"Good. Real good." I was repeating myself. I always repeated myself with her when I was trying not to say too much. "People seemed to like it. I made ninety-three dollars."
"Ninety-three dollars." She said it the way you'd say a miracle. Which, to her, it probably was. To her, ninety-three dollars was a week's worth of groceries stretched careful, or the electric bill in February when the heat ran long. To her, ninety-three dollars from singing was the kind of thing that happened to people on television. "Rebecca, that's just wonderful."
"It's a start," I said.
"It's more than a start. You always undersell yourself, baby. Always have." She paused, and I heard the familiar sound of her coffee cup against the kitchen table, the one with the wobbly leg Daddy had been meaning to fix for years. "Your daddy will want to hear about this. He's out in the yard right now, but I'll tell him when he comes in."
I smiled at the water stain. "Tell him I said hey."
"I will." Another pause. The comfortable kind, the kind that meant she was settling in, getting ready to stay awhile. "Clayton called the other day."
There it was.
She didn't mean anything by it. She never did. She mentioned Clayton the way she mentioned the weather—as information, as fact, as a thing that existed in the world and therefore deserved acknowledgment. She had no idea what his voice did to the inside of my chest, the way it rearranged things.
"Yeah?" I kept my voice even. "How's he doing?"
"Oh, you know Clayton. He's got a new thing." She laughed, soft and fond. She was always soft and fond about Clayton. He was her baby boy, the one who'd needed her most and longest, and she'd poured herself into him the way mothers poured themselves into the child who asked for it most loudly. "He's talking about starting a landscaping business. Got himself some brochures printed up."
"That's good," I said.
"He asked about you."
I waited.
"Said to tell you hey." She paused. "Said he heard you were down in Charleston singing for tourists."
Singing for tourists. I felt it land the way I always felt Clayton's words land—quiet, precise, in exactly the soft place he'd always known to aim for. He probably hadn't even meant it that way. That was almost the worst part. He didn't have to mean it for it to work.
I was quiet long enough that my mama said, "Rebecca?"
"I'm here." I smoothed my voice out. "Yeah, tell him hey back."
We talked for another twenty minutes—about my younger sisters, about the church roof that needed repairing, about a woman down the road who'd had a baby early and was doing fine now, thank God. My mama's world was Caton's Chapel, wholly and completely, and she reported on it with the thoroughness of a woman who understood that the small details of a small place were the whole world to the people inside it.
I loved her for it. I ached over it. Both things at once, the way it always was.
When we hung up, I lay still for a moment with the phone on my chest.
Singing for tourists.
The ceiling stain looked less like Tennessee now. I turned onto my side and looked at the wall instead.
By mid-morning, the apartment had come alive around me.
I heard Geoff before I saw him—the rhythm of his movements in the kitchen, efficient and unhurried, the sounds of a man who'd grown up in a place where kitchens had more than four feet of counter space. I'd noticed that about him early. He cooked the way people cooked when they'd been taught how, when someone had stood beside them and shown them the order of things. He didn't fumble. He didn't approximate. He just—knew.
I showered and dressed and told myself I wasn't arranging my exit from my own bedroom around his schedule, and then I did it, anyway, waiting until I heard him move toward the living room before I opened my door.
He was on the sofa with a book and a cup of coffee, legs stretched out, entirely at ease. He looked up when I came in. He had the kind of eyes that registered things quickly—I'd noticed that, too. Quick eyes in a calm face.
"Morning," he said.
"Morning." I moved toward the kitchen, keeping my path simple and direct. The refrigerator. The coffee maker. The cabinet where I kept my mug on the second shelf because the first shelf was where Geoff kept his, and I'd relocated mine without making a decision about it, the way you relocated yourself around people who occupied space with more certainty than you did.
"There's still coffee," he said. "I made a full pot."
"Thank you." I poured a cup and leaned against the counter and tried to look like a person who leaned against counters.
