Heartbreak Town

by Marsha Moyer

  She stood up and gathered our empty cups and set them in the sink. "Anyway, I never really would have done anything about it. It's just one of those things that goes through your mind at one a.m., you know? 'What if? What if?'"

  "Yeah. I know'what if.'"

  "You want to crash here the rest of the night? The guest room's made up. I can wake you up at six. Give you time to get home and get changed for work."

  I stood and walked around the table and opened my arms, and she stepped into them, a big, fuzzy terrycloth presence, solid as a sofa. "I'm sorry," I said into her shoulder.

  "What for?"

  "That we didn't get everything we wanted. You and me both."

  "Nobody gets everything they want."

  "Some do."

  "Like who?"

  I thought for a minute. "Faith Hill," I said. "I bet she doesn't wander around the house half the night thinking about what she'd do over if she could."

  "Well, I don't either, mostly. And neither should you. We're the lucky ones. When we're old ladies rocking on the porch together, you'll know that. It's all we'll talk about."

  I pulled back, wiped my eyes, nodded, and she looped her arm through mine and led me down the carpeted hall, to where the ones we loved lay dreaming.

  chapter fourteen

  Luckily, it was a slow morning in the shop, and I was able to sit in the office and pretend to work on the books while Peggy and Audrey gave me a wide berth. At lunch-time Audrey came in and asked if I wanted anything from Dairy Queen, but I just shook my head. Shortly after she left, I heard the doorbells chime out front, and Peggy poked her head around the door frame to say I had a visitor. I didn't have to ask who; it was written all over her face.

  "Can't you say I'm trying to finish up the payroll?"

  "Oh, Lucy," she said. "He just seems so…" She shook her head, like there was no word in her vocabulary to describe it.

  "All right," I said, rolling my chair away from the desk. "He's got two minutes."

  After three and a half hours of sleep the night before, I was more than a little annoyed by the sight of Ash leaning his elbows on the counter out front, looking as fresh and chipper as if he'd just spent two weeks at a spa. The fact that the last time we'd seen each other we'd been trading recriminations and lame excuses back and forth like tennis volleys seemed to have slid straight out of his memory; he looked bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, damn near born again.

  "You had lunch yet?" he asked.

  "I'm skipping it," I answered. "Too much work."

  "I'll take you up to Willie B.'s. Buy you a rib plate."

  "I can't."

  "Aw, come on. I want to show you something."

  "Something like what?"

  He closed one eye, smiling mysteriously. "Gotta take a ride with me and find out."

  "Ash, I haven't got time for this. Besides, I'm mad at you. Have you forgotten? You ran Denny off last night."

  "Denny ran off because of her cheap-shit scumbag of a husband. That doesn't make it my fault. Anyway, she called the house this morning."

  My heart fluttered in my chest. "Is everything okay?"

  "They were at some rest stop. Will was inside, paying for gas. She said he hadn't spoken to her for four hundred miles. Sounded like she'd been crying for most of them. But when I said I'd come get her, she said no, that she was sure this was just one of those bumps in the road that all new couples go through. She said she was sure everything would be okay once they got back to Nashville and had some time to talk things out."

  I sighed. "What's this thing you want to show me?"

  "It's not far from here. Maybe twenty minutes. I'll have you back in an hour."

  "Audrey's at lunch, and I don't know if Peggy can cover for me."

  "Sure I can." She stepped out of the cooler, where I realized she'd been hovering all along, carrying a pot full of paperwhites as a decoy. "Go. You haven't had a break all day. Audrey and I can run things for an hour without you."

  I looked at Ash, who shrugged and smiled as if to say, There you go. "I should have known you two would be in cahoots," I said, taking my purse out from under the counter. "This doesn't have anything to do with the Piney View Motor Court, does it?" I asked as I followed him out to the truck.

  "We'd need a lot more than an hour for the Piney View Motor Court," he said, opening the passenger-side door for me.

  "In your dreams."

