"I've got it," she said. "I can?—"
"I know you can. But you've got an audience and I've got nothing but time, and I string faster than most. Let me."
The lush at the table to my left made a noise.
I gave him exactly the look he needed. Held it half a second. Watched him decide his wine was suddenly fascinating.
She handed me the guitar.
The instrument settled in my hands and something in my chest did a thing it hadn't done in a long time. The Gibson was the cousin of my guitar. Same family. Same warmth in the back of the neck where the wood remembered being a tree. I felt theweight of it the way you felt the weight of an old friend's body when you hugged them after a long time, the rightness of it.
I went to work.
She didn't watch me, at first. Then, she did. I felt her watching the way you felt sun on the side of your face. I kept my eyes on what my hands were doing—old string off, new string up through the bridge pin, threaded through the post, four turns down clean, the trick I'd learned from my mother where you locked it under itself so it wouldn't slip. I hummed something while I worked. I always did. I couldn't help it.
I tuned the new string. Plucked. Adjusted. Plucked again.
Handed it back.
Our hands didn't quite touch.
I told her to play something good and stood up and went back to my table and sat down and picked up my coffee and tried to look like a man who was finishing his second cup at his own pace.
Then, she played.
And the voice that came out of her wasn't the voice she'd started with.
It wasn't louder. Wasn't bigger. Nothing that showy. It was justtrue. Whatever quarter step she'd been holding herself off the bit on—she'd let that go. The voice came out where it was supposed to come out from. The chord under it had teeth. The line of the melody bent the way melodies bent when somebody who knew where the bend lived was driving them.
The room went a little still.
Most of the people in it didn't know why. They just knew.
I knew why.
I'd grown up knowing why.
I sat with my hands wrapped around a coffee cup that had gone lukewarm and I listened to a stranger sing a song in aCharleston restaurant on a random winter afternoon, and I went somewhere I hadn't been in a long time.
I went to a kitchen with a yellow curtain.
I went to the smell of pie crust and the sound of the screen door slapping the frame and seven boys' worth of running feet outside, and a woman at a table humming with no words.
I went to a hallway I hadn't walked down in years. The night terrors had been bad, that one. Bad enough that I'd come out of it shaking and hadn't been able to make myself stop. I'd done what I always did—padded down the hallway to my parents' room and crawled into my mother's side of the bed, usually careful not to wake my father, but on that night, my father wasn’t there. Mama'd put her hand on my hair. I'd settled.
But that one had been bad.
And after a while, when my breathing didn't slow, she'd sat up.
"Tommy. Get the guitar from the closet."
I'd been maybe eight. Maybe nine. I'd thought I was in trouble. I'd thought the guitar was for somebody else, somehow, that I was about to be told to take it somewhere or do something with it. I'd gone to the closet on bare feet and pulled out the case and brought it back to her and she'd taken it and uncased it on her lap, the room half lit by the hall light, and started to play.
Real soft. Just for me.
She'd played until the shaking went. She'd played until the part of me that was scared didn't know which note to be scared at anymore. And somewhere in the third song she'd looked at me in the bad light and said, "You want me to teach you a chord, baby?"
I'd said yes.
