Page 181 of Levi
I’ve lost people. Everybody keeps skipping over it, but it’s true. The families went. A lot of the flag-wavers went. There are radio programmers who won’t take Freddie’s calls and never will again, and some of those folks played every song I ever made, and they’re not coming back. My daddy’s out there somewhere and I know he saw it. He hasn’t called and I don’t want him to. I counted him in that number a long time ago.
But there’s another audience finding my music now. People who heard those ninety seconds and wanted more, and they don’t want the sundress songs, which is convenient, because I can’t sing them anymore. I can sing about damn near anything else as long as it’s true. I’ve written more since July than I did in the eight years before it.
And I sleep.
Nobody would understand the importance of that except maybe Dante, who watched me not do it through the worst of it. The loop isn’t gone. I don’t believe it ever fully goes. But it’s quiet most nights now, enough that I drop off in the middle of an ordinary sentence and don’t come up till morning. What finally turned the volume down wasn’t anything I ever reached for. It wasn’t the bottle and it wasn’t the guitar and it wasn’t even the open door.
It was a person. It was knowing, down in the part of my brain that has never once believed anything, that I’m not in this alone anymore.
And then one day Dante handed me a list.
Same way he did the lawyers. He didn’t diagnose me, just came home one evening with four names on a piece of paper — people who work on exactly what happened to me — and set it on the counter, and went to start supper. Said if I didn’t like those four people, he’d go find four more. Then he left it alone. Didn’t bring it up once. That paper sat on the counter for days and he walked past it every morning and never said a thing.
I finally got up my nerve and called the third name.
I’ve been going to therapy since August. Sometimes I come out of there worse than I went in, and he doesn’t ask me about it. He just slides a plate in front of me when I get back and kisses the top of my head.
She told me the first day it doesn’t get fixed. It gets smaller, and you get bigger around it, and one day you notice you’ve got room in there for other things. That’s about where I am. There’s room in there now.
We spend the first night on the floor of our new house because the bed doesn’t come till Thursday. The house is empty and it echoes. There’s a single lamp on the floor because neither of us thought about tables. There’s also a rug.
One rug, dead center in a bare front room, squared to the wall like it’s holding the territory until furniture shows up. Hand-knotted. I know it before I’m all the way through the door.
“That’s the rug I gave a bottle of tequila to.”
“It cleaned up,” Dante says, somewhere behind me with a box.
I get down on my hands and knees in the middle of an empty room and put my face to it. Take a good long sniff. Wool. Soap. A little bit of the back of his SUV.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Checking.”
“For what?”
“Tequila.” I sit back on my heels. “First night in that house I put a whole bottle into this thing. Knocked it over on my way down and never even felt it happen. You rolled it up and hauled it off before I was awake.”
He rolls his eyes. “I remember.”
“It rode around in the back of your car for a month.”
“I remember that too.”
“Whose bill did that end up on?”
He doesn’t answer, which is the answer. He sets the box down and goes back out to the SUV.
I owed somebody four figures for a hand-knotted rug and it never got collected, and now the rug lives here, in a house with my name on half of it.
We eat off paper plates sitting against the wall with our legs out. Dante’s still in his closing shirt with the sleeves shoved up. He’s got a legal pad going with a list on it, and every few minutes he adds something to it and then reads it to me.
“Window blinds,” he says.
“Why do we need blinds? We don’t need blinds. They’re a pain in the ass.”
“Levi, there is a road.”
“There’s a couple of palm trees and then a road.”
