ONE
Fallon
The first time I met Augusta Belle Branson, she was fixin’ on killin’ herself.
Said the minute I’d walked up, she was tryin’ to decide if jumpin’ off the bridge in the center—where the water was deep and the current stronger—would be a swifter end, or if she should jump near the edge, where jagged limestone slabs anchored the slow-moving current.
Certain death for sure.
I replayed the split second when the Indian summer sun burst through the orange oak leaves, a halo of warmth enveloping her.
Like an angel. Stardust sparkling straight from heaven, ploppin’ her in my path.
And then she turned, the most startling shade of liquid amber eyes breathing something real and alive, like fire, into my soul.
That same something I’d been runnin’ from—or chasin’, dependin’ on how you looked at it—just about every day since.
I settled myself on the lone wooden stool that awaited at center stage, my thoughts drawing back to the present. My head swam, but the old familiar chords floated on through the current of whiskey in my blood, and I strummed the first few notes of a song I wrote a lot of nights ago by an act of sheer muscle memory.
Old acoustic guitar resting on my knee, my first and third fingers in position on the strings, the opening chords of “Whiskey Girl” bled from my fingers.
Every chord, another dagger.
Every whispered lyric, my undoing.
I still ’didn’t know what the fuck had overtaken me the night I’d written this song in a fevered rush.
Well, the booze might have played a part, but I happened to think my best shit came out of uninhibited states.
I’d just had a fuckton of uninhibited states recently.
And the harder the liquor, the more she haunted me.
Whiskey Girl.
My poisoned lullaby.
The crowd of a few hundred erupted into a standing ovation when I ended with the final, emotion-charged words.
The irony of this song was it was the one that’d launched my career. The first single to hit radio waves and then the top spot on the Billboard charts, and brought reporters, music executives, long-lost family members I wasn’t even really sure I was related to, and too much other scum with an end game that carried dollar signs to my front doorstep.
I’d moved to Nashville a rising star and left two years later, middle finger in the air as I tossed my once-promising music career out with last night’s liquor bottles in favor of the open road.
Chasing something.
Not finding the one thing I needed.
Playing local honky-tonks for a fraction of the money I could have made.
But the truth was, the road was the only place I could find my happy.
A familiar ball of pain formed in my throat as I stood, pushing my guitar over one shoulder and bowing deeply. I couldn’t see a single face behind the glaring stage lights, but still, some part of me pretended she could be out there, that I was singing to her.
That she would hear her song and find her way back to me.
After hundreds of faceless crowds and too many bottles of Tennessee whiskey to bother counting, I still felt the pull inside me to travel to every town in America if that’s what it took to find her.
Hell, maybe she was happily married with a few kids, a dog, and a fucking minivan by now.
