Page 126 of The Maverick
"Play," she said. Simple.
Tommy looked at me.
"You pick," he said.
I thought about it for half a second. Then I started the opening ofCoat of Many Colors. The first song I'd ever played at The Piazza. The Dolly song about poverty and dignity and a mother's love.
Tommy heard two bars and found the harmony line. He found it the way I found chord turnarounds—without having to think about it, the way musicians found each other when they were playing the same language. His harmony came in under my melody and sat there the way a second voice was supposed to sit, supporting without competing, and I felt the special thing that happened when two people played music together and meant it.
I'd played with other musicians before. Pickup bands in Key West, an open mic partner once in Gatlinburg. But this was different. This was?—
This was what he'd been giving me from the beginning, I realized. This was what the guitar string in his pocket had been about. This was what the J-45 lifted with both hands had been about. He'd been playing the same song I'd been playing since the first day in the restaurant, and we'd been working our way toward this room in Marfa, and toward this chord.
Elaine's eyes came all the way open.
The fog lifted.
It didn't lift slowly—it lifted like a curtain, sudden and complete, and the woman in the chair became the woman in the photographs on the dresser, the one with the laugh and the seven boys and the sweater she'd worn longer than any of us. Her hands came up and folded in her lap and she looked at her son and she looked at me and her face was entirely present.
We played through the verse and into the chorus.
When we got to the line about a coat of many colors, Elaine sang it.
Not loud. Not all the words—she lost some of them and hummed through the gaps—but the melody was there, true and clear, her voice thin with age but on pitch, the way certain things survived that shouldn't.
Tommy's jaw tightened. I watched it happen from across the room and I kept playing because stopping would have been the wrong thing and he knew it, too. We both kept playing.
We finished the song.
In the quiet after it, Elaine reached out and put her hand on Tommy's wrist.
She looked at him.
"You're happy," she said. It wasn't a question.
"Yeah, Mama," he said. His voice was the even one, the controlled one, but the control was costing him. "I am."
She turned to me.
"You did that," she said. "Didn't you?”
I didn't know what to say, so I said the honest thing.
"We did it together," I said.
She looked at me for a long moment. The way a woman looked at another woman when she was doing the full accounting. Then something in her face gave itself permission.
"Come here," she said.
I got up. I went to her. I crouched down in front of her chair the way Tommy had crouched on the restaurant floor for me, one knee down, and she took my face in both her hands—her hands were warm and light, the hands of a woman who had held a lot—and she looked at me.
"You love him," she said.
"Yes, ma'am," I said.
"And he loves you."
"He says so."
