Page 21 of The Maverick
"The people at The Carolinian know me as a waitress."
"They know you as someone who works hard and shows up on time, which is more than I can say for my guitarist, apparently." He paused. "A hundred and fifty dollars. Cash."
I looked at the ceiling.
A hundred and fifty dollars cash would close the gap. Not all the way, but close enough that I could breathe without the stone in my chest pressing so hard.
"Okay," I said. "Okay, I'll do it."
I almost talked myself out of it three times on the walk over.
The first time was at the end of my street, when I thought about walking into The Carolinian through the employee entrance with a guitar case on my back instead of my work apron in my bag, and the look on everyone's face when they realized what was happening.
The second time was when I stopped on the sidewalk outside and watched the lunch setup through the window—the white tablecloths going down, the candles being lit, the whole careful machinery of service that I understood and belonged to—and thought about standing in front of it instead of inside it.
The third time was when I actually pushed through the door.
Priya saw me first. Her eyes went to the guitar case and back to my face and she smiled the smile of a woman who had made something happen and was pleased about it. "Oh good," she said. "You're going to be great."
"Don't," I said.
"You are."
"Priya, I swear to God?—"
"There's a little platform set up near the window. Luis put a stool out. You want water?"
I wanted to leave. I wanted to go back to my apartment and sit on my bed with my guitar in my lap and play for nobody, the way I did when it felt safe. I wanted the music to be mine andnot a performance, not something I had to deliver to people who knew me as the girl who refilled their water glasses.
But I also wanted the hundred and fifty dollars.
I set my case down by the platform and opened it and lifted the Gibson out and the familiar weight of it in my hands did what it always did—settled something. Like picking up a tool you knew how to use. Like the guitar didn't care who was watching. It just wanted to be played.
I tuned quietly, quickly, back to the room the way I always started. A couple of the servers drifted past. One of the kitchen guys I didn't know well leaned out to look and then went back to whatever he was doing. Nobody made a thing of it.
I exhaled.
Okay.
Okay. I could do this.
The lunch crowd came in the way lunch crowds did—gradual at first, then all at once, the tables filling up with the Charleston mix of business people and tourists and couples who'd walked off the historic district streets and followed the menu board in. I started soft, background stuff, filling the room without demanding it. I played the way I played at The Piazza—present but unobtrusive, a current running underneath the conversation rather than over it.
It was fine. It was actually fine.
After the first twenty minutes, the self-consciousness started to lift, the way it always did once the music took over from the nerves. My hands knew what to do. My voice knew what to do. The room was just a room.
I was halfway through an original—one of the gentler ones—when I felt the string go.
The G string snapped with that bright crack that every guitarist knew and dreaded, the sound of a small catastrophe arriving without warning. The note died wrong. I felt it under myfingers before I heard it—the sudden absence of resistance, the way the chord collapsed.
I stopped playing.
The room noticed. Not all of it, but enough. A few heads turned.
I kept my face neutral. Smiled, small and controlled, the way I'd learned to smile through things. "Sorry about that," I said into the space. "Give me just a minute."
I set the Gibson across my knee and reached for my bag. I kept spare strings. Of course, I kept spare strings—I wasn't an amateur, I'd been playing long enough to know that strings broke at the worst possible moments, which was all moments. I kept a full set in the front pocket of my case.
