Page 123 of The Maverick
Outside, somewhere on the lawn, a generator kicked on and steadied. Somewhere else in the house, a door closed soft, the way doors closed soft in houses where people had been told to be careful about it.
My father nodded.
Lucas nodded.
Wyatt nodded.
I nodded last.
We stood in the corridor of Dominion Hall with the news cycle building somewhere outside and a federal investigation gathering somewhere closer and a deputy director of the FBI running on the assumption that he had us off balance, and I will say, for the record, that the man was about to find out off balance was not the same thing as off our feet.
"All right," I said. "Let's talk to the others. I can’t wait to meet the rest of the family.
EPILOGUE
REBECCA
The plane was smaller than I'd imagined and larger than I'd feared.
I'd built it up in my head the way I built up anything I'd never done—into something enormous and theoretical, a concept more than a thing, the way flying had always been a concept to me. Something that happened to other people in movies and in the departure gates I'd walked past in airports I'd only been inside to pick someone up.
I'd been in the Knoxville airport twice in my life, both times to collect someone, and both times I'd stood at the arrivals area and watched people come through the door from the secure side and thought:that's where the flying people come from.
Now, I was a flying person.
Tommy had his hand on the small of my back when we boarded, which was a thing he did without deciding to when he was aware that I might need anchoring. I had not told him I needed anchoring because I was a woman from the mountains who did not admit to needing anchoring, and he knew that, which was why he did it without being asked.
The interior of the Dominion Hall jet was—I registered it the way I registered all of it now, with the slightly delayed, slightly sideways registration of a woman who was getting used to a world that kept presenting her with things she had no prior category for. Cream leather. Recessed lighting. A galley with actual food on it, not peanuts in a foil bag, but small sandwiches and cut fruit arranged on a tray. Windows that looked out at the tarmac at the private airfield outside Charleston where Dominion Hall apparently kept aircraft the way other people kept cars. Or in my world, bicycles.
"Okay?" Tommy said.
"Ask me when we're in the air," I said.
He smiled.
We were carrying guitars. Both of them—my J-45 in its case with the long scrape across the outside from the explosion on the lawn, and Tommy's guitar, which I had not seen until this morning when he'd brought it out from somewhere in the depths of Dominion Hall.
It was a Martin. Old, the way my Gibson was old, with the worn beauty of an instrument that had been played rather than displayed. He'd carried it out of his suite the way I carried mine—both hands, careful, like something he didn't let himself have often and wanted to be worthy of when he did.
I'd looked at it and looked at him.
"You never told me what kind," I said.
"You never asked."
"I thought you'd tell me."
"I was getting there," he said.
That had been this morning. Now we were on a plane to Texas and the guitars were in the overhead compartment in their cases and I was sitting in a leather seat that was wider than the bed in my apartment. The engines were doing something I couldfeel in my chest, a rising, building thing, and then the plane was moving and then it was moving faster and then?—
Then, we were in the air.
The ground fell away under my window and my hand found Tommy's armrest and gripped it. He turned his hand over underneath mine and held on without saying a word about it.
I watched Charleston get small—the harbor, the historic district, the gas lanterns invisible from this height but there, I knew they were there—and then we were in the clouds and then we were above them. The sky was an impossible blue and the clouds were white below us like a second ground, a softer one, and I thought:I've been on the wrong side of this my whole life.
"Hey," Tommy said.
