Chapter 7
In the mirror, Marisa’s shoulders fell. She started to say something, hesitated. “I knew it was a mistake to come,” she said.
“I would have welcomed it,” I said. “When I was six.”
“I came then,” she said, not quite looking at me.
I would have remembered that, right? “No, you didn’t.”
“I did. You were still here with Alex, before … It was before you left.”
Before I was shunted off to foster care, she meant. To strangers paid to keep me, like I was the oddest little orphaned critter in a petting zoo.
“I didn’t talk to you, or Alex,” she said. “I just watched from a distance until…”
When I was six, I looked like a prizefighter, a tooth missing and the gap slow to fill in. Alex had trimmed my hair with a pair of kitchen shears.
I couldn’t help myself. “Until what?”
“Until you went into the house,” Marisa said.
“You were walking home, from here. I followed you. You had a little yellow backpack. He held your hand the whole way,” she said with wonder.
“You stopped to pick up something from the sidewalk. I don’t know, a penny, maybe, or a rock.
I always wondered what it was you picked up. ”
She looked at me as though I might have the answer.
“And then I watched the house after you went in, until I was sure one of the neighbors would call the police.”
“If that’s true,” I said, “why not ring the doorbell?”
“He held your hand, the whole way. I knew you were where you needed to be.” She caught her own reflection again, and looked away. “You were better off without me.”
Except I hadn’t stayed with Alex, and she seemed to know that.
“I could have been safe in someone else’s home and also been happy to see you,” I said. “Even once in a while. You could have tracked me down—”
“It would have been too hard.”
“For who?”
“It’s something I held on to,” she said.
“That I had reached out for the right help, to the one person who could handle it. He’d always been the one person who could—but for you, not myself, see?
And since then—I’ve been ashamed of how weak and—and, well, I’ve been mostly just ashamed of how things went.
” Her confidence was gone now. She looked at the floor.
I felt a rush of anger. I’d come to Alex with a kid-sized cast on my arm. That’s how things went.
“Actually, I came here to be honest with you,” Marisa said to the floor tiles.
I turned so she’d have to say it to me, not my reflection. “Okay?”
“I didn’t try hard enough to get in touch, and I’m sorry. You may not understand this, but I think it was because … because as long as I didn’t insert myself into your life, you and Alex were the only people who knew how much I had messed it all up.”
This was a speech that was both better and worse than any I had ever imagined.
And it wasn’t true. The state of Illinois knew.
Plenty of people who dealt in notarized blah-blah knew all about it, people with clipboards, and northwards of eight sets of foster parents.
Marisa just hadn’t had to look anyone from the Department of Children and Family Services in the eye, like I’d had to.
I was nearly sick with fury. “So you’re here now,” I said, “and why is that? You need a kidney or what?”
She looked up from the floor, her color high, as though I’d slapped her. I had no idea what she would say or ask, finally given the chance she’d come for. But she said nothing. She turned to leave.
At the door, she hesitated. “I hope you have a good show, Dahlia,” she said.
“I always have a good show,” I said.
The door swung open, banged closed. She was gone. I wasn’t sure I’d see her when I got back out front, or ever again.
I was fine with it, okay?
But I found myself wishing the show was already over, the evening, the holidays, this year. I gripped the sink counter’s edge, staring at myself in the mirror. The show must go the hell on.
I went into the far toilet stall, latched the door, and leaned my cheek against the cool tile of the wall.
I always have a good show. That was not the parting shot for the ages that I would have planned for this reunion. But it was the truth.
Oh, I was supposed to be coy and Midwestern about it, wasn’t I? Say something to cut any compliment in half and toe the dirt with my boot?
But I didn’t play that game. Our little band got people off their butts, dancing—people who wouldn’t normally get off the couch to do anything at all came to see us play Wednesday nights, out past their bedtimes. We gave people what they wanted: a good dang time.
Was I supposed to pretend that Doll Devine wasn’t the reason people came out? Pretend that women didn’t come out to McPhee’s on a school night, leaving the laundry undone, so they could imagine themselves shimmying in one of my tight-fitting dresses? And you can guess why the men showed up.
Everyone came out to feel and then went back home to get lucky or to get out their old records and, well—sorry if I wasn’t supposed to admit that my voice reached into people’s hearts.
