Page 41 of A Song for Another Woman

The next caller is sixteen, maybe seventeen, though he says he’s eighteen in a voice that has never convinced a bartender in its life. His name is Mason. He can’t sleep because his parents are fighting downstairs and he has a math test in the morning.

We talk and I play an Alan Jackson tune for him I haven't heard in too damn long.

Hour one becomes hour two.

Somewhere close to 11, the show stops feeling like a thing I'm trying not to ruin and starts feeling like a room people are entering carefully, one by one. A night nurse on break. A divorced man making pancakes because he can’t sleep in an empty house. A woman who quit her job that afternoon and is terrified she's destroyed her life. A college student homesick in Knoxville. A grandmother who wants to request a song for her grandson stationed overseas but spends five minutes telling me about his dimples first.

I know how to hold them. The knowledge comes back through my hands, through the lean of my body toward the mic, through the places where I let silence do its work. I don’t rush people. I don’t make their pain smaller so the hour fits better around it. I remember how to bring them back to ground without making them feel managed.

At 12:08, Pop slides a note under the studio door.

Phones are full.

Below it, in smaller writing:

You’re killing me, Sutton.

I look up. He's grinning.

I laugh on air by accident, soft and startled. “Sorry,” I tell the listeners.

At ten minutes to three, I lean into the microphone.

“All right, Harmony Ridge. We’re going to take one more before I send you back to the night.”

The last caller is an older man named Earl, which makes Pop throw both hands up because he thinks I can’t see him through the glass.

“Not you, Pop,” I say on air.

Caller Earl chuckles. “No, ma’am. Different Earl.”

“What can I do for you, Different Earl?”

“I just wanted to say welcome home.”

The words hit me in the center of the chest.

He clears his throat. “My wife passed last spring. I leave the radio on most nights now. House feels less empty that way. Tonight it felt like somebody turned a lamp on.”

I press my fingertips to the desk. For a second, I can’t speak.

Pop looks away, pretending to adjust something on the board.

“Different Earl,” I say finally, “that may be the nicest thing anybody’s said to me in a long time.”

“Well,” he says, “it’s true.”

I swallow. “Then I’m glad I came home.”

I play the final song for him. Not a hit. Not anything shiny. An old, warm thing with a guitar that sounds like it was recorded in a room where people were allowed to make mistakes.

When it fades, I give the station ID, thank the sponsors, and say goodnight.

“Take care of yourselves,” I tell the dark county. “And if you can’t do that, call me tomorrow and we’ll start again.”

The red light goes off.

For a moment, I just sit there. Then Pop comes through the door and folds me into a hug so fast the headphones nearly slide off my head.