Page 40 of A Song for Another Woman

“Good. What’s keeping you up besides vegetables and poor life choices?”

Pop laughs silently behind the glass, one hand over his mouth.

Travis tells me he's driving through the dark because his wife is at home with their newborn twins and he took the extra route for the money. He says he feels guilty leaving her, then guilty wanting quiet, then guilty for being glad nobody is crying in his cab.

“That’s a lot of guilt for one truck,” I say.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Emmy,” I correct gently. “And Travis, I don’t have twins, so I’m not going to pretend I know that exhaustion. But I do know this. Two things can be true without canceling each other out. You can love your family and be grateful for ten minutes where nobody needs your body. That doesn’t make you a bad father. It makes you a person who needs sleep and maybe a gas station burrito with fewer consequences.”

He laughs again, but it breaks a little in the middle. “I needed somebody to say that,” he says.

“Then I’m glad you called.”

I dedicate the next song to Travis’s wife, who is probably awake whether she wants to be or not. It’s an old Dolly track about tenderness that never needed spectacle to be good. When it starts, Pop looks at me like he's just found a twenty-dollar bill in a winter coat.

The lines keep lighting up. Not all of them make it through. Pop screens with the grim focus of a man defusing small explosives. I catch pieces through the glass when he forgets to lower his voice.

“No, sir, we’re not asking that.”

“No, she just told you the rule.”

“Because I own the station and I said so, that’s why.”

Then he sends me Mrs. Ellen Price from Cedar Mill Road, a widow who still sets two coffee cups out every morning because her hands haven’t learned what her life already knows.

“I feel foolish,” she says.

“You’re allowed,” I tell her. “Grief makes fools of everybody. It’s one of its least charming qualities.”

She gives a watery little laugh. “My Harold liked your show,” she says. “Back when you were on before. He said you had a voice that didn’t rush a body.”

I have to look down. There are compliments that slide right off you. Then there are ones that find the place you thought had gone numb.

“I remember Harold,” I say. “He called every Thursday and pretended it was an accident.”

Mrs. Price laughs for real then. “He did.”

“He asked for Patsy Cline every time.”

“He said it was for me.”

“It was,” I say. “Even when he pretended it wasn’t.”

The studio goes quiet around us, the kind of quiet radio makes when it's working. Not dead air. Listening air.

Mrs. Price cries without apologizing. I let her. Then I ask her what Harold took in his coffee, and for two minutes she tells me about a man who drank it black but put six sugars in hers because he said life was bitter enough.

When I play Patsy, I have to wipe under both eyes carefully so I don’t get raccoon eyes.

My phone lights up again.

June

You sound like you.

I put the phone facedown before I can cry harder.