“What do you mean?”
“Well, he waters the fig tree with the exactitude of a man who has been given a task and treats it as a covenant.”
Dina chuckles. “That’s an image.”
“He remembers that I take my tea with the bag in for four minutes exactly and not five. He remembers that I cannot sleep on my right side since the ribs, so he has moved to the left side of the bed without discussing it, simply shifted, and stayed there. He remembers that I find the local morning news aggressively cheerful, and he mutes it when I come downstairs, without being asked.”
“I don’t know what to say, Lucy.” Dina beams at me like a kid on Christmas morning. “I can see how this is distressing for y’all, but for me…sheer entertainment!”
19
STIR CRAZY
LUCY
Iam losing my mind staying home, especially now that I’m feeling better, and my ribs have settled into a dull, manageable complaint.
My head is clearer as I’m off the heavy pills and onto something mild enough that I can think in complete sentences and stay awake past seven.
“I need to get out,” I all but shout at him when he comes back from work that I made him go to.
He smiles. “Where would you like to go?”
“Why do I have to figure everything out?” I whine. “You find a place to take me to.”
He continues to smile. “Alright, sweetheart.”
He surprises and charms me.
The next day, he takes me to Bells Bend—a neighborhood on the far northwestern edge of the city that the Cumberland River decided, at some geological point, to wrap itself around on three sides, creating a peninsula that feels nothing like Nashville. Nothing like the Broadway honky-tonks or the rooftop bars orthe bachelorette parade of Lower Broadway that tends to be the first thing people mean when they say this city.
It feels like the Tennessee that was always underneath—the one that was there before the cranes and the condos and the reinvention.
We park off Old Hickory Boulevard and walk slowly, because of my ribs, down toward the water.
The land here is open—working farmland, fields running toward the tree line with the unhurried patience of land that has not yet been convinced to become something else.
There’s a family farm stand, and Fox and I taste our way through jars of honey—light clover filled with sunshine, dark wildflower honey with a hint of earth and smoke, and thick golden sourwood that the woman behind the table tells us is a Tennessee favorite.
One spoonful is almost buttery, another sharp with the bite of late-season blooms, each jar faintly different depending on what the bees found that year.
“You brought me to a honey tasting,” I say, delighted.
“I....” He looks sheepishly at me.
“What?”
“I’ve been looking up places I can take you to when you feel better...you know, places you’d like.”
My eyebrows lift in quiet surprise. “You’ve never been here before?”
He shakes his head.
Fresh emotions unfurl in my chest. “Thank you.”
He wraps his arm around me and kisses my temple. It’s an unconscious gesture of affection, and everything inside me melts.
“The places I know, the restaurants, the venues—they have my family’s name on them, or my friends’ names, or my history.I wanted somewhere that was just Nashville. The actual city. Yours as much as mine.”
