Page 30 of The Maverick
"Wait tables at the same restaurant, mostly."
"The Carolinian."
"The Carolinian." I paused. "That's actually my job. The playing today was—their regular guitarist cancelled and Luis needed somebody last minute."
"Luis Soto."
"You know him?"
"Read his name tag when I paid." He tilted his head. "So, you're a waitress who plays guitar, or a guitarist who waits tables?"
The question landed somewhere soft. I looked down at my donut.
"I don't know yet," I said honestly.
He didn't fill the silence. He just let me have it, which was unusual. Most people filled silences.
"I want to be a musician," I said. "That's the real answer. I want what Dolly has—not the fame exactly, just the—the thing where you make something and it reaches people. Where your voice means something to somebody who needed it." I stopped. "That sounds?—"
"It doesn't."
I looked up.
"It doesn't sound like anything except true," he said.
I didn't know what to do with that, so I ate the rest of my donut.
"Did you study music?" he asked. "School, or?—"
There it was.
I felt the familiar cold move through me, the reflex tightening. I kept my face where I'd learned to keep it.
"I didn't go to college," I said. Light. Easy. The prepared answer. "Went straight into working."
"Okay," he said.
That was it.Okay. Like it was the most ordinary thing, like the answer had required no courage from me and no adjustment from him. He reached for his second donut.
And then, because something about him made the truth harder to keep managed, I heard myself say, "I wanted to. Go to college. I wanted to go to the University of Tennessee and study music. But my family didn't have—" I stopped. Started again. "Nobody around me knew how to navigate the financial aid stuff. My parents never went. We didn't know about scholarships, or—my choir teacher thought I maybe could've gotten a music scholarship but by the time anybody said that out loud, it was too late to apply." I looked at the table. "So."
He was quiet.
"That's the whole story," I said. "It's not—I'm not looking for sympathy. It's just what happened."
"I know," he said.
I made myself look at him. His expression wasn't pity. It wasn't the performative empathy of someone who wanted credit for caring. It was just level and real, the face of someone who'd heard a hard thing and wasn't going to make it worse by over-handling it.
"For what it's worth," he said, "you play like someone who's been in school your whole life. Just a different school."
Something moved in my chest.
"You're from Texas," I said, because I needed to change the direction of things before my eyes did something embarrassing. "I can hear it."
He smiled. "Valentine, Texas. Born and raised."
"Is that near anything?"
