Chapter 16
TOMMY
She fell asleep against my chest and her breathing went even and her hand stayed open on my sternum—fingers loose, not holding on because she didn't have to.
I lay there looking at her ceiling.
The ninety-four dollars sat in the room like a third person.
She'd said it out loud to me. That was the part I couldn't get past. A woman who had spent the last few hours showing me she could be brave with her body had decided to be brave with her math, and the math was I'm ninety-four dollars short on rent.
She'd handed me that number the way she'd handed me the Gibson—both hands, careful, with a clear-eyed understanding of what it cost her to hand a stranger something she usually only handed a few people in her life.
I knew exactly what to do. The first impulse was clean.
I had cash on me. Real cash. The kind of cash a man like me carried because the world ran on it in places the world didn't talk about.
I could fold the bills into the inside pocket of her work coat where she hung it on the third hook from the left and walk out of this apartment in the morning and never say a word, and Rebecca Lynn would find it on her way to a shift she wasn't going to need to make, and the math would be done.
I could also do better than that. I could hand her a card with a number on it and tell her it was hers, no strings, no expectations, and watch her face do the thing women's faces did when men showed up wearing kindness and meaning favor.
I could pay her rent for the year. Ten years.
The math against my net worth was a rounding error and I knew it.
The math against her pride was the entire problem.
Because here was the thing.
I knew Rebecca Lynn already, even if I hadn't known her long.
I'd been raised by her, in a different body, in a different state, on a different ranch.
My mother had a rule.
Six words.
We don't take a damn handout.
She'd said it the day my third-grade teacher had tried to send me home with five dollars because she'd noticed something in my lunch box she didn't think was enough.
She'd said it the day a neighbor had come over with a casserole after my father took off the second time and didn't come back for a month, and she'd received it gracious and hot and walked it down the road to a family she said needed it more than we did, even though there wasn't a family on God's earth that day who needed it more than we did.
She'd said it the year the church had tried to put us on a list for the Christmas hamper, and my mother had walked into that church on a Sunday morning and asked, in front of God and the pastor and half the county, that we be removed from the list and that whatever was in our hamper be given to a family with smaller boys.
We had all eaten beans for two weeks after that and not complained, because complaining would have undone the point.
The point was that we made our own way. The Dane way. We work for it. We earn it. We don't take a damn handout. We give, instead.
When the oil came, my mother cried at the kitchen table—I'd told Rebecca that part, and it was true—but the next thing she did was hold a meeting with seven boys, and what she'd said in that meeting was that the money didn't change a single thing about who we were.
That we were not now to walk through the world like men who were owed something.
That we were not to spend money in a way that made other people feel small.
That the reason God had given us this was so that we could be people who had options about how to be of service, not so we could become people who'd lost the habit of being of service.
She'd been right.
She'd raised seven men who all knew, in their bones, that money was a tool and pride was a backbone and the two of them had to be kept apart in your understanding or one of them would corrode the other.
Rebecca Lynn had the same backbone. Different home.
Same lesson. Same mother somewhere in Tennessee teaching her daughter that you didn't take what you hadn't earned, didn't owe what you hadn't agreed to owe, didn't trade your pride for a meal even on weeks when the math said the meal cost more than the pride.
Walking cash into her work coat in the dark would not be kindness.
It would be theft.
It would be me taking the one thing she still owned outright—the I made my way here—and replacing it, without her permission, with a man took care of it.
I wasn't going to do that to her.
But I also wasn't going to let her run that math at three in the morning for the rest of her natural life, because she didn't deserve it, and because some part of me had walked across a restaurant and decided, without bothering to brief me on the decision, that I was going to be in the business of what Rebecca Lynn did and didn't deserve.
There were ways. There were always ways.
I could put a thumb on Luis at The Carolinian.
I'd like to be a regular at the bar. I'd like a private function booked once a month.
I'd like the lunch sets she's playing to be guaranteed.
