Page 51 of A Song for Another Woman

After I hang up, I sit there while traffic moves around me and the world keeps being ordinary. No one in the gas station parking lot knows I just cut a cable thick enough to hold up anempire. No one claps. No one boos. No red light blinks on. It feels right that way.

I buy coffee I barely taste and a pack of crackers because the road to Harmony Ridge still knows how to twist a stomach if a man isn’t careful. Emmy used to say that the mountain roads made tourists pray and locals impatient. The thought of her in her Daddy’s old truck, driving these roads without me, hits so hard I have to stand beside my open door for a minute.

Then I get in and keep going.

The cabin is smaller than the primary closet in the Nashville house. That should shame me. It does, but not the way I expect.

The porch sags on one end. The kitchen has yellowed linoleum, a two-burner stove, and a refrigerator that hums like it’s trying to remember the words. The living room holds a couch, a lamp, a scarred coffee table, and a radio with one silver antenna bent slightly sideways. I set my duffel on the floor.

The landlord, Mr. Hanley, hands me the keys and pretends he doesn’t recognize me for almost seven whole minutes. Then he says, “You planning on causing trouble?”

“No, sir.”

“You planning on making that girl’s life harder?”

The instinct to tell him to mind his own business comes up fierce and angry. I swallow it. “No.”

He studies me from under brows like a courtroom. “June Sutton finds out I rented to you, she’ll put too much salt in my eggs till Easter.”

“I’ll stay out of her way.”

“And Emmy’s?”

I close my hand around the key. “Especially hers.”

Mr. Hanley nods once. “Radio gets best signal if you put the antenna toward the east window.” Then he leaves.

I stand there for a long time. At eleven fifty-eight, I set the radio on the coffee table and turn the dial until static gives wayto fiddle, then a station bumper, then Pop Dobbs’s gravelly voice saying something about Rayburn Hardware.

My hands are damp. That’s ridiculous. I’ve walked onstage in front of sixty thousand people and felt calmer than this.

Then the red light in some small studio across town must come on, because Emmy’s voice fills the cabin.

“Good evening, Harmony Ridge,” she says. “This is Emmy Sutton on WHLR Backroad Country, and tonight we're telling truths, no matter how ugly, as long as we can bookend them with a country song."

A caller comes on, a woman trying not to cry about a daughter who hasn’t spoken to her in six months. Emmy listens. Really listens. She asks one question, then another. She doesn’t offer easy forgiveness like a sticker slapped over a crack.

“Missing someone doesn’t mean they’re safe for you,” she says gently. “And loving them doesn’t mean they’re ready to love you better.”

I close my eyes.

The cabin grows colder as the night deepens. I don’t move to turn up the heat. I sit on the old couch with my guitar case unopened beside me and listen to my wife teach strangers how to survive the hours.

She laughs once near one in the morning, softer than before.

That's my girl.

No. Not mine. Not anymore. Maybe not ever again.

But there. Alive. Warm. Unmistakable.

I press my palms together and rest them against my mouth, because every begging word in me wants out and none of them have earned the right.

Across town, Emmy takes another call. I stay quiet.

I listen.

Chapter Twelve