She crossed Gay Street and climbed over a low stone wall, and in another few steps she was standing beneath trees just coming into their leaves. Though it’d been eighty degrees the day she’d left Houston, spring was late this year in Tennessee. She could hear the river sliding along its banks and the sound of traffic on the bridge.
Ducking down between two giant hydrangeas, AnnieLee pulled her backpack from its hiding place. She took out her tarp and lay it on a smooth patch of ground beneath an elm tree, humming softly, almost tunelessly, to herself. Then she unrolled the lightweight down sleeping bag she’d gotten—along with a knockoff Swiss Army knife, forty dollars in cash, and a lewd proposition—in exchange for Maybelle at Jeb’s Pawn.
A folded sweater served as her pillow. Light from a neon Coca-Cola sign on the other side of Gay Street flickered through the tangle of branches.
Sleeping outside reminded AnnieLee of summer nights when she was a kid, when she’d lie in the back of her mom’s pickup truck as it sat parked in the driveway. Mary Grace had been alive and happy then, and sometimes she’d join her daughter under the stars, singing her to sleep with old folk lullabies like “500 Miles” and “Star of the County Down.”
It had felt like a wonderful adventure to slip into dreams with her mother beside her and the whole sky of stars hanging right there above them. But bedding down outside like this now? It was nothing but a cold and lonely necessity.
A gust of wind blew last winter’s dead leaves and a torn scrap of notebook paper toward AnnieLee’s face. As she brushed them away, she saw words scribbled in black marker on the paper: …ave never felt like this before, and it… The rest was ripped away.
She wondered if the note had ever gotten to the person it was meant for, or if it was just wadded up and pitched into the bushes.
Lines written but never read
Like a song only played inside your head, she sang softly.
Then she stopped to readjust her makeshift pillow. If she had a nickel for every scrap of a tune she’d ever written, she’d be curled under six-hundred-thread-count sheets in a fancy hotel instead of stuffed inside a polyester pawnshop sleeping bag underneath a damn elm.
She closed her eyes and thought back to earlier that evening, when she’d stepped onstage for the first time and sung her scared little heart out. Maybe there was a song in that experience. Certainly there was a story in how she’d got there, and what she was running from. And as she drifted off to sleep, she thought of Ethan Blake and the warmth of his dark eyes.
Eventually AnnieLee began to dream, and inside that dream, she spoke out loud. The words were nonsense at first, and then came a name. “Rose,” AnnieLee muttered as she curled tighter inside her sleeping bag. “Rose!” Her arms flew up as if to ward off a blow. “Oh, Rose, be careful!”
Chapter
9
Ethan Blake got to Ruthanna’s so early on Tuesday he had to wait twenty minutes in his truck before it was time to let himself into the kitchen. “Morning,” he said as Ruthanna’s cat, Biscuit, twirled itself around his legs. He reached down to pet its soft gray head.
“It sure is,” Ruthanna said. She was tucked into her favorite spot in the entire enormous house, against the cushions in the bay window, and the sunlight was falling on her red-gold hair. “You want coffee?”
“Thanks, I’m good,” he said. He’d made a stop at Bongo Java on the way, plus Maya, who was over by the stove, made coffee so strong he could practically feel it stripping the enamel from his teeth. He set his guitar case on the Florentine tiles and took an apple from the enormous fruit bowl on the kitchen island. “So I saw an amazing new singer last night,” he said.
Ruthanna gave Maya the side-eye, and Maya giggled into her fist. Ethan braced himself for the ribbing he could tell was coming.
“So, Blake,” Ruthanna said, “what was so amazing—her face or her boobs?”
“How do you know the singer was a girl?” Ethan asked, his mouth full of apple.
“Because I’m not dumb,” Ruthanna said.
“Fine,” he said. “But give me a little credit, why don’t you? It was her voice.”
“Mm-hmm,” Maya said, pouring herself a mug of her killer brew.
“Sang like an angel, did she?” Ruthanna asked.
“If you don’t mind a cliché like that,” Ethan said, “then yeah, she did.” He still felt moved by the blunt power of AnnieLee’s lyrics and the soaring ache of her voice. “She sang like an angel who’s been cast out of heaven, yearning to fly back up to where she belongs.”