Chapter 13
REBECCA
The dinner shift started before I got through the door.
Priya was at the server station when I came in through the back, and she turned around and pointed at me with both index fingers the way people pointed at someone they'd been waiting for, and said, "There she is," loud enough that Marco from the kitchen leaned out of the pass-through to see who she was talking about.
"There who is?" I said.
"The one who played today." She fell into step beside me as I hung up my coat and tied on my apron. "Rebecca, three separate tables asked Luis if you'd be here tonight. Three. One of them left their card."
I stopped tying. "Their card?”
"Business card. It's at the host stand. Luis has it."
I didn't know what to do with that, so I finished tying my apron and went to find Luis.
He was at the bar going over the reservation sheet and he looked up when I came over with the expression of a man who had been vindicated about something and was being gracious enough not to say so directly.
"Before you say anything," I began.
"I'm not saying anything."
"You have that face."
"I have my regular face." He slid a business card across the bar. "A woman at table twelve asked me to give you this. She said—" he glanced at a notepad— "she said she produces a podcast about Southern musicians and she'd like to have a conversation."
I looked at the card. I didn't pick it up yet.
"Okay," I said.
"Rebecca."
"I know."
"Do you?"
I picked up the card and put it in my apron pocket and looked at him. "Thank you for letting me play today. Genuinely."
He waved it off. "You saved my lunch service.
I should be thanking you." He paused, in the way Luis paused when he was about to say something he'd already decided but wanted to deliver carefully.
"I'm making next month's schedule at the end of the week.
I'd like to put you on it. Two lunch sets, maybe a dinner.
In addition to your regular shifts, if you want them. "
Something moved in my chest. Slow and warm, like the first real heat of a fire that had been trying to catch.
"The pay would be the same as today?" I said, because I needed to know, because the math was always there, because I was the kind of woman who asked.
"Same rate. Plus tips."
A hundred and fifty dollars a set. Two sets, maybe three. On top of my regular shifts.
I did the math fast and quiet, the way I always did, and the number I came up with was one I hadn't ever seen. The kind of number that had a cushion in it. The kind that meant when the heat ran long in February or the guitar needed a new set of strings, I wouldn't have to hold my breath.
"Yes," I said. "Absolutely yes."
Luis nodded, satisfied. "Good. Now, go work. Table six has been waiting ten minutes and they look like the kind of people who track that."
I went.
The dinner service was the best shift I'd worked since I'd come to Charleston.
Not because it was easy—it wasn't, it was a full house and the kitchen was backed up on the risotto and table nine changed their order twice—but because of the way the room felt toward me. There was a warmth in it that hadn't been there before.
People who'd been at lunch looked up when I passed their tables and said things like there she is and we heard you play earlier, honey, you were just wonderful, and I took each one of them in the way I was learning to take compliments—not deflecting entirely, not drowning in them, just a quiet thank you and a real smile and moving on before my face could do the embarrassing thing.
Priya found me in the server station between courses and said, low and genuine, "Proud of you, Bec." Just that. She didn't make it a bigger thing, which was exactly the right size for it.
I stood at the server station with my check presenter and my pen and felt, for the first time in a long time, like I was in the right place.
Like the distance from Caton's Chapel meant something.
Like maybe it wasn't just geography.
I watched the door.
I didn't mean to make it a thing. I told myself it wasn't a thing—it was just the natural habit of a server, tracking arrivals, reading sections, anticipating covers. Completely professional. Completely ordinary.
Except that every time the front door swung open, I felt my eyes go there before I'd decided to look, and every time the figure in the doorway was not tall and broad-shouldered with close-cropped dark blonde hair and creek-water eyes, something in my chest did a small, quiet reset that I refused to call disappointment.
Seven o'clock became eight.
Eight became nine.
The reservation sheet emptied out by degrees. The candles burned lower. The kitchen wound down and the sounds behind the pass-through shifted from the urgent percussion of full service to the slower rhythms of breakdown and cleanup. Tables cleared and didn't refill.
He didn't come.
I told myself it was fine. I told myself I'd known him for approximately one afternoon and he owed me nothing and I had built something in my head out of two donuts and a kiss, and that was a me problem, not a Tommy problem.
I told myself that men who said I'd like to see you again sometimes meant it in the immediate tense and sometimes meant it in the general sense and the only thing worse than not knowing which was letting your face show that you cared about the difference.
