Page 31 of A Song for Another Woman

A teenage boy standing at the mouth of the chip aisle looks up, sees me, and nudges the girl next to him. The girl's eyes widen with the thrill of recognition before she lifts her phone.

I turn away as I quickly swipe my card, then grab the aspirin, the clerk none the wiser of the drama playing out before him.

"Everything okay?" June asks when I slide back into the passenger seat.

I smile, though I know it likely looks a bit maniacal. "Peachy. You?"

"Oh, boy," she says, then cranks the car. "Trial by fire? Want me to beat someone up?"

"Not just yet."

At the red light, Mrs. Hawley, the secretary at the only Methodist church in town, crosses in front of us with a grocery bag on her arm. She stops mid-step when she sees me. For oneterrible second, I brace. Then her face changes. Not pity. Not gossip. Recognition.

She lifts one hand to her heart and mouths,Emmy. Just Emmy.

My name crosses the windshield without cameras, without captions, and without somebody attaching Cade’s last name to make me legible.

I lift my hand back. Mrs. Hawley nods once, fierce and small, and keeps walking.

The light turns green. I look out the window at Harmony Ridge waking around me: brick storefronts, old maples, the pharmacy sign with two bulbs burned out, the courthouse clock that still runs four minutes slow, and the flower boxes outside the bank. Nothing here is glamorous enough to sell to a magazine. Nothing here knows its good side.

I forgot places could be real like this.

At the Dogwood Diner, June parks behind the kitchen and brings me through the back door. The lunch rush is already building. The griddle hisses. The bell over the front door keeps chiming. Somebody is laughing too loud near the pie case. The whole place smells like bacon grease, coffee, yeast rolls, and the kind of sugar that settles in your clothes and follows you home.

I stand just inside the kitchen and nearly break because I know this room. Not because it’s stayed the same; it hasn’t. June repainted the walls a clean pale green, the old vinyl stools are new, and there’s a chalkboard menu in her handwriting with a framed dollar bill above the register from the first day she owned the place.

But the bones know me: the pass-through window, the swinging door, the corner booth where I used to do homework, and the scuffed tile near the server station where Daddy slipped once carrying a tray of biscuits and swore in front of the pastor’s wife.

June runs the diner the way she runs everything: fast, blunt, and with more heart than she wants credit for. She calls customers by name. She knows who takes decaf and who is lying to their cardiologist. She tells someone to stop blocking the register, tells someone else their mama called and they better call back, and at one point threatens to throw a biscuit at a man named Keith for asking too many questions.

I'm sitting at a corner booth, filling up sugar shakers when the door swings open, and Pop Dobbs walks in.

My pulse gives one hard kick.

Earl “Pop” Dobbs owned WHLR when I was nineteen and thought a radio booth at midnight was the center of the universe. He let me sit in during weather reports, taught me how to breathe through dead air, and once told me I had the kind of voice people trusted before they knew why.

I haven’t seen him in years.

Pop looks around, zeroes in on me, and heads over. He takes off his hat and motions toward the opposite booth seat, and I give him a nod, trying not to smile too big.

“I heard you were back in town," he says as he slides into the booth.

“Can't keep nothing from this town," I say. "If you’re here to see if I'm alive, I am.”

“Debatable.” He says it gently. “But that ain’t why I came.”

Pop turns his hat in his hands. “WHLR’s in trouble.”

I frown.

“Real trouble,” he says. “Ads are down. Tower needs work. I got syndication eating up half the day and dead air eating up the rest. Backroad Country’s barely breathing.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I am too.” He looks at me for a long moment.

My chest tightens. I know where this is going before he says it, and my body starts backing away even though I stay in the chair. “Pop.”