Page 100 of The Maverick
I replayed it.
I couldn't stop myself.
The mind did what it did in the aftermath of a bad thing—it ran the tape, and ran it again, and slowed it down in the places where the damage was worst and held it there like evidence. The light hitting my face when I walked out. The anticipatory quiet of the room, that held breath of three hundred people waiting to receive something. The sound that had come out of my mouth that was not the sound I was capable of making.
The phones coming up.
The two people at the front table turning to each other.
I crossed Meeting Street without checking for traffic and a car honked. I waved an apology I didn't feel and kept walking.
The thing was—and this was the part I couldn't stop circling—the thing was that I knew better. I'd been playing guitar since I was nine years old. I'd been singing in front of people since the community fair at sixteen, since the school talent shows before that, since the living room with my siblings watching and my daddy clapping and my mama with her hand pressed to her mouth because something in her recognized something in me. I knew how to perform. I had presence. My choir teacher had said so. The woman at The Piazza had smiled the real smile. Three separate tables had asked Luis if I'd be back.
I knew how to do this.
I just hadn't done it tonight.
I hadn't done it in front of three hundred people with proper lighting and a real sound board and the weight of an opportunity that mattered. The reason I hadn't done it—the reason I could feel with perfect, cold clarity walking home through the Charleston dark—was that I had been standing at the microphone thinking about all the ways it could go wrong instead of the one way it could go right.
Clayton's voice.
Not even words. Just the feeling the words left behind. The residue of years ofyou think you're somethingdelivered in the flat, bored tone of a boy who'd needed to make something smaller so he could feel bigger. I'd carried it for so long I didn't notice its weight most days. It had become part of my center of gravity.
Tonight, it had walked onstage with me.
Tonight, it had opened its mouth instead of mine.
I thought about the morning. The suite. The fight that hadn't quite been a fight—the quiet, edged conversation about moneyand charity and the shower knob I hadn't known how to work. I'd been carrying that all day underneath the lunch shift and the phone call with Wren and the excitement of the showcase, carrying it the way I carried most things, below the surface, in the place where I put things I didn't have time to deal with, yet. And I thought, walking through the dark, that maybe I'd arrived at the Revel Room already cracked. Already hollowed out a little by the morning's reminder of exactly how far I was from the world Tommy moved through without thinking. That standing in the wing of a real venue with a real sound board and three hundred real people had just been the thing that found the crack and widened it.
Poverty did that. It didn't just take your money. It took the floor out from under your confidence in ways you didn't always see coming—ways that arrived sideways, at the worst possible moments, dressed up as stage fright or self-doubt or a voice going thin at a microphone.
You could know you were good and still feel, in the body, in the gut, like someone who hadn't earned the right to the room. Like someone who was going to be found out. Like someone who'd sold sixty-three bags of fruit for a Holiday Inn in Orlando and had no business standing on a real stage under real lights being expected to fill a real room. Like someone who hadn't gone to college, hadn't studied music formally, hadn't been to Berklee or Belmont or even a single semester of community college music theory—who had learned everything she knew from YouTube videos and a paperback chord book she'd found at a Goodwill in Sevierville and years of playing alone in small rooms for small crowds, and who was therefore, always, one moment of real scrutiny away from being exposed as someone who'd been faking the credentials she'd never had.
That was the feeling.
That was what had come out of my mouth, instead of the song.
I stopped at the corner of Queen and turned left without thinking, which was the wrong turn for the apartment, and I realized it two blocks later and didn't correct it. I just kept walking in the wrong direction, because the wrong direction was past the harbor, and I needed the water.
The Battery at night was something else.
I'd walked it once before, in the early morning, when the cold was sharp and the city was still sleeping and the seawall had felt like the edge of the world. That had been before Tommy. Before everything that had come after.
Tonight, it was dark and cold and the harbor was a flat black expanse with the bridge lights reflected in it and a container ship moving slow and lit in the distance. I walked to the seawall and put both hands on the top of it and looked out at the water and breathed.
The wind came off the harbor cold, the kind that found the gaps in your coat and reminded you that January was serious about itself.
I stood there.
I thought about the first time I'd stood here, and what I'd felt—that rare sensation of being in the right place at the right time in my own life. I tried to find it now and couldn't, which was its own information.
I thought about my mama.
I thought about calling her. It was late enough that she'd be in bed, but she kept her phone on the nightstand and she answered when I called, no matter what time it was. She would pick up on the second ring and sayhi babyin the voice that meant she'd been half-expecting the call, because mothers like mine had a receptiveness to the frequency their children broadcast when something had gone wrong.
But I didn't want to hearof course they did, honeytonight. I didn't want the reflexive comfort that couldn't distinguish between a good night and a bad one, that applied the same warmth to both because the warmth was the point. I loved my mama for it. Tonight, I needed something different.
I thought about Tommy.
