CHAPTER TWO
TOWNES
My publisher called before eight in the morning, which was how I knew before I even answered that it was good news. Bad news waited until a decent hour. Good news couldn't help itself.
"Number one for the fourth straight week," Deb said. "Fourth, Townes. You know how rare that is for a song this quiet? This isn't a truck-and-beer song. This is a man admitting he lost something and people can't stop listening to him say it."
I sat on the edge of the bed and let her talk, and some part of me that had been waiting years to hear exactly this sentence lit up like a struck match.
Four years of writing songs that made other men famous while my own name sat small in the liner notes.
Four years of being the guy the artists called when they needed the real thing and needed somebody else's face on the cover.
And now Rhett Callahan was on every radio format in the country singing words I'd written, and for once people were asking who wrote them.
I remembered the first time somebody had said my name back to me at a party as though it meant something, a producer I'd only met twice clapping me on the shoulder at a Christmas gathering the month after the song broke, saying Barrett, the man himself, like the words carried weight all on their own.
I'd spent four years standing at the edges of rooms like that one, watching other men get greeted that way while I nursed a drink and waited for somebody to remember I existed.
That single sentence, said by a man I barely knew, had done something to me I still hadn't fully examined.
It had made the whole slow, grinding climb feel, for one evening, worth it.
I understood, even then, holding the phone to my ear while Deb kept talking, that the hunger behind that feeling hadn't gone anywhere just because it had finally been fed once. If anything it had gotten louder, more specific, telling me exactly what it wanted next.
"They want a follow-up," Deb said. "Same well, if you've got more in it. This kind of honesty, this kind of specificity, that's what's selling. Don't give them something generic. Give them more of whatever gave you that one."
I said I'd see what I had.
I already knew what I had. I'd known for two weeks, ever since I finished the draft of "Blue Room" at two in the morning and sat back from the desk with my hands shaking a little, because I knew it was good, and because I knew exactly where it had come from, and both of those things were true at the same time and I hadn't figured out yet how to hold them without one crowding out the other.
Larkin was in the kitchen when I came out, standing at the counter with her coffee, already dressed for the day. She had a look about her lately that I couldn't quite name. Careful. Like she was weighing her words before she said them in a way she never used to.
"That was Deb," I said. "Song's still number one."
"I know," she said. "I heard it at the store yesterday."
Something in the way she said it made me look at her a beat longer than I meant to. "Yeah?"
"Whole store knew it," she said. "A woman thought you wrote it after a divorce."
I felt that sting somewhere I didn't examine too closely. "It's not literal, Lark. You know that."
"I know what it is," she said, and there was something under the words, something I heard and didn't chase, because chasing it would have meant a conversation I wasn't ready for yet, and I had a follow-up single to write, and Deb was waiting.
I told myself she was tired. I told myself the song had put a strain on us the same way anything new and big puts a strain on a marriage, and that it would settle, the way things settled. I'd been telling myself some version of that for months.
The truth, if I'd let myself look straight at it, was smaller and worse than tired.
Larkin had stopped finishing sentences with me.
She used to talk through everything, every worry, every half-formed feeling, sitting across the table with her hands wrapped around a mug while I listened and sometimes wrote down a line she said without meaning it as a line.
Somewhere in the last year she'd started catching herself.
I'd watch her open her mouth to say something and then close it again, like she'd remembered halfway through that I was the kind of man who might use it.
I didn't like thinking about why she might have started doing that. It was easier to think about the follow-up single.
I went back to the writing room after breakfast and pulled up the file for "Blue Room.
" I'd written it fast, the way the best ones came, in one sitting, barely stopping to eat, and it scared me a little how fast it had come, because the fast ones were always the true ones.
I'd built a frame around it. Changed the color of the walls in one draft, then changed them back because pale blue was the only color that made the bridge work.
Changed the mother into an aunt for two verses and then changed her back into a mother, because an aunt didn't carry the same weight, and weight was the whole point of the song.
I told myself the changes were enough. Nobody who heard "Blue Room" would ever think of Larkin specifically.
They'd think of their own mother, their own room, their own version of being told they were easy to leave.
That was what a good song did. It took something specific and made it universal, so specific it disappeared into everybody's specific.
I believed that when I told it to myself in the writing room with the door shut.
I believed it a little less every time I thought about telling Larkin I'd already sold it.
I hadn't told her yet. I kept meaning to.
There was never a good moment, and the longer I waited the harder the moment got, until not telling her had become its own decision, one I made fresh every single day just by staying quiet at dinner and letting her ask about my day instead of the other way around.
Deb texted around noon. Label loves it. Wants Callahan on it too if he'll do a second duet. This one's bigger than the first, T. I'm serious.
I read the text twice and felt the old hunger stir, the one that had been driving me since I was nineteen years old sleeping four to a room in a house off Music Row, writing songs nobody wanted and playing them for nobody at open mics that started at eleven at night and ended past two, telling myself somebody would eventually hear something true enough to matter.
I had a shot now at being the man whose name people looked for on the credits instead of the guy standing behind the guy with the guitar.
I picked up my own guitar and worked through the bridge one more time, tightening a line, and somewhere underneath the satisfaction of getting it right there was a smaller voice, quieter, the one that sounded like Larkin, asking me a question I hadn't let myself hear all the way through yet.
I didn't answer it. I kept working.
Rhett called that afternoon, wanting to talk through a bridge on a different song entirely, and somewhere in the conversation he brought up "The Light She Left On" the way people had started doing lately, casually, like it was common property now instead of something either of us had built by hand.
"You ever think about writing something that raw again," Rhett said. "Not for me necessarily. Just, that vein. Whatever mine you tapped for that one."
"I've got something," I said, before I'd fully decided to say it out loud. "Not sure yet who it's for."
"Well, whatever it is, don't sit on it too long," he said. "This town's got a short memory for the guy who was hot six months ago. You want to build on this while the door's open."
I told him I understood, and I did, more than I wanted to.
I had spent four years watching other men's names get bigger while mine stayed small in the credits, watching artists thank producers and labels and each other at awards shows while the man who'd actually written the words stood somewhere near the back of the room, unmentioned, unrecognized, and I had told myself for most of those years that it didn't matter, that the work was its own reward, that I didn't need the recognition to know what I'd made was good.
That had been a lie I told myself so often I'd nearly believed it.
The truth was closer to what Rhett had just said out loud without meaning to be unkind about it.
This town had a short memory. If I wanted the door to stay open, I needed to walk through it again, and soon, with something as good as the last thing or better.
I thought about Larkin at the kitchen table the night before, the careful way she'd started answering my questions, the sentences that used to run long and unguarded now clipped short and safe.
I told myself I was imagining the change, or exaggerating it, the way people exaggerate small frictions in a marriage when they're under professional pressure.
I told myself a lot of things that week that I would later have to admit, to her and to myself, weren't quite true.
That evening I sat with my guitar longer than usual, running through the opening of "Blue Room" again, testing the bridge one more time, listening for whatever it was in the melody that made my chest go tight every time I got to the line about the room.
I told myself the tightness was craft, the mark of something working the way it was supposed to work.
I didn't let myself consider, not yet, not fully, that the tightness might be something closer to a conscience trying to get my attention before it was too late to listen to it.