The kind of pressure that didn't come down through her—came down sideways, through the room she worked in, from a man who'd taken an interest in the establishment.
I could find the podcast producer who'd left her business card and quietly fund the season Rebecca didn't yet know she was being invited to be part of.
I could buy the building she lived in, take over the lease, knock the rent down by fifty dollars a month, and let her wonder for a year why her landlord had gotten generous.
I could drop a tip in her jar at her next set that was three months of her gap and let her keep it as a tip, because tips were earned, tips were the math she'd built her life around, tips weren't a handout. Tips were the universe answering when you sang well enough.
I had to think.
I had to think carefully and slow, and I had to do it without telling her, because the moment Rebecca Lynn knew that any of these things had been arranged for her she would walk away from me in a straight line and not look back, and she would be right to.
Pride didn't bend. Pride was the part of you that kept you upright when the math said lie down.
I held her against me and listened to her sleep.
Outside the yellow curtains, the dark was going gray and the birds were going from single notes into something that wanted to be a song. I thought about Valentine. The big sky my mother had stood under on a thousand nights, hands on her hips, looking up and not asking for anything.
She'd love this girl.
The thought arrived clean.
My mother would take one look at Rebecca Lynn and know her—the way mothers like mine knew daughters like Rebecca, in one slow honest look—and she would put her hand on the side of Rebecca's face and say you've got a good heart, baby, and that would be it.
The sentence would land in Rebecca like a blessing.
I knew it the way I knew a chord under my hand without thinking about it.
I would have to take her there.
The decision arrived with the same speed as the rest of them today.
The decision was unaccompanied by panic, which was the part I wasn't ready to think about yet.
I closed my eyes.
I went home in my head, because it was the only place I let myself go when I couldn't sleep.
Valentine sky in August. The pasture behind the barn.
The smell of horse and cut alfalfa and the dust kicked up under the wheel of an old truck.
Seven boys whooping like idiots on horseback through the back forty playing the cowboys-and-Indians game my mother had stopped letting us call cowboys-and-Indians somewhere around 1998 and which we had renamed, with the moral seriousness of children, cowboys-and-natives.
Mucking stalls in the cool hour after sunup.
My mother on the porch in a sweater she'd had longer than any of us, calling us in for breakfast in the voice that got us moving without arguing.
The voice that got us moving.
I fell asleep on the sound of it.
I woke to an empty bed.
That was the first thing. The second thing was that I hadn't felt her get up.
That was a thing.
I had not failed to feel a woman get out of a bed I was in since approximately my fifteenth year on this planet.
Operators slept on a thread. Light came on, you came up.
Door cracked, you came up. Body moved next to you, you came up.
Tommy Dane did not snore through a woman crossing her own bedroom in her own apartment and slipping out into her own hallway. That was not a thing that happened.
It had happened.
I lay there for a second with my hand on the warm spot on the sheet where she'd been, and I couldn't decide whether I was alarmed by it or pleased about it, and the fact that I couldn't decide meant the answer was pleased.
The bedroom door opened.
She came in sideways because her hands were full, and what her hands were full of was two coffee mugs balanced on a small plate and the small plate had two pieces of toast on it, and the toast was already buttered and already spread thick with raspberry jelly.
"Surprise," she said.
She was wearing my t-shirt. It came down to mid-thigh on her. Her hair was tied up loose in a knot that had the casual perfection of a knot that had been tied without a mirror by a woman who did not know how good she looked.
I sat up.
"Rebecca Lynn, are you trying to ruin me?"
"What?"
"That. All of that. You're going to ruin me."
She smiled. The slow private one, the one I'd gotten in the donut shop. She crossed the room and sat down on the bed and handed me a mug and a piece of toast on a plate.
"I thought you might be hungry," she said.
"I am hungry."
"And I thought maybe—" she paused, the careful pause she did when she was about to take a risk— "after we're done with these, we could shower together."
I held still for a second and looked at her over the rim of the mug.
"Rebecca Lynn."
"Yeah."