The voice was holding back. I heard it in the second verse. It was like watching a horse that knew it could run pulling itself a quarter step off the bit because it had been told once that running was rude.
She had something. She wasn't using it.
I knew that look. I'd seen it more times than I'd liked—talented people carrying a hand against their own throat. The kind of restraint that didn't come from training. The kind that came from somebody, somewhere, telling them once that being too much was the worst thing they could be.
I'd never had that problem with most things.
The guitar was the exception.
The guitar was the one thing in my life I didn't take into rooms.
That was Mama's. That was mine and Mama's. Nobody else's. Not my brothers. Not the women I'd slept with. Not the men I'd served with. None of them had ever heard me play.
The most exposure my guitar got to other human beings was the occasional songwriter's open mic in a city I was passing through and didn't intend to come back to, where I'd sign up under a name that wasn't mine and play three songs and disappear before anybody could buy me a drink. Or the rarer thing—when I walked into a small bar on a weekday and the guy who was supposed to play didn't, and the owner looked stricken, and I'd sayI can fill in if you need it. I never took the money. I didn't need the money. I needed the playing. There was a difference, and I knew it.
The reason wasn't complicated.
The reason was my mother, sitting at a kitchen table, humming something with no words while she rolled out a pie crust.
I carried the guitar strings in my pocket because I couldn't always carry the guitar. They were a way of keeping her with me. A practical relic of the only person in my life who'd ever known the part of me I didn't show.
They were also useful in a pinch. A length of high-tension wire wrapped in nylon was a lot of things in a lot of situations, including the bad ones. I'd wrapped one around a man's neck in a basement in Dushanbe once and watched his eyes go where eyes went. Garrote. Old-school. The Godfather had nothing on me. I was a sentimental man with a practical streak.
But mostly, I carried them because of her.
Because I might find a guitar somewhere and need a string. Because the world was big and music was bigger, and a man who couldn't play when the chance came was a man who'd let his mother down.
That was the math.
The G string went on the girl's guitar in the middle of a chord.
I heard it before she did—the sharp pop of high tension giving up, and then the chord collapsing under her hand. She stopped playing. The room noticed, the way rooms noticed uncomfortable things, and a kind of soft attention turned toward her that wasn't kind enough to help and wasn't unkind enough to leave.
She kept her face neutral.Sorry about that. Give me just a minute.Polite. Performing the recovery the way she'd been trained to perform recovery—at a job, I thought, at a job exactly like this one.
I watched her go for her case. Watched her find what she was looking for and not find what she needed.
I watched her color change.
A man at a table near her left her some lip about it. The kind of man who started in on his third glass of wine before his food showed up. I didn't catch all of it. I caught enough.
I was already moving.
I crossed the room. I didn't think about it much. There was a moment when she looked up and our eyes met, and my brain registered three things in fast order: she was younger than I'd thought from across the room, she had eyes that didn't entirely match her face yet because the face was still learning what to do with them, and she was very pretty in a way that was not designed to be pretty, which was the only kind that ever got me.
"What gauge?"
"What?"
"Your G string. What gauge do you run?"
"Thirteen. Medium."
I had the packet out of my pocket before she'd finished the word. Held it out. She blinked at it. I told herguitarist, simple, true. I let it sit.
I crouched down on the carpet in front of her stool—one knee down, the way you went down to a child's eye level when the child had something to say. Held my hand out for the Gibson.
She looked at me.
