Page 125 of The Maverick
Elaine Dane was in the chair by the window.
She was smaller than I'd imagined—Tommy's descriptions had made her enormous in my head, the way the people who shaped you were always enormous in your head. The woman in the chair was fine-boned and white-haired and had the quality of stillness that came to people when the world had quieted around them in ways they hadn't asked for.
She looked up when we came in.
Her eyes found Tommy first.
Something moved across her face—a slow, warm illumination, the way a lamp came on in a room that had been dim. Not full brightness. But light.
"Tommy," she said. His name in her mouth was the same two syllables but different in quality than any other voice that said it. It was the voice that had made him.
"Hey, Mama." He crossed the room and bent down and kissed her forehead and took both her hands in his. "I brought someone."
Her eyes moved to me.
I stood in the doorway with my guitar case at my side and her son's whole life behind me and I said, "Hi, Mrs. Dane. I'm Rebecca."
She looked at me for a long moment.
"Rebecca," she said, trying it out.
"Yes, ma'am."
"Are you Tommy's girl?"
I looked at Tommy.
"Yes, ma'am," I said. "I am."
Something settled in her face. A satisfied settling, like a thing that had been waiting in the right place for something to arrive.
"Good," she said.
The guitars had been Tommy's idea, and I had not understood it until we were in the room and Deb had quietly pulled the door mostly closed and it was the three of us and the afternoon light coming through the west window, and Tommy had unlatched his case.
"Mama used to play," he said to me, low. "She can't anymore. But she remembers music." He paused. "Better than she remembers most things."
He lifted the Martin out.
He sat down on the edge of the bed facing her chair, the way he'd sat on the floor of my apartment that first night—easy, natural, like a man returning to something. He ran his thumb across the strings once, checking the tuning, the same gesture I made with my own hands on my own guitar, and I felt something move through me at the sight of it.
I got my Gibson out and sat in the other chair.
"What does she like?" I said quietly.
He smiled. "Old stuff. Country, mostly. She had a record player and a stack of albums when I was growing up. Dolly was in the stack."
I looked at him.
"Of course, she was," I said.
He laughed—the surprised, real laugh.
He looked at his mother.
"Mama," he said. "We're going to play you something. Okay?"
She had drifted a little, the way Deb had warned us she sometimes drifted between moments of clarity—her eyes soft and unfocused, somewhere else. But at the sound of his voice she came back, partial, enough.
