Page 23 of The Maverick
"Good thing I pack light," he said.
He crouched down in front of me—right there on the restaurant floor, easy as anything, one knee down—and held out his hand for the guitar.
Something moved through my chest that I wasn't going to examine right now.
"I've got it," I said. "I can?—"
"I know you can." He kept his hand out. Patient. "But you've got an audience and I've got nothing but time, and I string faster than most. Let me."
The man at the table to my left made a sound that might have been a comment. The handsome man with the green eyes glanced over at him—just once, just briefly—and something in that look was so quiet and so absolute that the other man picked up his wine glass and looked at it instead.
I handed over the Gibson.
He took it with both hands, the way you took something you knew the value of. He turned it and found the broken stringand went to work, and I watched his hands—which was not something I'd meant to do, but couldn't seem to stop.
They were capable hands. The hands of someone who'd done difficult things with them and still came out knowing how to be gentle.
He didn't hurry. He didn't perform the task for the room. He just did it—pulling the old string free, threading the new one through the bridge, turning the tuning peg with the practiced motion of someone who'd done this a thousand times, working up the neck. He hummed something low under his breath while he worked, barely audible, just a habit, the way people hummed without knowing they were doing it.
The room had gone soft around us. Not silent, but softer. A few people were watching. I was aware of that the way I was aware of everything when I was embarrassed, which was acutely and with my whole body.
He plucked the new string. Adjusted. Plucked again.
Then he held the guitar back out to me, and when I took it our fingers didn't quite touch but the space between them was very small and I was extremely aware of that space.
"Try that," he said.
I played the chord I'd been on when the string broke. It rang out clean and true, the new string bright against the others.
He rocked back on his heel and stood up in one easy motion.
"There you go," he said.
"Thank you," I said.
I meant to say something else—something more, something adequate to the moment—but his eyes were on me and my brain had decided not to help.
He smiled again. Smaller this time. Private, almost.
"Play something good," he said.
He went back to his table by the window. Sat down. Picked up his coffee cup like nothing had happened, like he hadn'tjust walked across a restaurant and crouched on the floor and restrung another person's guitar with string from his own pocket, like it was the most ordinary thing.
I looked down at the Gibson in my hands.
The man at the table to my left had found something very interesting to study on the wall.
I took a breath.
I played.
Not the gentle original I'd been on. Something with more backbone—a song I'd written in Key West in a bad week, one of the ones I normally kept for myself. I didn't plan it. It just came out that way, the way things came out when your hands were still buzzing from almost touching someone and the room needed to know you were still standing.
I played it through to the end.
When I looked up, he was watching me from his table by the window.
He wasn't smiling now. He was just watching, with the focused, serious expression of someone who had stopped doing anything else because this required his full attention.