  He laughed. "Relax. We're just going for a little ride."

  We proceeded slowly around the courthouse square out of town, past the Food King and the elementary school, and turned north on farm road 1399. As we passed the city limits sign, Ash pressed the accelerator and the big truck surged forward as the heavy-duty engine kicked in and then leveled out as it picked up speed. He hit a button to send the windows sliding down, and a warm spring wind whipped through the cab, making conversation impossible, especially after Ash slipped a Lou-vin Brothers CD into the slot and cranked up the volume.

  Oddly enough, I felt relaxed for the first time all day, riding next to Ash through the woods, the road a curving black ribbon through a tunnel of pines, breathing in the familiar smells of sun on pine bark and mown hay and cattle. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the leather headrest, letting the breeze snarl my hair, listening to Charlie and Ira Louvin's sweet, old-time voices singing, When I stop dreaming, that's when I'll stop lovingyou.

  I opened my eyes as the truck slowed, and saw that we were approaching the turn to the house. But Ash turned left rather than right off the highway, onto the red-dirt road we called Bates Road, after the family who'd lived there for sixty years, growing corn and sorghum on their two-hundred-acre spread. The old folks, Ruth and David Bates, had passed away when I was just a kid, but their son, Little David, had continued to farm the place until just a few years back, when his wife got cancer and died after a long haul in County General, after which he'd packed up his clothes and sold off the furniture and moved to Florida, to be near his daughter and grandkids. A for sale sign had been nailed to a post next to the highway for so long that the plastic was warped and the letters faded from red to dusty pink. Who was going to buy two hundred defunct acres in this deep, forgotten part of the East Texas Piney Woods? Folks were moving away from Cade County nowadays, not into it, and those farmers who remained were the last of a breed, gradually letting go of any hope of passing along the family business to their offspring, who were heading out of town before the ink on their high school diplomas was dry, bound for the wider world they saw on cable TV and read about on the Internet.

  "How long's it been since you've been out here?" Ash asked as he steered the truck slowly over the ruts and bumps in the road.

  "Lord, ages. Since Junie Bates got sick, I guess, and I brought over some food. King Ranch casserole, I think it was."

  "It's pretty, isn't it?" The fields, once cultivated, now grew wild with tall grass and black-eyed Susans and Indian paintbrush. We rolled past the pink brick ranch-style house, which looked sturdy but haunted somehow, the barn, always Little David's pride and joy, starting to show signs of neglect: a door hanging off its hinges, peeling paint.

  "You ever been to the back of the property?" Ash asked as the road narrowed into a thick awning of pines.

  "Once, in high school. Norma had a bonfire at Halloween. We were juniors, I think."

  "That always cracked me up," Ash said.

  "What's that?"

  "That the Bateses named their daughter Norma. Like, are they the only people on the planet who never heard of Alfred Hitchcock?"

  I smiled. "Poor Norma." It hadn't helped that she was skinny, dark, and twitchy, like her cinematic counterpart. As I recalled it, the bonfire wasn't much of a success; only six or eight kids showed up, and the main form of entertainment had involved a couple members of the track team sneaking off into the woods with a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20, returning there later, presumably, to puke it back up again. It was hard to picture Norma as a housewife in Kissimmee with two sons, but
I guessed she was one of the ones who'd managed somehow to triumph over her past, or at least move beyond it.

  Sunlight appeared through the canopy and we emerged from the tunnel of trees into a clearing, the sky opening up overhead, as blue as the ceiling of an Italian church. To the right was a field like the ones we'd driven past earlier, overgrown with grass and wildflowers. To the left was a small dog-trot cottage the elder Bateses had once rented out to a man who helped with the crops and other odds jobs around the place, so long back that nobody in town could even remember his name. I doubted it had been lived in for at least forty years, and it showed; the once-white paint had faded to gray, the roof sagged, and a couple of the windows had holes in the panes from unlucky birds or local kids with bottles of Mad Dog in their pockets and nothing to do.

