CHAPTER FOUR
LARKIN
The industry party was at a house up in Belle Meade, one of those parties where everyone dressed like they weren't trying and had spent an hour trying, and I went because Townes asked me to and because staying home alone felt worse than standing in a crowded room being invisible next to my own husband.
I'd chosen a dress carefully that night, something I'd altered myself years earlier from a piece I'd found at an estate sale, navy silk with a hem I'd taken up twice as my taste changed, and I remembered standing in front of the mirror feeling something close to armor putting it on, a small private reminder that at least one thing I was wearing had been made entirely by my own hands, regardless of whatever else happened at the party.
Rhett Callahan found us near the bar within ten minutes, tall and easy in the way famous people learn to be easy, like the room adjusted around them instead of the other way around. He hugged Townes with the kind of full-body enthusiasm of a man who knew exactly how much he owed somebody.
"There he is," Rhett said. "The reason my calendar's full through next spring."
"You did the singing," Townes said.
"You did the bleeding," Rhett said, and laughed, and clapped him on the shoulder, and I stood there holding a glass of wine I wasn't drinking and felt the words hit somewhere under my ribs.
He did the bleeding. Rhett had no idea whose blood it actually was.
He thought he was praising a songwriter's honesty in the abstract, the way people always praised it, without ever wondering whether the honesty had asked permission.
Rhett's wife, Savannah, came over a minute later, and she and Rhett had a warmth between them that I used to think Townes and I still had, before I started noticing all the places it had thinned out.
Savannah hugged me like she meant it, which she probably did.
I'd met her twice before, both times at events like this one, and both times I'd liked her more than the setting deserved.
"How are you holding up with all this," Savannah asked me, tipping her head toward the general noise of the party, the way people kept angling toward Townes across the room.
"It's a lot," I said, which was as honest as I could manage in a room full of people.
She looked at me a beat longer than the question required. "It changes things, doesn't it. Even the good kind of big."
I didn't know what she meant by that exactly, and I didn't ask, because a woman I barely knew came up right then and put her hand on my arm like we were old friends.
Before that, though, I asked Savannah a question I'd been wanting to ask somebody for weeks, someone who might actually understand instead of just sympathizing from a comfortable distance.
"Can I ask you something," I said, dropping my voice a little.
"Does it ever feel strange to you, watching Rhett up there singing something so personal that isn't actually his? "
Savannah considered the question seriously, not brushing it off the way most people would have.
"Sometimes," she said. "The good ones always feel like they're mining something.
I used to wonder about that more when we were first married, whether the songs he sang about heartbreak came from somewhere specific, whether I should feel jealous of a woman who might not even exist. I learned to stop asking, mostly.
It got easier once I decided the songs belonged to the audience the moment they were released, not to whoever inspired them. "
"What if the person who inspired them never agreed to that trade," I said, careful, testing how much I could say without saying too much.
Something shifted in Savannah's expression, thoughtful, a little more alert.
"Then I imagine that would be a very different kind of hard," she said, and she didn't push further, didn't ask me to clarify what I meant, and I appreciated the restraint more than she probably knew, because I wasn't ready yet to say the rest of it out loud to anyone, not even a woman I was starting to trust.
"You must be so proud," the woman said. "That song. I cried the first time I heard it, I really did. What do you think inspired something like that? He must have really been through something."
I felt my face do the thing it had learned to do at these parties, arrange itself into something warm and unbothered. "You'd have to ask him," I said. "He doesn't tell me everything."
The woman laughed like I'd made a joke, and moved on to find someone else to say the same thing to, and I stood there with my wine and watched Townes fifteen feet away, laughing at something Rhett said, glowing with the particular light of a man finally getting the thing he'd wanted for years, and I thought about how strange it was to be furious at somebody and still love them so much it made my chest hurt.
Savannah was watching me. "You've gone somewhere else," she said, not unkindly.
"Just tired," I said.
"I get it," she said, and something in her voice made me think she might actually get it, more than I wanted to explain, so I didn't ask her to.
Not that night. There was a version of this conversation I would have with her eventually, further down the road, but that night I wasn't ready to have it with anyone, including myself.
Townes found me an hour later, pulling me a little away from the crowd, his hand warm on my back. "You having an okay time?"
"Sure," I said.
"You seem far away tonight."
"I heard a lot of people tell me how much your song made them feel," I said. "I was trying to figure out how to feel about that."
He looked at me, and for a second something in his face went soft and uncertain, almost like the boy I married instead of the man standing in a room full of people congratulating him for turning our worst night into art. "I didn't think about it affecting you like that," he said. "I should have."
It was the closest he'd come in months to actually seeing it, and I wanted to hold onto that small opening, but Deb appeared at his elbow wanting him to meet somebody from the label, and he squeezed my hand and went, and the opening closed behind him like a door swinging shut on its own weight.
I stayed another hour because leaving early would have started a conversation I didn't want to have in the car, and I smiled at people and said thank you when they praised my husband's honesty, and somewhere near the end of the night I found myself cornered near the bar by a music journalist I half recognized, a woman named Carla Reyes, who introduced herself and said she was hoping to sit down with Townes soon for a longer piece.
"You must know the real story behind that song better than anyone," Carla said, not unkindly, just curious in the professional way journalists are curious. "Wives always know the parts nobody else gets to hear."
"I know plenty," I said, keeping my voice light, practiced by then at deflecting exactly this kind of question. "I'm not the one you should be interviewing, though."
"Fair enough," she said, and let it go, though something in the way she studied me for an extra second made me wonder, uneasily, whether she'd clocked more than she let on.
I remembered the exchange and didn't think much more about it that night, though I would remember her name again, months later, under very different circumstances.
I drove us home at the end of the night because Townes had had two more drinks than he should have, and neither of us said much on the way back except him telling me, twice, unprompted, that Beau Whitaker wanted him to write something for his next record too.
I said that was good.
I meant it, mostly. I just didn't know anymore where the good news for him stopped and the bad news for us began, or whether he'd noticed there was a difference.