Page 94 of The Maverick
Three dots appeared almost immediately.
That's my girl. You're going to be incredible.
I stared atthat's my girlfor a longer moment than was probably useful.
Then:Do you need me there?
I thought about it. Honestly, the way he'd taught me to think about things.
Not tonight,I typed back. I need to do this one alone first.
A pause.
Understood. Call me after.
I put the phone in my pocket and went back inside to finish the lunch shift with three hundred people waiting for me on the other side of it.
The Revel Room was on upper King Street, above a furniture shop, up a flight of stairs that opened into a long, low-ceilinged space with exposed brick and a real stage at the far end and a sound board on a riser in the middle of the room and a bar along the left wall already doing business when I arrived for sound check.
It smelled like a real venue. Old wood and sound equipment and the charged air of a room that had heard a lot of music.
I stood at the bottom of the stage stairs and looked out at the empty seats.
Three hundred chairs. Half of them already filled by the time the first act went on, which meant by the time I went on—third, forty minutes in—the room was going to be close to full.
I did my sound check. The sound guy was efficient and kind, the kind of professional who put performers at ease by treating the technical part like it was ordinary, which it was for him and which helped me pretend it was for me. He set my levels. He tested my monitor. He pointed me toward the green room, which was a small, cluttered room behind the stage with a folding table and a bowl of pretzels and two other performers who nodded at me the way musicians nodded at each other—abrief acknowledging nod that meantI see you, I'm nervous too, we don't have to talk about it.
I sat in the corner with my guitar across my knee and ran through the set list in my head.
I'd built it on the walk over. Six songs. Open with something familiar, something that gave the room permission to settle. Two originals in the middle. Close with the Dolly, because Dolly was always the right way to close, because Dolly knew how to send people home feeling like they'd been somewhere.
And the new song. The one I'd started yesterday. The one about a road I hadn't known was there.
I was going to play it.
I'd decided on the walk. It wasn't finished—the bridge was still a ghost—but the verse and the chorus were real and true and they were the best thing I'd written in two years and I was going to play it in front of three hundred people while it was still new because Dolly would and because the decision to want it out loud was a practice and not a destination. I needed to practice it tonight.
The second performer finished to warm applause that I could hear through the green room wall.
The stage manager knocked on the door. "Rebecca? You're up in five."
I stood.
I walked to the side of the stage.
And then I looked out at the room.
Three hundred people was a different thing from sixty.
I had known this, intellectually. I did not know it in my body until I was standing in the wing of a real stage looking at three hundred faces in a real room with real lighting and a real sound board and a real microphone stand at center stage. The waiting crowd was silent. They had just finished applauding the last act and were now looking at the stage expecting the next thing.
Expecting me.
The noise started in my chest.
Not Clayton's voice—not words, not anything that specific. Just the noise. The old, familiar noise that lived below the words, the feeling the words had left behind, the residue ofyou think you're somethingthat had worked itself into my grain so thoroughly I sometimes forgot it was there until a moment like this one reminded me.
Three hundred people.