  "Look there," Ash said as a body of water came into view. If it had been here when Norma had that bonfire nearly twenty-five years before, I'd either forgotten or hadn't seen it in the dark; or maybe my topography was off, and the party had been on some other part of the property. It was a nice-sized pond, an acre at least, banded with pines and maples and mirroring an irregular blue oval of sky. What was left of a wooden dock tilted from the shore into the water like a drunk stumbling to his knees, and an old rowboat was tethered to a tree on the far bank.

  Ash coasted to a stop and cut the engine. "What did I tell you?" he said as we gazed through the windshield. "Pretty, huh?"

  "I can't believe I never saw this before. Why didn't the Bateses build their house back here, I wonder? Two hundred acres, and they let the hired man have the nicest piece of it?"

  I opened the door and slid to the ground, wandering through the high grass toward the water. It was a balmy day, cloudless and still, but you could feel summer right around the corner, boiling behind that sky like a pot about to lose its lid, turning loose the bugs and heat and humidity. Out on the pond something caught my eye, dark and quick, skimming along the surface—a snake, probably a cottonmouth, hunting for some nice flesh to sink its fangs into. I'd lived in the country more than half my life and, while I didn't have a fear of snakes, exactly, I did have a healthy respect for them.

  "Hey." Ash came up behind me through the grass, carrying a can of Dr Pepper. I still had my eye peeled for the snake, but it was gone. "It's great out here, isn't it?" he said. "Can't you just feel the energy?"

  "I just saw a water moccasin."

  "That's one of the things I love about it. It's so wild. Look there," he said, as a great gray bird soared out of the woods on the far shore, coming in low on one wing like a stunt pilot, and settled itself in the shallows near the rowboat on a spindly leg.

  I turned and studied the look on Ash's face, a look I knew well and feared nearly as much.

  "What's on your mind, Ash?"

  "It's a great spot for a house, isn't it?"

  "You already have a house. In Nashville." Not to mention his half-interest in the place I lived in, just across the highway.

  "I'm not going back to Nashville."

  "How can you say that?"

  "I know my mind, Lucy. I knew it before I ever left that place, and I know it for sure now. Here." He nodded toward the water with the pride of some would-be monarch, like this was his birthright, his eminent domain.

  "I've got the whole thing already drawn up in my head," he said. "A timber-frame place, maybe four bedrooms, a big stone fireplace in the main room, nice-size kitchen, with a wraparound deck. And this whole side of the house will be glass, so you can look out over the water from every room."

  The sun played across the surface of the water, spackling it red and gold. A breeze moved in the grass like a phantom sigh. The gray bird slowly spread its wings and took off, sailing over the trees.

  "I remember Little David told me cranes migrate through here sometimes, a couple of times a year," Ash said. "On their way to the coast in the springtime, and back to wherever it is they go in winter. Canada, or Siberia." His eyes stayed fixed on the space where the bird used to be. "They're symbols of good luck, you know."

  "I think you'd better get yourself a field guide. That was a heron, not a crane."

  "I know what it was. It's too late in the season for cranes. I'm thinking next fall. If we get started pretty quick, the place should be finished by then."

  "Who's'we'?"

  "Isaac and me. If the weather holds, we can get it knocked out in a couple, few months."

  "Hasn't Isaac got his hands full already, working maintenance at the hospital and taking care of a wife and seven kids?"

  "I told him I'd pay him twice what he's making at the hospital."

  "How are you planning to finance all this?" Even in deep East Texas, two hundred acres wouldn't come cheap, to say nothing of materials and labor.

  "We'd have to sell the place in Nashville."

  I took a breath, held it, let it slowly and deliberately out again. "By rights, that place is half mine."

  "I know that. You'll get your share. And I'll get mine, to do what I want with."

  "And this is what you want? I don't get it, Ash. What are you trying to prove?"

