Page 49 of Night Songs

I thought we could get a quick, easy divorce and not have to spend a lot on lawyers and whatnot. We were both from a place where people settled their fights amongst themselves without strangers getting in the middle.

When the divorce papers arrived at Martha’s where I was staying, I forced myself to read every page, even though it was painful. I’m no illiterate, but that kind of language is made to confuse. To trick people into agreeing to whatever the other person wants.

And I was sure as hell confused. It said that Clayton would receive 50 percent of all my music earnings.

For the rest of my life.

Apparently I’d signed some agreement that guaranteed him part ownership of any music I ever made, even if he didn’t work on it.

What right did he have tomy money? Tomy music?

That was when I called Alice. We hadn’t spoken since that night, andI made it clear it wasn’t a social call. I wanted to know what greasy son of a bitch helped her get a good divorce.

And thank God, she delivered.

Part of me thinks this was Clayton’s way of trying to hold on to me. To keep me from leaving. There was a little tenderness to it.

But he also thought he owned me. That hemademe, and that entitled him to some return on his investment. He wouldn’t accept that I kept him afloat those years. His career would have died a slow, wheezing death, and instead, my pretty little ass came around and brought it back to life.

I’ll spare you all the dry legal proceedings. What’s important is that we ended up in a very different place from where we started. He still walked away with more than he’d earned. All the publishing rights, and most of the royalties. He’d set it up from the beginning so I got a tiny fraction of each record sale and nothing else.

But I had enough to strike out on my own and not have to depend on anyone. It’s what I’d wanted all along, and I’d made it happen with just my voice.

I was my own person now, and all I had to do was figure out who that really was.

15rhea

1995

In early August that summer, Micah and I went to Martha’s for the first time. She lived across the river on the east side of Nashville, where long-haired tattooed locals walked amongst historic homes and the neon pulsed at a lower volume.

Inside Martha’s modest bungalow, musicians of different ages sprawled across couches and hunched on the floor, smoking and drinking from jelly jars. Candles burned on every surface, illuminating shelves of records lining the walls as Judee Sill’s “Down Where the Valleys Are Low” spun on the turntable.

Micah raised his eyebrows at me, clearly impressed, and I raised mine in response. I felt like we’d just entered the real Nashville, and everything up until this point had only been a performance.

Martha appeared and handed us each a jar of golden liquid. “Sparkling pear juice, if you dig. I keep a dry house.” We each took a drink, and it tasted like something a fairy might sip. Martha elbowed me gently in the ribs. “I met your father at a party like this.”

This was why I had called her. Since the Fourth, I’d ruminated on what Clayton had said about my father. I’d been so focused on Belle that I’d almost forgotten about him.

When I’d asked Hess, she’d bristled with disdain. She told me she never knew my dad, and when I asked why, she said something vague about a falling out with Belle. It’d taken a while, but lately I’d noticed that she often answered my questions about Belle with half answers.

I had the keen sense she was hiding things from me.

At the same time, I could feel her watching me. Tracking my movements. Sometimes she made passive-aggressive comments when I came home late.

When I’d introduced her to Micah, she’d been polite to the point of coldness, and the conversation had devolved into her grilling him on why he wasn’t going to college. The past year had been tough for him with his brother’s death, and his grades had slipped. He also didn’t feel ready for college—he had no idea what he wanted to study, and shouldn’t it be more deliberate than that? Especially when it was so expensive? I thought Hess would be impressed by his thoughtfulness, or at least sensitive to the fact that he clearly didn’t come from money. But this only deepened her suspicion of him.

She and I had been so close at the beginning of the summer. But now that connection had stretched and strained, and I often couldn’t wait to be out of the house, no longer under her watchful gaze.

As the weeks passed, I spent most of my time with Micah in a haze of early love. Even when we were just talking or eating or walking through the streets, being together felt historic, cosmic,cataclysmic.

Sometimes, though, when I hadn’t seen him in a day or two and he hadn’t called, I would imagine him dropping me, and the fear could be so intense I thought I was losing my mind. I still couldn’t believe someone as special as him could loveme—maybe want me, but not love me.

Martha continued, “Your father used to try out new songs at these house parties. Wasn’t much of a singer, but nobody cared because his words were so beautiful.”

I imagined the shaggy-haired Jesus-looking man I’d come to know from the scant pictures I’d found, sitting on the rug with a beat-up guitar and rasping out his latest poetry from a scribbled page.

“How did he meet my mom?”