“Good luck.”
Bex switches to the next line and holds up three fingers.
“Hi, Liam. Longtime fan. First-time caller.”
Aren’t they all tonight?
The woman laughs at her own joke, nervous. “Okay, so. My sister is engaged to a guy who is, frankly, a nightmare. He talks down to her in front of people. He controls the money. He told her she couldn’t come to our mother’s birthday dinner because he had tickets to a game. She went to the game.”
“And she’s happy?”
“She says she is.”
“But you don’t believe her.”
“No. I don’t.”
I pull the mic closer. Half an inch. Bex taught me this. When the subject gets heavier, get closer to the mic. Drop the volume. Make the listener lean in.
“You say it once,” I tell her. “You say it with love, and you say it clearly, and you say it knowing she might not hear you. You tell her what you see. Not what you think of him. What you see happening to her. Then you let her make her choice.”
“And if she chooses him?”
“Then you hold her when it falls apart. Because if it falls apart, she’s going to need someone who told the truth and stayed anyway.”
The woman’s voice catches. “That’s—yeah. Okay.”
“You’re a good sister for calling.”
She hangs up. I sit with it for a second longer than I should. Bex taps the glass.Keep moving.
I queue up a 4225 West track between callers. “Lost in the Landing,” one of the ballads from the second album. Harrison’sbrush work on the snare, JD’s bass line walking beneath the verse, a quiet pulse. My voice from twenty-some years ago, younger, rougher at the edges, singing about coming home to someone who left the porch light on.
I listen to myself sing while the track plays through the studio monitors. That guy had no idea what he was talking about. He’d left. Had changed his life. And hadn’t earned any of the words he was singing.
I know what those words mean now.
The song fades. Bex cues the next caller.
“Hi, Liam. I’m hoping you can help me think through something.” Male and older, and the words come slow and careful, like he wrote them down somewhere and practiced them before calling. “My wife wants us to move. Closer to her mother. Her mother is getting older, needs help, and my wife wants to be the one to give it. I understand that. I do. But we’ve been in our house for twenty-two years. Our kids grew up there. I built a workshop in the garage. I know it sounds stupid, a workshop, but that house is my life.”
“It’s not stupid.”
“She says I’m being selfish.”
“Are you?”
He pauses. “Maybe.”
“Let me ask you something. What are you really afraid of losing? Is it the house? Or is it the life you built in it? Because those aren’t the same thing. You can take the workshop apart and put it up somewhere else. You can’t take apart twenty-two years of marriage and expect it to survive the rebuild.”
“So you’re saying I should move?”
“I’m saying you should figure out what you’re protecting. If it’s the house, that’s one conversation. If it’s something else, if you’re scared that leaving means losing who you are, that’s adifferent conversation, and it’s the one your wife actually needs to hear.”
He’s quiet for a long time. I let him be quiet. Bex watches through the glass and doesn’t tap.
“Thank you,” he says.
