Page 15 of The Maverick
He went back to his book. The cover was something with a long title I couldn't read from here, and I didn't ask. I'd learned that not asking Geoff about his books was self-preservation.
The last time I'd asked, he'd talked for twenty minutes about something called post-colonial theory and I'd nodded in what I hoped were the right places and felt the shame of not knowing whether I was following or not, the kind of shame that came from not being able to tell the difference between genuinely not understanding and simply not having been given the vocabulary yet.
It was probably the second thing. That almost made it worse.
I drank my coffee by the window. Outside, a couple was walking a dog on the sidewalk below, the live oak across the street going silver in the winter light. I thought about what my mama had said. About Clayton.
Singing for tourists.
The thing was, he wasn't wrong, technically. That was what I was doing. I was in a city I'd chosen partly because it was warm and partly because it was somewhere new and partly because the tip money was good, and I was playing my guitar in the background of other people's evenings while they drank wine and talked about things I didn't understand, and at the end of the night I counted my cash in the parking lot and walked home alone.
Was that different from singing for tourists in Gatlinburg? Was the distance I'd put between myself and Caton's Chapel meaningful, or was it just geography?
I didn't know. Honestly, I didn't know, and the not knowing sat in my chest alongside the rent money and everything else I'd learned to breathe around.
"You okay?"
I looked up. Geoff was watching me over the top of his book—not intrusively, just noticing. He had a way of noticing things without making you feel surveilled by it. It was different from being watched. I didn't know how to explain the difference, only that there was one.
"Fine," I said. "Just thinking."
"How'd your gig go? The wine bar, right?"
He'd remembered. I hadn't told him directly—I must have mentioned it to Tasha and he'd been in the room. I felt the small, complicated thing that happened when someone paid attention to something I'd said without me knowing they were listening.
"Good," I said. "It went good."
"Yeah?" He set the book down on his knee. "What kind of stuff do you play?"
And there it was—the question that was really a test, except he wasn't testing me, I was testing myself. Because the honest answer was Dolly Parton and Tom Petty and songs I wrote alone in apartments, and I never knew how to say that without hearing it the way Clayton would hear it.
Small. Regional. Unsophisticated.
"Country, mostly," I said. "Some folk. Some originals."
He nodded like that was a complete and sufficient answer. "Do you record?"
"Not really." I paused. "I've done some demos. Nothing serious."
Nothing serious. I'd said it before I'd decided to, the reflex of a woman who'd learned to make herself smaller before someone else did it for her. Clayton's gift to me, still giving.
"You should," Geoff said, simply. Then he picked his book back up.
I looked at him for a moment. He wasn't being kind in the way people were sometimes to make themselves feel good. He'd said it the way you stated a fact—you should, the way you'd sayyou should turn left here. Like it was obvious. Like the only question was why I hadn't done it yet.
I turned back to the window.
Below, the couple with the dog had stopped so the dog could investigate something at the base of the live oak, and the woman was laughing at whatever the dog had found, and the man was watching her laugh with the expression of someone who had decided, at some point, that watching this person was the best use of his time.
Something moved in my chest. Not sadness exactly. More like hunger—the hunger of wanting something you haven't let yourself name yet, because naming it makes not having it more real.
I finished my coffee.
I rinsed my mug and set it on the drying rack and went back to my room and picked up my guitar and sat on the edge of my bed and played the opening of a song I'd been writing for months and couldn't finish—a song about a door that wouldn't open no matter what was on the other side of it.
I played it through twice.
Then I played it a third time, slower, and let myself hear what it actually was.
