Chapter 19
REBECCA
I’d woken up with a song already in my head.
That was how it worked sometimes—not often, not reliably, but occasionally the brain did its work while the rest of you was doing something else. I'd learned not to question it when it happened. I'd learned to get to the guitar before the thing dissolved.
I was across the room and had the Gibson out of the case.
The chord progression came first. Something in D, open and a little aching, the kind of chord that wanted to go somewhere and wasn't sure it deserved to.
I played it through twice, found the turnaround, played it again.
Then the first line arrived, the way first lines arrived—fully formed, as if it had been waiting just offstage for someone to open the door.
You came in off a road I didn't know was there.
I stopped.
I played the chord again and sang it back to myself, quiet, in the morning with my hair still loose and Tommy's absence still warm in the room around me.
It was right. It was the right line. It had the thing a first line needed, which was a door—something that opened into a world and invited you through.
I wrote for an hour.
Not all of it was good. Most of it wasn't, which was the nature of it—you wrote through the bad to get to the good, the way you walked through brush to get to the clearing.
But the bones of it were there by the time I had to put the guitar down and get ready for work.
A verse and a chorus and the ghost of a bridge I'd find later.
A song about a man who arrived without warning and rearranged you before you'd thought to ask his intentions.
I didn't write his name in it. I never wrote names. But it was his, the way the best songs were always somebody's—specific enough to be true, open enough to be anyone's.
I put the guitar away carefully and sang the chorus back to myself until I had it memorized, which was how I kept things before I could record them. Commit it to the body. Let the throat learn it. The throat didn't forget the way the brain did.
I ate another piece of toast with the last of my mama's raspberry jam, which I rationed the way I rationed everything good—slowly, with attention, making it last.
I thought about Tommy eating it in my bed.
I smiled at the toast.
Luis was at the host stand when I came in through the back, which was unusual. Luis was almost always at the bar or in the office at this hour, not the host stand. He had the look of a man who'd been waiting for a specific person and was pleased to see them arrive.
"There's something for you," he said.
He said it the way you said something for you when the something was worth saying it about. I followed his eyes to the server station.
The flowers were in a glass vase someone had found from somewhere—Luis's office, probably, the kind of vase that lived on a shelf for exactly this kind of occasion.
They were cream colored, mostly, with a blush of pink threaded through them, and a single long stem of something green with small yellow buds laid against the rest like it had been placed there with an opinion.
The ribbon holding the stems together was somewhere between casual and careful, the kind of tied thing that had been done by someone who'd thought about it.
No card.
I stood there and looked at them for a long moment.
"A man brought them this morning," Luis said, from behind me. "Tall. Texas accent. Said to make sure you got them before your shift."
I didn't say anything.
"No card," Luis said.
"I know," I said.
No card was its own kind of card. No card was you know who sent these and the confidence of that—the assumption that I would know, that there was no ambiguity to clear up between us—landed somewhere low and warm and stayed there.
I touched one of the cream petals with one finger. It was soft in the way flowers were soft when they were fresh, when the whole short life of them was still ahead.
"They're beautiful," I said.
"He seemed like he knew what he was doing," Luis said, which was Luis's way of giving his approval, which I hadn't known I wanted until I had it.
I carried the vase to the end of the server station where I could see it through most of the dining room and went to work.
The lunch shift moved the way good shifts moved—steadily, with enough to do that the time passed without dragging, not so much that anything went sideways. I took my tables, kept my sections running clean, refilled water without being asked. The usual machinery of it. The familiar rhythm.
But underneath the rhythm, something was different.
I felt it in the way I moved through the dining room.
Something looser. Something that had set its weight down somewhere and wasn't carrying it in the same way.
I caught myself humming the chorus of the new song between tables—just under my breath, just barely—and stopped myself each time.
The third time, I caught myself and thought: why?
Why stop?
I was humming because I had written something good this morning and because there were flowers at the end of the server station with no card and because a man had said don't go too far on the way out of my door and meant it. The world had, without asking my permission, started to open up.
I let myself hum.
Priya caught me at the pass-through mid-shift and raised her eyebrows at the flowers and then at me. I said nothing and she said nothing and we understood each other completely.
Marco called from the kitchen: "Whoever sent those, tell him the kitchen says thank you. You've been less annoying today."
"Marco," Luis said, from somewhere.
"It's a compliment," Marco said.
It was, from Marco, the highest possible form of one. I laughed and it came out easy and real.
I was three blocks from The Carolinian on my way home when I stopped on the sidewalk, took the business card out of my apron pocket, and looked at it.
Wren Calloway. Producer. Southern Frequency Podcast.
I'd told myself I'd call today and almost talked myself out of it during a slow moment between tables when my brain had found time to construct the full architecture of what calling might mean.
