“You don’t have to pay me,” AnnieLee said. “I’ll sing for my supper.”
The bartender snapped her magazine shut and stood up straight. “Supper?” she said, tossing her thick braids behind her back. “I’ve got the best chili dogs south of the Mason-Dixon, girl, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
Chapter
22
Following the bartender’s curt instructions, AnnieLee perched herself on a stool by the jukebox and waited for someone to walk over and request a country classic.
And waited.
And then she waited some more. Soon an hour had gone by—sixty lonesome, tedious minutes during which she sat there unnoticed, cradling Ruthanna’s beautiful rosewood guitar on her lap and tapping her feet on the cement floor.
Maybe no one saw her because it was two-dollar Tecate Tuesday until 6 p.m., and they were too busy knocking back cans of Mexican lager to notice a dark-haired girl hunkered in the corner. And maybe it’d be too loud to hear her play anyway. But AnnieLee had no intention of calling it quits. She told herself that she was just doing what she had to do for her art. For her love of music.
Anyway, there were far worse ways to spend a Tuesday night; this she knew from experience.
She shifted around on the uncomfortable stool and sighed. Then she hummed the beginnings of a new melody. Later she killed a few minutes thinking of words that rhymed with bored: chord, sword, horde, snored…
As she watched the bar clock tick its way toward six and her stomach began to grumble, AnnieLee realized that her reason for sticking it out at the Lucky Horseshoe had shifted. It was no longer about dedication or pride; it was about dinner. She wanted one of those chili dogs, damn it, and she wasn’t going to leave until she’d earned it.
Ingrid, the bartender, had told her to sit tight and wait for someone to come up to her, but hunger finally wore AnnieLee’s patience too thin. When a man in a Charlie Daniels T-shirt passed by on his way to the bathroom, she leaned out and called, “What’s that you said, mister? You asked me if I could play ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’？” It was the only Charlie Daniels song she could think of.
The man turned toward her in confusion. “Huh? I didn’t—”
“Well, I can’t play it, actually,” she interrupted, giving him her brightest, most irresistible smile, “because I don’t have a fiddle player. But you look like a man of great taste and discernment, so what if I played you a little Willie Nelson instead? Say, ‘Yesterday’s Wine’？ I know George and Merle went to number one with their version, but I’ve always loved Mr. Nelson’s take on the tune.”
Still looking somewhat baffled, the man told her that he wouldn’t mind hearing the song at all, especially not from a pretty little thing like her. And AnnieLee swallowed her objection to being referred to as such, and thereby tricked her way into her first live performance at the Lucky Horseshoe.
When she’d finished the song and the sound of the final E chord had faded into the background noise, she thought the Charlie Daniels fan would move along on his personal errand. But he stayed there, peering at her curiously, as if she were some kind of rare bird.
“I never heard it sung like that before,” he said. “Can you do ‘On the Road Again’？”
“I sure can,” she said.
“Spider,” he called over his shoulder, “come check this girl out.”
“Woman,” AnnieLee said under her breath.
Then an extremely large man in an extremely large cowboy hat—Spider, AnnieLee could only assume—strode over to hear her version of Willie’s ode to being on tour, and pretty soon a whole cluster of people had gathered around her stool. Spider wanted her to sing “Two Doors Down” next, and she’d barely gotten the last line out before everyone started calling out more requests from the jukebox lineup. A very young couple with their arms around each other’s waist asked if she could play their wedding song.
“Our first dance was to ‘I Cross My Heart,’” said the woman, who hardly looked old enough to be in a bar, let alone in a marriage.
AnnieLee clipped a capo onto her guitar’s first fret. “George Strait, right?” she asked.
“Damn straight!” the woman said, and then she blushed and giggled as if she couldn’t believe she’d said the word damn.
AnnieLee closed her eyes and thought back to being a kid, listening to KCMN—“That’s Country Music Now at 95.5 on your FM dial, cowboys”—on the truck radio, clutching her banged-up, twenty-dollar guitar in sweaty hands as she tried to figure out where her fingers were supposed to go. She could remember the tune, but…