Page 67 of The Maverick
I needed to make a girl feel special tonight.
And before I did that, I needed to call in a favor at Dominion Hall.
19
REBECCA
I’d woken up with a song already in my head.
That was how it worked sometimes—not often, not reliably, but occasionally the brain did its work while the rest of you was doing something else. I'd learned not to question it when it happened. I'd learned to get to the guitar before the thing dissolved.
I was across the room and had the Gibson out of the case.
The chord progression came first. Something in D, open and a little aching, the kind of chord that wanted to go somewhere and wasn't sure it deserved to. I played it through twice, found the turnaround, played it again. Then the first line arrived, the way first lines arrived—fully formed, as if it had been waiting just offstage for someone to open the door.
You came in off a road I didn't know was there.
I stopped.
I played the chord again and sang it back to myself, quiet, in the morning with my hair still loose and Tommy's absence still warm in the room around me. It was right. It was the right line.It had the thing a first line needed, which was a door—something that opened into a world and invited you through.
I wrote for an hour.
Not all of it was good. Most of it wasn't, which was the nature of it—you wrote through the bad to get to the good, the way you walked through brush to get to the clearing. But the bones of it were there by the time I had to put the guitar down and get ready for work. A verse and a chorus and the ghost of a bridge I'd find later. A song about a man who arrived without warning and rearranged you before you'd thought to ask his intentions.
I didn't write his name in it. I never wrote names. But it was his, the way the best songs were always somebody's—specific enough to be true, open enough to be anyone's.
I put the guitar away carefully and sang the chorus back to myself until I had it memorized, which was how I kept things before I could record them. Commit it to the body. Let the throat learn it. The throat didn't forget the way the brain did.
I ate another piece of toast with the last of my mama's raspberry jam, which I rationed the way I rationed everything good—slowly, with attention, making it last.
I thought about Tommy eating it in my bed.
I smiled at the toast.
Luis was at the host stand when I came in through the back, which was unusual. Luis was almost always at the bar or in the office at this hour, not the host stand. He had the look of a man who'd been waiting for a specific person and was pleased to see them arrive.
"There's something for you," he said.
He said it the way you saidsomething for youwhen the something was worth saying it about. I followed his eyes to the server station.
The flowers were in a glass vase someone had found from somewhere—Luis's office, probably, the kind of vase that livedon a shelf for exactly this kind of occasion. They were cream colored, mostly, with a blush of pink threaded through them, and a single long stem of something green with small yellow buds laid against the rest like it had been placed there with an opinion. The ribbon holding the stems together was somewhere between casual and careful, the kind of tied thing that had been done by someone who'd thought about it.
No card.
I stood there and looked at them for a long moment.
"A man brought them this morning," Luis said, from behind me. "Tall. Texas accent. Said to make sure you got them before your shift."
I didn't say anything.
"No card," Luis said.
"I know," I said.
No card was its own kind of card. No card wasyou know who sent theseand the confidence of that—the assumption that I would know, that there was no ambiguity to clear up between us—landed somewhere low and warm and stayed there.
I touched one of the cream petals with one finger. It was soft in the way flowers were soft when they were fresh, when the whole short life of them was still ahead.
