Page 42 of A Song for Another Woman

"That's my girl.”

I shut my eyes. I'm thirty-two years old. I'm sleeping in my sister's guest bedroom. My marriage is a public spectacle. My last name still feels like a house key to a place I can’t go back to. But Pop is holding me in a dusty radio studio after midnight, and my voice is still warm from being used, and something in me that I thought had gone quiet is wide awake.

The road home is empty enough that the traffic light on Main switches for no one. I drive Daddy’s old truck with the windows cracked, even though the air is cold. My hands smell faintly like metal from the mic stand and cheap soap from the station bathroom. My throat aches. My cheeks hurt from smiling in places I didn’t expect to.

Alive isn't the same as happy. I know that. But it's close enough tonight to scare me.

June has texted eleven times, each message more emotional and bossy than the last. Pop has already asked if I’ll come back tomorrow. The station’s voicemail filled twice. Somewhere in the hills, people I've never met are going to sleep with my voice fading out of their kitchens and truck cabs and bedrooms.

Mine.

The word sits beside me in the cab, bright and unfamiliar.

Mine.

I make it as far as the curve past the closed bait shop before my stomach turns. Hard.

One second I'm breathing cold air and thinking about Different Earl’s lamp in the window. The next, I'm yanking the truck onto the shoulder, gravel snapping under the tires, one hand clamped over my mouth.

I barely get the door open. The nausea folds me over so sharply my eyes water. Nothing much comes up, just bitter spit and the coffee I drank because my hands needed something to do before the show. My body shakes with it anyway, elbows locked, hair falling around my face.

For a few seconds, I stay there with one boot on the pavement and one still in the truck, breathing through the aftermath. The night is very quiet.

“It’s nerves,” I say out loud. My voice sounds thin in the dark.

Of course it’s nerves. Nerves, coffee, no dinner, two hours of sleep, and the small matter of my whole life having been set on fire in public. A body is allowed to object.

I wipe my mouth with a napkin from the glove box and sit back behind the wheel. My hands rest on my stomach without permission. I move them fast.

“No,” I whisper, though I don’t know what I’m refusing.

I start the truck again. The headlights catch the road ahead, pale and narrow, leading me back toward June’s house, toward tomorrow’s show, toward whatever I'm becoming now that no one gets to use me as proof of somebody else’s story.

I pull onto the road slowly.

“It’s just heartbreak,” I tell myself.

The lie rides home with me in the passenger seat.

Chapter Ten

EMMY

By the end of the second week, Pop has stopped answering the phone like a normal person. He answers it like a man trying not to sound excited because excitement might spook the blessing.

“WHLR,” he says, standing in the doorway of the studio with the cord stretched across his chest. “No, ma’am, she ain’t available right now. She’s sleeping because she has common sense, unlike the rest of us.”

I lift my head from the desk. Pop covers the receiver with one hand. “You sleeping?”

“My eyes are closed.”

“That’s halfway there.”

“It’s noon.”

“You went off air at two.”

“And then you made me sit in your office for forty-five minutes while you read numbers at me.”