I stood on the sidewalk in the January cold with the card in my hand.
I thought about Tommy sitting across from me in Proof saying you play like someone who's been in school your whole life, just a different school.
I thought about Geoff closing his book to listen.
I thought about the room at The Piazza going soft when the woman near the window smiled.
I thought about Marco's version of a compliment and Luis's version of approval.
I thought about the song I'd written this morning, still warm in my throat.
I dialed before I'd finished deciding to.
It rang three times and went to voicemail.
A woman's voice, warm and professional: You've reached Wren Calloway at Southern Frequency. Leave me a message and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.
The beep.
I took a breath.
"Hi, this is Rebecca Myers. I'm a singer and guitarist based—" I paused.
Based was a strong word for someone who moved with the seasons.
"I'm currently in Charleston, South Carolina.
Luis Soto at The Carolinian passed along your card after I played a lunch set there recently.
I'd love to talk if you have time. I can be reached at this number.
" I paused again, because there was something else I wanted to say and I was going to say it before I decided not to.
"I write my own songs. I've been writing since I was fifteen.
I've never really—I've never sent them anywhere or done anything formal with them.
But I think they might be worth something to somebody, and I'm trying to figure out how to find out.
" Another pause. "Okay. Thank you. Bye."
I hung up.
I stood on the sidewalk and looked at the card for another moment.
Then I put it back in my pocket and kept walking.
That's the decision to want it out loud, Geoff had said. Just that, simply, like it was obvious.
Maybe it was.
Maybe I was finally learning to be obvious.
Back at the apartment, Tasha was out and Devon was sleeping and Geoff was at the kitchen table with his book. He looked up when I came in—first at me, then at the flowers I was carrying.
He looked at the flowers for a moment. Then back at his book. Then back at the flowers.
"Those are nice," he said, in the careful tone of a man who had decided not to ask.
"Yes," I said, in the tone of a woman who had decided not to explain.
I set them on the kitchen counter where I could see them from the table, then held up my apron pocket in the general direction of where the card was and said "I called a podcast producer who heard me play and wanted to talk. Left her a voicemail."
He looked at me for a moment.
"Good," he said. Then he went back to his book.
That was exactly the right amount of response. I went to my room.
Getting ready for The Palmetto Rose took longer than I wanted it to and less time than I feared.
The problem was the gap between what I owned and what the occasion seemed to call for.
I'd never been to The Palmetto Rose. I'd never been to anywhere like The Palmetto Rose.
I didn't know if we were having drinks on a balcony or drinks and dinner or just the balcony and then he'd send me home at nine o'clock, and the not knowing made packing for it impossible.
I showered again, to wash the restaurant off, then laid everything I owned on the bed.
The brown leather boots. A dark pair of jeans without any wear in the knees.
A black top I'd bought at a thrift store in Key West that was simple and fitted and had a small V at the neck that was tasteful without being understated.
A cardigan in a soft cream color that Tasha had given me at Christmas because she said it matched my skin.
I stood there and looked at it all.
I thought about the women I'd seen going in and out of places like The Palmetto Rose on my walks through the historic district—the linen and the silk and the effortless.
I thought about the fact that Tommy had restrung my guitar on a restaurant floor and eaten my mama's jam off grocery-store bread in my small Charleston bed and said I know what you are without needing me to explain it.
I put on the jeans and the black top and the cardigan and the boots.
I curled my hair loose, the way I'd done for The Piazza, the way that took twenty minutes but looked like it hadn't.
I put on the small gold earrings that had been my grandmother's and that I wore only for things that mattered, and I looked at myself in the mirror above the bathroom sink and thought: this is what I've got and it's enough.
I believed it. Mostly.
Before I left I made myself eat—scrambled eggs and the heel of a bread loaf, standing at the kitchen counter with my coat already on.
I wasn't going to arrive at The Palmetto Rose hungry and make assumptions about what the evening included.
I was going to arrive having taken care of myself, the way I always took care of myself, and let the rest of it be whatever it turned out to be.
The eggs were good. Simple and hot and mine.
I washed the pan, dried it, put it away.
Tasha came through the front door just as I was pulling on my gloves and she stopped in the doorway and looked at me—just looked, for a full second—and said, “Wow.”
"Don't," I said.
"You look beautiful."
"I said don't."
"I'm saying it, anyway." She stepped aside to let me through. "Go. Have fun. Text if you need anything."
I went.
The Charleston evening was cold and clear and smelled like the ocean, the way it always did. Somewhere ahead of me, The Palmetto Rose was waiting with its partial harbor view and its good bourbon and Tommy Dane on a balcony.
I walked toward it.
I didn't run the math once.