Page 73 of A Song for Another Woman

I make the same rule every night. “No filming the whole set,” I say from the mic. “If you need proof you were here, take a picture of Hal. He’s prettier.”

Hal flips me off from behind the bar. The room laughs. A few phones come up anyway, then lower when Pop Dobbs turns in his stool and gives them the look of a man who controls airwaves and church gossip.

I play until my shirt sticks to my back. I play old songs, deep cuts, and covers I used to do before anyone cared about publishing splits. I play the song Emmy once said had a bridge that needed work.

She was right. I fixed it twelve years too late, but I fixed it.

The jar fills. Hal empties it into bank envelopes between sets. By the fourth night, he stops talking about closing. By the sixth, he replaces the buzzing monitor and pretends not to be proud of it.

The town changes by inches. They still don’t let me off easy. Mabel tells me my second verse dragged. A man at the feed store says, “Don’t make me regret rooting for you.”

But people come. They buy beer. They drop cash in the jar. They clap when I play the songs from before the world got big enough to hide inside.

And every night, I don’t look at the door.

That's a lie. I look.

There is a spot at the end of the bar, near the old neon sign, where Emmy used to stand. No one takes it for long. I don’t know if the town does that on purpose or if I’ve started seeing mercy where there’s only habit. Either way, it stays mostly empty.

Late on the seventh night, after the crowd thins and Cy carries his steel out to the truck, Hal counts the jar beneath the Bud Light sign. His color is better. Or maybe the lights are.

“You saved it,” he says.

I wipe down the stage with a towel because one of the college boys spilled beer near the mic stand. “They saved it.”

“You allergic to taking credit?”

“I’m trying to be.”

He ties off the bank envelope and writes the date on it. “You know who still hasn’t come.”

My hand pauses on the towel. Hal doesn’t say her name. He doesn’t need to.

“She has to know about it,” he says. “Whole town does. Pop mentioned folks call the station every night wanting to talk about you.”

I look at the empty spot at the end of the bar. The wood there is worn smooth from years of elbows, glasses, and hands waiting for other hands. “I’m not playing to make her show up,” I say.

Hal studies me. “No?”

“No.” I fold the towel once, then again. “I’m playing because this place should still be here if she ever wants it. Whether I’m in it or not.”

Outside, a truck rolls past slow on the road, headlights moving across the front windows. For one stupid second, every part of me goes still. The truck keeps going.

Hal’s voice softens. “How long you planning to keep this up?”

My fingers ache. My shoulder hurts. Tomorrow morning I’ll be back at the house, setting porch boards under the dogwood, keeping one more promise she never asked me to keep out loud.

I pick up my guitar case.

“Until she shows up,” I say, looking once more at the empty place by the bar. “Or until she tells me to stop.”

Chapter Eighteen

EMMY

At two-forty in the morning, Melody Hunter is crying on a morning show couch in Los Angeles. I know this because I'm sitting alone in the WHLR booth with my headphones pushed down around my neck, watching the clip on mute while the old hymn block plays itself out through the board.

Her face is everywhere now. Not the way it used to be. Not golden under stage lights, not barefoot in a studio with Cade laughing six feet away, and not tilting her head in interviews while someone asked where all that fire came from. Now it's close-ups, freeze-frames, and slow-motion edits of her smile disappearing when a host says, “A lot of people feel you helped sell a story that hurt another woman.”