“I’m sorry,” AnnieLee said, sounding so young and small herself.
Ruthanna told AnnieLee about how Sophia had rebelled in high school, partying too hard and sneaking out at night while Ruthanna was on tour. After a stint in rehab, she graduated a year late, but with a good GPA. She was supposed to go to college. She wanted to be a music teacher.
“But then she met Trace Jones,” Ruthanna said, and the name tasted bitter in her mouth.
“I know him!” AnnieLee exclaimed. “I mean, I know who he is.”
“Of course you do. He’s been on the charts for a decade. He’s nothing but a hat act, if you ask me, but people buy his records. Anyway, Sophia and Trace were in love. She wanted to go on tour with him—a tour Mikey Shumer had booked and was managing. I didn’t want her to go, because she still seemed too fragile to me. She argued that it was time she went out on her own. I pointed out that she wasn’t going out on her own, that she was following someone else. She wasn’t even going to be playing, because Trace already had a banjo player in his band. We fought. And Sophia left.”
Ruthanna unfolded her napkin and then folded it back up again. AnnieLee had stopped eating her dinner.
“Somewhere on the tour, she started drinking again. And a little while after that, Mikey decided that it wasn’t good for Trace Jones’s image to have a girlfriend. Mikey told him that if he was serious about his career, he needed to break up with Sophia.”
Ruthanna poured more wine into her glass.
“So he did. I’m not saying it wasn’t hard for him. All I know is that he did it. And that night, in her hotel room, before she was supposed to fly home to me, Sophia drank all the bottles in the minibar and took some pills she’d gotten from a roadie. I don’t know if she was trying to die. Maybe she was just trying to drown her sorrows. Trying to get to the place where she didn’t feel the pain. But she went to sleep, and she never woke up.”
Ruthanna had been looking out the window as she spoke, and she could feel the tears trickling down her face. When she looked at AnnieLee, she saw that the girl was crying, too.
“I’m so sorry,” AnnieLee said. “I can’t even imagine.”
Ruthanna put her hand on top of AnnieLee’s. “I know your life hasn’t been easy, and I bet you’ve felt loss, too.” She pulled her hand away and her voice grew firm. “That’s why I don’t want you talking to Mikey. There’s a darkness in him, and a coldness. A man who would do anything to win is not the kind of man you want on your side.”
She got up and walked over to the sink to get herself some water. “‘I have been in sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots,’” she said softly.
“Is that a line from a song?” AnnieLee asked.
“It’s from a book—Dust Tracks on a Road, by Zora Neale Hurston.”
“Sorrow’s kitchen,” AnnieLee repeated. “I might’ve visited there once or twice.”
Then they were silent, and the sun passed down into the garden, illuminating every flower in one last bit of angelic light.
Ruthanna gripped the edge of the sink to steady herself. “Good night, Sophia,” she whispered.
Chapter
39
AnnieLee half woke to the sound of an urgent whisper. A figure, dressed all in white, stood by the side of her bed. Sophia, she thought, still in sleep’s clutches. The ghost reached toward her, even as she rolled away from it, and then it yanked the blankets back.
“Ahem,” the ghost said, and AnnieLee woke up enough to realize that it was Ruthanna standing there, her red-gold hair shining like a halo around her head. She was telling AnnieLee that it was time to get up.
Last night, after they’d talked and cried and drunk a bottle and a half of rosé, they’d agreed that it made little sense for AnnieLee to wend her way back to her motel, not when there were six empty beds in Ruthanna’s beautiful house.
“It’s almost eight a.m.,” Ruthanna said, saying “eight” as if it were as scandalous as “noon.” Then she bent over and picked a piece of paper off the carpet, peered at it, and began to read out loud as AnnieLee tried to burrow back under the covers. Her head felt like someone was hitting it with a hammer.
I was standing up just as tall as I was able
Already begging for a seat at the table
Feeling like a shadow, pressed against the wall
All those years he didn’t see me at all
I was invisible, invisible
Like shade at midnight, a ghost in the sunlight