However, reality snapped me back to my actual job when someone called me over to order another round of margaritas for their table. By the time I’d made them and brought them out, Seraphina and Tyler had paid their bill and were standing, putting on coats. Serving tray in hand, I hustled over to them.
“I could do four tomorrow afternoon, if that works?” I said to Tyler.
Tyler grinned. “I usually get home from practice at five but I could do half past so I could shower first. If you don’t want a smelly teenager sitting next to you.”
I chuckled. “Five-thirty it is then.”
“Thanks so much. I’m psyched,” Tyler said.
“Yes, thank you,” Seraphina said. “You’ll let me know what I owe you for the lessons?”
“Nah. I don’t need the money,” I said. “Consider this a gesture of friendship.”
“How small town of you.” Her eyes twinkled up at me. “Thank you.”
“Just trying to fit in around here,” I said.
“Have a good rest of the night.” Seraphina nodded at Tyler. “We better get home. It’s getting late.”
“My mom doesn’t like to drive in the dark,” Tyler said.
I added that to my list of things I knew about Seraphina Sinclair.
They left together, Tyler holding the door for his mother.
I watched through the window as they headed toward the parking lot, the last of the daylight leeching from the sky. What had I just agreed to? And why did it feel so important?
The last customerleft at eleven-fifteen. I wiped down the bar, rinsed the glasses, restocked what needed restocking, and did the end-of-night inventory, all rote at this point. Before I finished, the kitchen staff departed, with the servers right behind them. I locked up and stood for a moment in the quiet parking lot, breathing in the April night. Willet Cove smelled good in the spring, with the scents of the sea, fruit tree blossoms and lilacs mixing into a perfume I’d call Coastal Springtime.
As soon as I started the car, it connected to my phone. Immediately, music came though the speakers from Spotify. Strangely enough, the first song to play was Ivy’s version of “Already Gone.” Hearing her voice made me miss her. She was my best friend in Nashville. We’d collaborated for almost two decades, coming up together in the competitive world of Nashville. She’d made it big seven years ago, with one of my songs, and had been on an upward trajectory ever since. All in all, five of the songs I wrote for her were number one hits on country radio.
On the negative side, the song brought me back to that hard time in my life. My wife had left me. I was alone in the house we’d bought together and knew with perfect clarity that the breakup of our marriage was my fault. I’d driven her away by holding on so tightly. The song had poured out of me. When it was done, I sent it to Ivy and told her to record it. She put it out as a single, and the darn thing went straight up the charts. My broken heart, revealed in a three chord song for all to hear.
I reached the gate to Wes and Margaret’s property, which sat at the end of a private road off the main coastal highway, tucked into the jagged cliffs just outside Willet Cove. Two acres ofoceanfront land that had been worth a reasonable amount when they’d bought it twenty years ago and was now worth something they would have embarrassed him to say out loud.
Wes and Margaret had built the house together, back when he was fifty and ready for a quiet life away from Nashville. By then he’d signed three acts that went platinum and managed careers that had defined a decade of country music. Margaret had grown up in California and spent thirty years following Wes through the noise and ambition of Nashville. He figured she’d given him enough. The next thirty could be spent by the sea, where she’d always wanted to be.
They were still here. Still madly in love. If dancing around the kitchen was any indication, they remained completely crazy about each other.
The house itself was a sprawling shingle-style mansion. Weathered and grand at the same time, with massive stonework and windows that soaked in panoramic views of the Pacific from every room. A wraparound deck ran the length of the ocean side, anchored by a towering chimney that made the whole place feel equal parts New England coastal and rock-and-roll retreat. Below the main house, a multi-tiered terrace dropped down toward the cliff edge, where a saltwater infinity pool had been carved into the hillside, flanked by smooth boulders and manicured hedges.
Inside, the estate was exactly what you’d expect from a man who had spent years at the intersection of serious money and serious music, opulent and eclectic in equal measure. Vintage guitars hung alongside abstract art on walls. He and Margaret had chosen bright colored fabrics and walls, with velvet drapes and leather furniture. Bookshelves stuffed with novels and biographies and music theory.
Photographs from Wes’s long career decorated a grand piano in the living room. Wes and Margaret young and squinting intothe sun on their wedding day; Wes backstage somewhere in the eighties with three country singers he’d managed; Wes and my father, side by side, guitars in hand, laughing at something just outside the frame.
Wes and Ray. Young and hungry. Gunners, Wes called them. Two men from nothing who’d arrived in Nashville at the same time with the same goal. Make good music. They did it too, albeit differently. Wes became one of the most powerful men in the industry. My father became the best session guitarist in town.
Ray Sloan had been the man every producer called first. His name appeared in the liner notes of hundreds of records, in small print on the back. He played on every important album in Nashville for twenty years. At his peak, he played three sessions a day, six days a week. He was rarely home, choosing to work rather than spend time with his family. The top session men played constantly, not because anyone forced them to but because the call list was competitive and turning down work meant someone else got the gig the next time. My father couldn’t say no to an evening session, a Saturday morning session, or a holiday session.
Subsequently, my mother left when I was ten. She’d been Elena Hunter before she married my father, which was where I got my name. She’d followed my father to Nashville from Portland, Oregon, at twenty-two, in love and certain that love would be enough. She’d made her life around a man who was perpetually absent, in a city that wasn’t hers, without the roots or the community that might have made it all bearable. Elena made countless dinners that grew cold and sat through weekends alone. When I was born she hoped the baby would change things. It didn’t. Ray loved me, yet showed up inconsistently—a weird dichotomy I couldn’t understand.
By the time I was ten she’d been a single mother for a decade while technically being married. She left a note on the kitchentable.I need to start a new life. With a man who isn’t locked in a studio twenty hours a day.Even at ten years old I knew what she meant. She’d met someone else. A man who didn’t work constantly. Unfortunately, he was also a man who had no interest in taking on a stepchild. This was confirmed later, as it all unfolded.
My mother moved to Florida with a man twenty years her senior. Carl Webb was rich as sin and equally controlling. To be with him, she had to leave my father and me. After that I heard from her once or twice a year. She always ended the call with a promise to come visit. She never did. Too many fundraising galas and lunches at the club with her new fancy friends and time on the new husband’s yacht to make time for her son in Nashville.
She was still down there, as far as I knew. Still with Carl, or someone like him. Still not calling. I’d stopped waiting for the phone to ring a long time ago. But she was with me all right. She’d given me the gifts of insecurity and abandonment issues. Those never left, even though she did.
After she disappeared, my dad shut down the way men do when they don’t know how to grieve or express their feelings. He worked more. Came home even less. For a few months, I ate a lot of cereal and waited for whatever was going to happen next. I also learned how to play guitar, alone in that apartment, listening to the records my dad had played on, memorizing licks and technique and a growing appreciation for just how talented he was.
