“Anna.” He put the cat food under the sink. “She’s my housekeeper. She’ll come by when I’m not here and check in on the cats.”
We went upstairs to drop the bag with my clothes in a bedroom. And then I followed him down the narrow steps to his basement. There, he had divided the room into two purposes. On one side, he’d lined his walls with musical equipment. The other side looked like a personal gym. A treadmill faced a flat-screen TV, and a huge weight machine ate up a chunk of real estate.
I raised an eyebrow. “Amplifiers?”
He sat down on a small amplifier, laughing. “It’s plausible. I have nightmares about these things.”
A notebook lay open next to the treadmill, and I thumbed through it. He had a routine, regular in regimen, irregular in execution. “You sure skip a lot of days.”
“I travel a lot.”
He did. I flipped back. Page after page showed blanks. “When do you travel next?”
“Tomorrow.”
My eyes shot up at him. “What?”
He shrugged. “Just going up to Connecticut. You wanna come?”
“You’re asking me to go to Connecticut tomorrow?” I put my hand on my hip. “You know I have a job, right?”
“No worries. I’ll be home Saturday. You’ll barely miss me.”
He pulled up a guitar and started picking at it. I found a stool and leaned against it to watch. His fingers moved smoothly between chords, totally professional. He kept his eyes on me. He wasn’t really playing, just doodling.
I struck a teasing tone. “Are you gonna write me that song now?”
He changed chords and began playing a song that sounded almost familiar. Then he sang. “Josie came up from Georgia. She was looking for a soul to steal.”
I squealed. “No no no!”
He stopped playing. “I’d love to say I wrote you a song in my head over the last hour. Eden could do it, but if I’m going to write you a proper song, I’ll need a little more time. I could play you something else. I won’t put you on the spot for a request.” His smile took the barb out of the jab.
“I want to hear something. I really loved hearing you sing with Eden last week.”
He started into a quiet song. I tried to imagine what it would be like to sit in a club like the one Eden had performed at while he sat onstage playing songs like this. It was so different from the music his band had performed. Would he stage dive at the end?
While he played, a scraggly black-and-white cat peered out from behind the amplifier. Its eyes were milky, and I recalled Micah mentioning that Felix was blind. He’d failed to mention the cat’s ear was half missing. The little guy was so beat up, it appeared to have survived a tragic combine accident. Whatever possessed Micah to take that pathetic thing into his house was beyond me, but it emerged from hiding and began to rub its head against Micah’s ankles while he played, apparently a fan of the music. Or a fan of Micah.
The whole scene was utterly incongruous. At the concert on Tuesday, Micah had been larger than life on a huge stage, commanding adulation from a thousand screaming fans. Here in his small spare basement with a cat making love to his feet, he’d disappeared into himself. But his stillness couldn’t disguise the power he held in his fingertips. He overwhelmed the acoustic guitar. He overwhelmed me.
When he stopped playing, my voice trembled a little as I said, “Wow.”
“Yeah?” He grinned and set the guitar down.
“Yeah. You can write a song about me.” I bit my lip. “If you want.”
He slipped onto the floor with his back against the wall. When I started to sit down in front of him, he reached out his hand and pulled me next to him. I leaned against his shoulder.
He said, “I’ve never written a song about a real girl.”
“You write about blow-up dolls?”
He snorted. “I write about fictional girls. There are a ton of great, sad stories in old country songs. Tragic love songs. That’s my go-to inspiration.”
“I feel like I should be writing all this down.”
His chest rose and fell as he chuckled. “You want to interview me?”
