"Ma'am, I appreciate that. I do. But I want you to know this is genuinely difficult for me and I'm doing my best."
She laughed. He had that effect, I was noticing. The laugh-out-of-people effect. He deployed it without seeming to try, which probably meant he'd been doing it his whole life and didn't know it was a thing anymore.
We ordered—he got three, I let him talk me into two, which took approximately four seconds of effort on his part—and took the table by the window because he guided us there with a hand that didn't quite touch the small of my back, but almost. I was aware of the almost the way you were aware of lightning before it landed.
He sat across from me and broke one of his donuts in half and ate it like a man who'd been thinking about donuts for a while. I ate mine more carefully, the way I ate things in front of people I was trying to make a good impression on. Which I was doing. Which I hadn't admitted to myself yet.
"So," he said. "Where are you from?"
"East Tennessee," I said. "Little town called Caton's Chapel. It's outside Sevierville, which is outside Gatlinburg?—"
"Smoky Mountains."
"You know it?"
"Driven through. Beautiful country."
"It is," I said, and I meant it the way I always meant it, with the mix of love and restlessness that I'd never quite figured out how to separate. "It's—yeah. It's real beautiful. Touristy in the parts people know, but if you get off the main roads it's something else entirely."
"That's where you grew up? Off the main roads?"
"Pretty far off." I picked at the edge of my second donut. "My family's been in that area for generations. My daddy's people, anyway. We're mountain people. We don't move around much."
"But, you do."
I looked up. He was watching me with that direct, unhurried attention, like he had nowhere to be and nothing to do but this.
"I do," I said. "I'm the one who—yeah. I move around."
"Why?"
Nobody asked that directly. Most people askedwhere have you beenorwhere are you going, the forward and backward of it, but not the why underneath it. I took a breath.
"I wanted to see what else there was," I said. "I wanted to know if the world was as big as it felt from where I was standing."
"Is it?"
"Bigger," I said.
He smiled at that. Not the big grin—a smaller one, private and real.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"Rebecca."
"Rebecca." He said it back like he was trying it out. "That's a real name. Not a nickname."
"My mama named me after Dolly Parton."
He tilted his head. "How does that work? She doesn't look like a Rebecca."
"It's her middle name. Dolly Rebecca Parton." I smiled, the automatic smile I always got when I talked about her. "My mama's a big fan. Has been her whole life. She said if she had a daughter who might could sing, she was going to name her after Dolly, and when I came out—" I shrugged. "Here we are."
He was grinning now, the full one. "Rebecca Dolly?"
"Rebecca Lynn," I said. "Dolly's just—that's just the inspiration."
"I like it," he said. "Rebecca Lynn from the Smoky Mountains named after a country legend." He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms and looked at me with an expression I couldn't entirely read. "What do you do when you're not playing guitar at restaurants?"
