“Do you really feel lost?” AnnieLee asked. The question startled both of them. They’d never gone deeper than banter and small talk; AnnieLee had always turned the conversation away from anything serious.
Ethan picked a few more notes before he answered. “I used to. I don’t know if I do anymore.”
She didn’t ask him what had changed. What if he said it was her?
Worse, what if he didn’t?
“Keep singing,” she said, and he obeyed.
Sometimes the world seems to move too fast
You find something real but it’s not gonna last
Then he stopped again. “It’s not right somehow.”
“Ethan,” AnnieLee said, “it’s great so far. But it’s so…melancholic.” She giggled. “I know, it’s a big word for a hayseed like me, isn’t it? Tony Graham thought I was dumb, too.”
“I don’t think you’re dumb, you idiot,” Ethan said. “But the best country songs are about heartbreak.”
“Not all of them.” AnnieLee reached over and grabbed the guitar from him. “What if you made it more up-tempo? What if your lost man realizes he was wrong to feel that way?” She began to play, tweaking the melody, making it brighter. “Maybe,” she said, “you could give the song a happy ending.”
Ethan got up and grabbed a beer from the minibar. When he turned around, his expression was almost haunted. “I don’t know much about those,” he said quietly.
AnnieLee’s fingers found a D major open, one of the simplest and most optimistic chords there was. “Me, either,” she said. “But I bet we can write one anyway.”
Chapter
46
So she rented a bridal gown, he rented a tux
A bouquet of blue bonnets in his fancy new truck
Ruthanna was running through the song she and AnnieLee had been working on when her phone rang, and she jumped as if she’d been caught doing something wrong. Then she laughed. Who did she think was calling, the retirement police? Of course it was only Jack, checking in on her the way he did every Sunday.
“How are the roses?” he asked as soon as she picked up.
“The blooms are all gone now,” she said, “but my damask roses should blossom again in the fall.” She nudged the guitar away from her with a painted toe. “What’s shaking, Mr. Holm?”
“I can’t believe you let her go into that room alone,” Jack said, and Ruthanna had barely figured out who he was talking about before he was barreling on. “The last time we talked about AnnieLee, you told me she wasn’t ready for professional representation. And then you sent her all the way to New York—not with a lawyer, either, but with that cowboy guitar player of yours. For all you knew, she might’ve signed an exploitive 360 and offered up her firstborn to those guys!”
“She’s not stupid, Jack,” Ruthanna said.
“But that’s not how you do things,” he said, exasperated. “You know that!”
“Do I?” she asked, affronted. She wasn’t used to being challenged like this. “All I know is that if there were rules, I broke them—my whole damn life. You know who helped me for the first five years of my career? Me—that’s who. I was alone.”
She remembered being sixteen and singing at one VFW hall dance after another, with hair so big and shoes so high she made a six-foot silhouette with a five-foot-two body. God, those were long days, she thought. Correction: they were long years.
She’d sung at county fairs, rodeos, weddings, showcases, and talent competitions; she’d lurked outside radio stations all over the South, accosting everyone who walked in to try to get them to play the songs she’d paid to record. She’d started at the bottom, and rung by rung she’d climbed her way to the top.
“I just meant—” Jack began.
“I worked my rear end off,” she interrupted, “and I never stopped—not until I left the business.”
“Honey,” Jack said, his voice gentle now. “I know that. I know just about everything about you.”
“Oh, do you, now?” Ruthanna was simultaneously offended and touched by Jack’s claim. Of course he didn’t know everything. But he knew more than almost anyone else. Way more.
And then suddenly she wasn’t thinking about her past, or AnnieLee’s career, or anything but Jack, good old familiar Jack, there on the other end of the line.
“I miss you,” she heard herself say.
He didn’t answer right away, and Ruthanna quickly wished she could take the words back. It didn’t matter that they were true.