Reached in and gave a little tweak. That’s what it felt like to listen to a good country song, you know?
Like, when I first heard Patsy Cline, I didn’t know how to feel—elated and drunk, turned on, sad.
Most people feel a little sad listening to Patsy.
Her regrets became yours. And still, all these years later, when I heard one of her songs, I always remembered the saying that country music is three chords and the truth.
The truth, like a gong inside your soul.
A good country song, a true one, no matter how many chords it uses, no matter how rustic or slickly produced, sang to the inside of you and burst you wide open, lashed you raw and brand-new, and left you thinking of all the hurt you’d survived.
Now, some seemed to think country was about location, but not everyone can be from the same place. Not everyone can be born and raised.
Country wasn’t a dot on any map, not a way you were brought up, not a way you styled your hair, not a pair of boots you slipped into. Anyone can buy the trappings and put it on like a—
I was reminded of the guy on the bus, asking about my costume. And now Marisa suggesting the word country didn’t belong in my mouth. Telling me I had to talk some certain way, couldn’t name myself, couldn’t make myself anything I wanted.
Some might put it on and get it wrong, and maybe I’m one of them, to think I am country even though I’d lived in the city my entire life. And not the right city. Chicago is no Nashville, you’re thinking. No Austin.
But country wasn’t a place. It wasn’t one kind of music, either, or one kind of singer. Country was that gong—loud, hollow, ringing on and on unanswered.
If you know what I mean, you never have to ask. Am I allowed? Am I invited? If your soul reverbs with loneliness when you hear a fiddle singing sweet, even in a crowded room and with someone on your arm, no matter how you’re living, then, cowboy, you’re country enough.
I’d barely had a minute to myself in the stall when the ladies’ room door swung open again.
I listened for Marisa to start barking whatever she’d come to say now that I was trapped, or for Rooster to ask if I was okay or Lourey to wonder how long five minutes could possibly be, but it was only a couple of customers, laughing.
I turned my other hot cheek to a new patch of tile.
“Isn’t it ridiculous?” one of the women said. “You go. I just need to fix my face.”
The other stall door shut and latched. “You’ve seen them play before?” the other woman said from inside.
“Couple of times with Steve.”
“Steve,” the other said. “Why keep coming to shows if you don’t like the band?”
I lifted my face off the wall.
“Because it’s a hoot,” the woman at the sink said. “All that country girl crap. The people-watching, alone. Now that I’m not with Steve anymore, I don’t have to watch him drool over the slutty singer.”
“Is she slutty?”
“I don’t know what she is,” the one at the mirror said. “Doll Divine. Blow-up doll, more like.”
I was strangely flattered anyone would think I had the rack for it.
I stared at the placard on the back of the stall door, where a poster sleeve had long ago been covered with graffiti, stickers for bands who would never play here.
Someone had recently added a unicorn sticker to the corner, and she was pristine and pleased with herself.
“Is she out there?” said the one in the stall. “Which one is she?”
“Behind the bar, earlier. Brunette, sequins,” said the other. “Going for a retro pin-up thing?”
“Oh, I saw her,” said the one in the stall. “That was Steve’s type?”
“Yeah, he’d get a hard-on for that trailer trash and then invite me back, like, no thank you.”
I flushed the toilet with my boot and walked out. The woman at the mirror, bless her heart, had a face like a fist, but had rolled her bangs for the occasion of hating my band. Her mascara hand hardly faltered at the sight of me.
“Too bad about you and Steve,” I said, running my hands through the water at the next sink. I checked my lipstick. Perfect. “You know, at one point, I would have loved to live in a trailer. You ladies enjoy the show. Or … don’t.”
Back onstage and fired up, I shopped through the set list and moved a few things around while the girls shot looks behind my back.
I was being a hothead, but I didn’t care.
At the mic, eight o’clock on the dot, I thanked everyone for coming out.
Marisa was still in the corner booth and the women from the bathroom were carrying drinks from the bar to a far table, the easier to pretend they weren’t listening.
I’d make them listen. I’d make every one of them listen to me.
I put on my brightest twinkle, my sweetest y’all, swallowed the hint of anxiety that always threatened at the opening chords, and dedicated the first song to Steve. We came out cooking.