Page 27 of The Maverick
That was the night.
Not the last night I had a nightmare. But the beginning of the end of them. The beginning of the long summer of nights whenmy father was gone—and he was gone often, and he was gone for a long time more than once—where Mama would pull the guitar out and we'd play together on the bed with the door closed.Just us, baby. Just our little secret.She didn't have to tell me twice.
I'd kept the secret all my life.
I hadn't expected to have it cracked open by a girl in a Charleston restaurant with a Gibson and a voice she'd been hiding from her own self.
She finished the song.
The room clapped, real and warm. The manager—standing across the floor by the bar—gave her a small respectful nod and held up one finger.
One more.
I sat very still.
She thought about it for a second. I saw the decision move across her face. Then she put her hands back on the guitar.
She started low.
She sang about hollows. About creeks. About crickets going dark when somebody walked past them at night. She moved up into smoky cloudfall and hawks riding wind off a ridge. She built it the way you built a fire that was going to last. By the time she got to the bridge, there was something in her voice that wasn't performance anymore, something that came from a place I knew the shape of even if I'd never been in it. Echoes. A man's hands.Daddy's hugs went around me twice when I was small.
She brought it home.
The room had gone quiet enough that you could hear the espresso machine ticking down behind the bar.
When the last chord landed, the applause came up out of the tables like it had been waiting under them. A woman near the window was wiping her eye with the corner of a napkin. The kitchen guys had come out to listen and were leaning in the pass-through. Even the lush had set his wine glass down. He was clapping with both hands like he'd forgotten to be a problem.
She gave a shy thank-you. Packed up like she'd been packing up since she was twelve.
The piped music came back on, and the room rearranged itself around the absence of her voice the way a body rearranged itself around a sudden missing tooth.
I paid my check. Wrote a tip on the line that was probably more than the meal.
I was sliding my wallet back into my pocket when I felt somebody by my elbow.
She was standing there.
She'd hung the guitar case on her shoulder. Her hair had come loose a little from the playing. Her face was doing the slightly unfinished thing faces did right after a person had been somewhere bigger than the room they were standing in.
"Hey," she said. "I just—I wanted to thank you again. For the string."
"Of course."
She started to step back.
"Hey," I said.
She paused.
"If I'd known you were going to sing like that, I'd have given you a whole spare set."
She blushed.
I'd known a lot of women in a lot of cities. I'd been around enough of them to know that women who blushed were rare, and women who blushedand didn't seem to know they were doing itwere rarer still.
Something about it got me right under the rib.
Jeez.
