Page 101 of Wreckage and Rain

"You can launch it there and then also do Knoxville. The two aren't mutually exclusive."

"Knoxville doesn't need me. They have plenty of authors. They have Dolly."

"They have Dolly?"

"Dolly is from East Tennessee. Same area code emotionally."

Colt picks up his bourbon. Doesn't contribute. He is watching Summer's profile with a face that suggests he could listen to her argue with Autumn about regional book-tour logistics for the rest of his natural life and consider it a fair trade for whatever he did to deserve it.

I pour drinks at the bar. The Saturday crowd is two-deep. Bex is between numbers, in the wings, drinking water and stretching her hamstrings. Marisol is in the dressing room with Lucia, who has been on a sugar high since four o'clock and is currently, by Marisol's report, attempting to braid the curtains.

I don't interrupt the booth. The three of them are deep in a book-tour debate I have heard before in different forms. Summer is arguing with everything, Autumn is cataloguing it in the notebook, Colt is watching both of them like he is the luckiest man in any room he happens to be in. He is being absorbed. He doesn't push. He waits for an opening. When one opens, he takes it. Autumn has stopped looking up to squint at him; she hands him the salt now. He hands her napkins back.

Across the bar, Dominic Vargas pushes through the door looking, as he has all month, like a man who has misplaced his own face. He scans the room. Finds Marisol's name on the schedule chalked behind the bar, finds out she has one more number tonight, settles. Walks over.

"Lucia gave me a new one."

"How is Marisol?"

"She let me drop Lucia at preschool on Wednesday."

"That's big."

I pour him a bourbon and he carries it to a stool at the end of the bar and watches the empty stage where she will appear in thirty minutes. He has the patience of a man who's decided to wait as long as it takes.

***

Bex's number wakes the room up. She does the floor piece, with the white feather fan that she chases around the stage like a thought she is trying not to lose. The house light comes up between sets and the crowd buzzes and Summer slides out of the booth and crosses to the bar.

"Pour me one."

"You are on number two."

"Pour me a third one anyway. Autumn is being insufferable."

"About Knoxville."

"About everything. She found a quote in my acknowledgments and has informed me it is, quote, too sincere."

"Is it too sincere?"

"I thanked two men in it. She thinks that is fifty percent more men than the acknowledgments needed."

"Mm."

I don't look at her when I say it. I pour the bourbon. Slide it across, and lock eyes with Autumn from across the room for a moment.

"It isn't weird," she says. "Tell me it isn't weird."

"It isn't weird."

"I am asking because if it is weird, I will rewrite it."

"It isn't weird, Summer. It's true. You don't flinch from true. Don't start now."

She drinks. Her hair is down tonight. She is half-laughing already at something Autumn is in the middle of yelling across the bar, and she turns to deliver the line back, and Colt, from the booth, is watching her with the small tired smile of a man who is finally getting eight hours of sleep again.

I come out from behind the bar. I walk her back. She leans her shoulder against my arm for half a step. I don't comment on it. Neither does she.