But obviously it had to, and for her final song, AnnieLee danced around the stage playing Ruthanna’s hit “Big Dreams and Faded Jeans.”
Put on my jeans, my favorite shirt
Pull up my boots and hit the dirt
Finally doin’ somethin’ I’ve dreamed of for years
The song was older than AnnieLee, but it seemed as though everyone in that giant room knew the words.
Then it was time to hand over the mic to the star, Kip Hart. But the applause for AnnieLee was thunderous. She took three, then four bows, and then she ran from the stage, triumphant.
A roadie held out a bottled water. “How d’ya feel now?” he asked.
AnnieLee took a long, grateful drink and then said, “Shoot, if I felt any better, I’d drop my harp plumb through the cloud!”
He laughed. “Think you might like to do it again sometime?”
AnnieLee looked straight at him, totally serious now. “Honey,” she said, “I’m only getting started.”
Chapter
59
Too thrilled and wired to sleep in a hotel room, AnnieLee drove back to Nashville that night. She fell into bed at 4 a.m. and didn’t wake until the afternoon. Even then, she didn’t get up, but stayed warm beneath her down comforter, still feeling the faint electric buzz of her performance.
She’d been good and she knew it. Hell, she’d been great. She wondered where Kip would ask her to play next. Virginia? North Carolina? She didn’t want to go back to Texas, but she’d certainly consider it.
Eventually she sat up and checked her phone. There were voicemails from Ethan, Jack, and Ruthanna, which she decided to listen to after she’d had her coffee. Then she checked the Instagram account that ACD had insisted Eileen set up for her.
AnnieLee didn’t do the posting, but she had agreed to regularly text her publicist pictures, and Eileen had already put the ones from last night into her feed. There were a handful of backstage photos, plus a few shots that the stagehands had taken from the wings. These were blurry and slightly underexposed, but AnnieLee had told Eileen that she wanted her Instagram pictures to have the feel of casual snapshots. She didn’t want anything filtered or Photoshopped or Facetuned, or whatever it was people did to make everything look better than it really was.
“I want to post the truth,” she’d said, “or as near as I can get to it.”
And though Eileen had hoped for a more carefully curated and slick-looking feed, she’d clearly decided to take what she could get.
AnnieLee scanned through the comments to the one semi-selfie she’d taken right before going onstage. It was a shot of half of her face, taken in the mirror, with a streak of light falling across her shoulder.
Ur so pretty, said one commenter.
OMG I wanna be you when I grow up, said another.
There were star emojis and handclap emojis, and people begging her to tour through their tiny midwestern towns. AnnieLee hearted all the comments and then got up to make herself breakfast.
She was in such a good mood that she didn’t understand what Jack was saying in his message when she finally listened to it. She had to play it over and over again, in disbelief.
He had been driving, and so his voice was cutting in and out. “Kip…disappointed in the performance…different direction…future concerts. Sorry, AnnieL—”
She stood by the stove, stunned, as the French toast blackened in the pan.
It took the ringing of the phone to bring her back to herself. It was Ruthanna, and AnnieLee was already crying by the time she said “Hello.”
“There’s a video of the performance on YouTube already,” Ruthanna said. “You damn near sang the roof off.”
AnnieLee took the pan from the stove top and dumped the contents into the trash. Her kitchen was full of smoke now, and so she banged outside and stood shivering in her bare feet and pajamas. “If I was so good, why doesn’t he want me back?”
“You just answered your own question right there, AnnieLee,” Ruthanna said. “You outshone him. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened if he was up there with his regular giant band and his big ol’ pyrotechnic show. But this tour was supposed to be a simpler, smaller affair. And then you got up there with your tiny self, all alone, and you just blew everyone away with your big voice and your powerhouse songs. What man wants to follow that? Not Kip Hart. Not anyone I can think of.”
AnnieLee stepped farther into her little backyard and stood beneath its one tree. A fall breeze kicked up, and a shower of red-gold leaves swirled down and around her.