I kept my face where I needed it.
I counted my tips in the parking lot and they were good—better than average, the tail end of the goodwill from the afternoon following me into the evening—and I tucked the bills into my inner pocket and started the walk home and told myself I was fine.
I was mostly fine.
The ninety-four dollars was almost certainly going to be okay by the end of the week. Luis was putting me on the schedule. A podcast producer had left her card. The world was, by any reasonable accounting, going in the right direction.
I just—
I had thought about the Battery all through service.
The free walk. The harbor at dusk. The way I'd imagined him standing beside me at the seawall, looking at the water straight and honest. I had let myself think about it more than I should have, which was the problem with letting yourself think about things—once the door opened, it didn't close back all the way.
I turned onto my street.
I was composing the reasonable internal monologue—the one about feet on the ground and more information and Dolly going, anyway, without knowing how it turned out—when I saw the light in the apartment window.
That was normal. Tasha stayed up late. Devon was probably back from wherever he'd gone after his work shift. The light was nothing.
Then, I heard the music.
I stopped on the sidewalk.
It was coming from the third floor—my floor—and it was a guitar, and whoever was playing it was good in the way that stopped you on a sidewalk at night without your permission.
Not performing. Just playing, the way people played when they'd forgotten the room, or when the room was small enough that forgetting it was easy.
A melody I didn't recognize, something original, low and unhurried and with a kind of ache in it that reached down through three floors of an old Charleston building and found me on the pavement.
I stood there for five full seconds.
Then, I went up.
The door was unlocked.
Inside, Tasha was on the sofa with her chai and the expression of a woman sitting in the middle of something she had very much helped arrange and was not going to apologize for.
Devon was in the armchair with a beer and his feet up, looking at ease in the way of a person who had decided this was good television.
Geoff was at the kitchen table with his book, but the book was closed, which told me everything.
And Tommy was on the floor.
On the floor, back against the sofa, my guitar—my Gibson, my J-45, the one real thing I owned—in his lap, playing the thing I'd heard from the street like the guitar had been his for years and was just now remembering it.
He looked up when I came in.
The smile came first. Then something warmer underneath it, quieter, in the eyes.
"Hey," he said.
I stood in the doorway with my coat on and my tip money in my pocket and my heart doing the thing it had no business doing.
"That's my guitar," I said.
"I know." He looked down at it. Played one more measure of the melody, soft and unhurried, and let it resolve. "Tasha said you wouldn't mind."
I looked at Tasha. Tasha took a very focused sip of her chai.
"How did you—" I started.
"I knocked," Tommy said simply. "Tasha answered. We got to talking." He glanced at Devon. "Devon let me try the guitar."
"I said he seemed trustworthy," Devon said. "Jury's still out."
"Smart man." Tommy carefully lifted the Gibson and held it out to me the way he'd handed it back at the restaurant—with both hands, the way you returned something you knew the value of.
I crossed the room and took it. Our hands met around the neck. All the way, this time. His fingers warm against mine, not letting go immediately.
"You didn't come in tonight," I said, low enough that it was mostly for him.
"I got tied up." His eyes were on my face. "I'm here now."
Something in the way he said it—simple, certain, like here now was the only tense that mattered—made the breath move differently in my chest.
Behind me, Tasha said something about being tired.
Devon said something about the same. There was a small, orchestrated exodus, then the sounds of bedroom doors closing, and then the apartment was quiet.
It was just me standing in the middle of the living room with my guitar and Tommy unfolding himself from the floor and standing up.
He was very tall in the small space.
He was very close.
He reached out and took the guitar from my hands with the ease of a man removing an obstacle, set it carefully against the sofa, and when he turned back, the expression on his face was serious—the focused, still one he'd worn at the end of my set, before anything else had happened.
"Rebecca Lynn," he said.
"Yeah."
He stepped forward.
I didn't step back.
His hand came up and found my face the way it had in the donut shop, except this time there was no table between us and no public room around us and no reason to be careful or quiet or brief about any of it.
When he tilted my chin up, I went, because I had been going toward him since he'd crouched on the restaurant floor and held out his hand for my guitar like he already knew I'd give it to him.
"I've been thinking about you all day," he said. Low. Close.
"That makes two of us," I said, which was the most honest thing I'd said since I'd told him the world was bigger than I'd known.
He smiled. Then he kissed me.
And this one was nothing like the donut shop.