AnnieLee lay back on her chaise longue and crossed her arms. “Nobody does anything just to be nice.”
“Is that really what you think?” Ruthanna asked.
“It’s what I know,” AnnieLee said quietly.
“You must’ve had a rough life.”
“I’m doing all right. I’ve got a place to stay now and everything.”
“Dream big,” Ruthanna said dryly.
“I do,” AnnieLee said, suddenly earnest. “But I try to be real pleased by the little things along the way.”
Ruthanna smiled at the prickly, lovely girl. “That’s about the smartest thing I’ve heard you say yet.” She reached into her straw tote and handed AnnieLee a bottle of sunscreen. She could see the girl’s nose getting pink. “Look at me,” she said. “I’ve got everything. I don’t need anything at all, but if I did need something, I certainly wouldn’t try to take it from you.” She sighed. “I don’t know why I’m being so nice. Maybe it’s that you make me stop and remember someone.”
AnnieLee turned to Ruthanna. “Who?”
But Ruthanna had closed her eyes. “Hon,” she said quietly, “I don’t think I want to talk about it right now.”
Chapter
28
Ethan high-fived the regulars perched on barstools as he made his way toward the Cat’s Paw stage, his acoustic guitar slung across his broad back. He’d made the instrument himself from East Indian rosewood and western red cedar. It was beautiful, the product of six months’ worth of sweat and concentration.
If he was honest with himself, the guitar didn’t sound a whole lot better than a good factory-made Blueridge from China. But he didn’t care. He knew every inch and every joint of the instrument, every hex head bolt and fret wire, and it felt solid and right in his hands.
He’d recently begun making a second guitar. It would be smaller, with a mahogany face, curly maple back and sides, and mother-of-pearl inlay around the sound hole. When he worked on it late at night, he tried not to think about the blue-eyed girl he hoped would someday play it.
He checked his tuning in the shadowed corner near the pictures of Ruthanna and other Nashville greats, and then he hurried onto the stage, tipping his Tar Heels baseball cap to the crowd as he dropped onto the folding chair. He wasn’t the bantering type; half the time he’d start playing without even introducing himself. That, Ruthanna had told him, was a bad sign. A man who couldn’t remember to tell the audience his own name was a man who did not sufficiently hunger for fame and fortune.
But who said he had to want them in the first place? There were plenty of other things to hope for—like a bit of money so he could get a new exhaust system for his truck, for example. Or the ability to keep writing songs. Or a night without troubled dreams.
Of course, there was no guarantee that even such modest hopes would be realized. Fate granted some people their wildest, greatest wishes while leaving the simplest pleas of others unanswered.
But damned if he wasn’t philosophical tonight! If he wasn’t careful, he’d end up singing “Whiskey Lullaby” and weeping onto his one-of-a-kind guitar. The Cat’s Paw regulars would never let him hear the end of that.
He did manage to introduce himself, giving the room a wry half smile as he explained how he’d taken the night off from KJ’ing over at the Rusty Spur. “So head on over there one of these days,” he told the crowd, “grab a mic, and give me the chance to clap after you sing.”
He warmed up the crowd with some Dwight Yoakam and Merle Haggard. Ethan wrote his own songs, but he didn’t always like to play them onstage—which, as Ruthanna had pointed out, was another big hurdle on the road to fame and fortune.
“More like a sinkhole,” Maya had said.
Ethan was fifteen minutes into his set, strumming a slowed-down version of “Achy Breaky Heart,” when Billy placed a beer at his feet. Ethan finished the song and sipped gratefully, and then raised the glass in a toast to the entire room. The air conditioner was battling the heat of a hundred bodies, and the stage lights made everything hotter. “Thank you, kind stranger,” he said to the crowd. “I was getting thirsty up here.”
As he set down his drink, he shielded his eyes from the glare, trying to get a sense of who’d bought him the beer. That was when he spotted AnnieLee Keyes standing way in the back.
She’d actually come out to hear him play. And he was pretty sure she’d coaxed Billy into delivering the brew.