eighty-six to ninety-four in one afternoon. That was something. That was real, countable progress.
I let out a breath I'd been holding, probably, for days.
Ninety-four dollars I could manage. Ninety-four dollars was three good shifts or two good gigs or maybe even one night at The Piazza, if the tip jar cooperated. Ninety-four dollars was not four hundred. Ninety-four dollars was almost okay.
I closed the calculator app.
Opened it again.
Closed it.
I thought about the Battery. The free walk. The harbor at dusk when the light went gold and the palmettos went black against it and the whole city looked like something out of a dream someone else had and was generous enough to share.
I'd walked it once since I'd been here, alone, early on a morning when the cold was sharp and there was nobody else out yet, and I'd stood at the seawall and looked out at the water and felt something I couldn't name—not happiness exactly, but the rare sensation of being in the right place at the right time in your own life.
I thought about Tommy walking it with me. The easy stride of him. The way he occupied space without apologizing for it. The way he'd look at the harbor, probably—not like a tourist, but straight at it. Honest.
I thought it would be enough. The walk. The light. The free thing.
I thought he might be the kind of man for whom it would be.
I also thought I was building something in my head out of a guitar string and two donuts and a kiss, and that the intelligent thing to do was keep my feet on the ground until I had more information.
Both things were true.
I was getting good at holding two true things at once.
I got my guitar from where I'd left it by the door and brought it back to the bed, then I took it out of the case and held it in my lap without playing it. Just held it.
Dolly would know what to do.
That was the thing about Dolly—she always knew.
Not because her life had been easy, because it hadn't, everybody knew it hadn't, she'd grown up with less than me and in a smaller holler and with more mouths to feed and she'd walked out of those mountains, anyway, with nothing but her voice and her nerve and an absolute refusal to let the size of where she started determine the size of where she ended up.
She hadn't waited until she could afford it.
She hadn't waited until she was sure. She'd just gone.
And if a man who looked like Tommy had walked across a room and fixed her guitar and kissed her in a donut shop, Dolly would not be lying on a bed in a sweatshirt doing subtraction.
Dolly would put on her best dress and figure out the rest later.
I looked at the ceiling.
I didn't own a best dress.
But I thought, maybe, for the first time, that I understood the impulse.