“Did you know that crows are songbirds?” she asked. “That always seems kinda funny to me, because they have such terrible voices.” She shrugged in a way that she hoped seemed both innocent and charming. Maybe she could pass as a slightly eccentric urban birder? “A thrush, on the other hand,” she said, “sounds like some kind of magical flu—”
“You spend the night here?” the man interrupted. He stood with his legs spread wide and his thumbs tucked into his belt.
“Welllll…” AnnieLee said. Wasn’t it obvious?
“Sleeping in the park is illegal,” he said.
The woman took a step closer to her. She had a cup of steaming coffee, and it smelled so good and warm that it nearly brought tears to AnnieLee’s eyes. “There’s a shelter on Lafayette Street,” she said gently. “The Rescue Mission—are you familiar with it?”
“Um, okay, sure,” AnnieLee said, taking a corresponding step backward. She saw the other cop scanning the ground, probably looking for needles or bottles of cheap liquor.
“I don’t do drugs,” she blurted, and then flushed. “I’m not from here,” she added. But that was probably obvious, too.
“Are you okay?” the woman asked. “Do you need help?”
“Yes,” AnnieLee said. “No. I mean, I’m just fine. I’ll be moving along, I guess, if that’s okay with you.” She took another small step away from them.
The cops looked at each other—they clearly didn’t consider her a threat to herself or others—and when they turned back to her, she gave them a little wave. She’d take their silence as permission to get the hell out of there. “Thanks, and, um, have fun patrolling,” she said, and then she hurried away, holding her breath until she was safely out of sight. They didn’t call after her.
It’s your lucky day, kid, she said to herself. And then she tried very hard to believe it.
Chapter
11
AnnieLee walked south through the park for a quarter mile before she came to a long, sloping lawn. To her left was the slow-moving river, and on the far side of it, Nissan Stadium. To her right, up the hill, was a row of brick buildings, including one that said GEORGE JONES COUNTRY in big white letters. She headed up the lawn toward the city’s edge, singing to herself Jones’s “These Days （I Barely Get By），” a bleak song if there ever was one.
In a little café on Commerce Street, she spent three precious dollars on the largest coffee on offer, adding a big splash of cream and four packets of sugar. She didn’t actually like her coffee that way, but she needed all the free calories she could get.
Then she brushed her teeth in the café bathroom and tried to comb out her hair with her fingers. As she did so, she turned her face this way and that, gazing into the mirror appraisingly. Her mother used to tell her that she looked like a young Jacqueline Bisset, though AnnieLee barely knew who that actress was.
What she looked like now, she thought, was hungry.
“Well, there are worse things to be,” she reminded her reflection. “And you’ve been a few of them.”
She spent the rest of the morning wandering the streets and gazing into shop windows, feeling awkward and conspicuous with her big lumpy backpack. Though live music began at 10 a.m. all along Lower Broadway, she knew she’d never be able to talk her way onto one of those big stages. The people who played on them were seasoned professionals.
In the afternoon, she returned to the park to stash her belongings. A crow—the same one or not, she certainly couldn’t tell—was the only witness as she placed her pack in the hollow, covered it with leaves and branches, and then trudged back into town.
She’d decided to try her luck at a little spot on the corner of Church Street called the Dew Drop Inn, but when she asked the bartender if it might be possible for her to sing there, the woman didn’t even speak—she just started laughing. She laughed until a tear shone in the corner of her eye, and AnnieLee wondered if she’d been drinking more of the booze than she’d been serving.
“Every day,” the woman finally said, wiping her face with the back of her hand. “Every livelong day there’s a new face asking me if they can perform in my bar. Is there a farmer growing a whole field of you somewhere? Some bumper crop of wannabes?”
AnnieLee bristled. “You can just say no. You don’t have to call names.”
“Sorry,” the woman said, though she didn’t sound it. She pointed vaguely east. “You can try over at Patsy’s.”