  "I need to do this, Lucy. I need something to keep me busy, to make me feel useful again. And I need to do it here, in this place. Don't ask me how I know that. I just do."

  We tipped back our heads to watch a jet plane pass by high overhead, leaving a cottony white contrail across the sky.

  "Look," he said. "For most of my life, music mattered to me more than anything in the world. But when the whole thing fell apart, up in the rehab, I realized it wasn't music I missed. It was this." We stood quietly side by side, taking in the fields and water and the woods beyond. "All I can tell you is, this feels like where I belong."

  "This house you want to build," I said. "It would be for you andjude?"

  "It would be for my family. Whoever that turns out to be."

  We stood side by side for a while in silence.

  "What about the place in Nashville?" I asked finally. "You think it'll sell?"

  "I've been talking to an agent. She's already got an offer. What we paid plus six percent. Cash on the barrelhead." He paused, then added, "I've got the contract in the truck. All we have to do is sign."

  "Six percent?" The numbers tumbled in my head, divided by half, along with the thought of not having to live hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck.

  "Let's say I agree to this plan," I said. "You do still get that I think it's crazy, right? You and Isaac out here with your saws and hammers, building yourself a little house on the prairie?"

  "You wait," Ash said. "Wait till November. We'll have us a big cookout, and I'll bring you out to see the cranes, and you can call me crazy all you want."

  In a patch of shade under the same towering pines where Ash and I had courted seven years before, we sat on opposite sides of a scarred picnic table over Styrofoam plates of pork ribs and potato salad and coleslaw and tall paper cups of sweet tea. Willie had retired from the barbeque business a couple of years earlier, after he had to have his knee replaced, but his son, Lam, still ran the place out of the same metal shed, with the longtime pit man, Marcus Strum, and a young apprentice—nephew or cousin—keeping things smoking out back in the cookers. Ash ate silently but steadily as I picked at my food and read through the real-estate contract. It looked legitimate; everything he'd told me at the Bates's place was there, including the mind-boggling offer price. The buyers were even willing to assume closing costs.

  "Will we have to go up for the closing?" I asked, picking up my fork.

  "Oh, hell, no. They do everything with fax machines and FedEx."

  "What about our stuff? You know, the contents of the house?"

  "I can hire somebody to ship it. Or put it in storage, whatever you want."

  "Well," I said, letting my eyes roam again over the figures on the bottom line, "whoever it is must want the place awful bad."

  "Some young kid who just signed his first record deal," Ash said. "You remember what that was lik
e. You can hardly wait to start proving to the world that you're the real thing."

  "You were the real thing," I said. "You didn't need a twelve-thousand-square-foot house to make it true."

  "Well, I thought I did. But like I told you—things have changed. What I want has changed."

  "You know," I said, "you always did your best writing when you were building things. That summer you were remodeling Mrs. Mackey's kitchen, you came up with a new song just about every day."

  "Yeah, but there were—what do you call them?—extenuating circumstances."

  "Like what?"

  "I was in love," he said.

  I started to make a joke about how I'd always suspected tomfoolery between him and Loretta Mackey—the way she hung around the kitchen while Ash worked, in her polka-dot blouses knotted at the midriff, offering him hot coffee or cold beer and dropping hints about her husband's long, frequent business trips—but something in Ash's face stopped me.

  In spite of how long and how well I'd known him, it seemed to me Ash was always hiding behind something, behind jokiness or charm or anger or the blues. I could probably count on the fingers of both hands the number of times I'd felt he was letting me see him the way he really was, stripped of his mask, his true self laid bare. Our wedding had been one of those times, Jude's birth another. And I'd seen it, I realized, a few times during the years in Nashville, times he'd arrived home from the road or the recording studio exhausted and disappointed; I'd come downstairs in the middle of the night and find him at the kitchen table, his face pale and haggard, and I'd see straight into him, into a place that I had to admit now, to my shame, I hadn't wanted to see, and so I'd either picked a fight, or turned and gone back up to bed. Was it any wonder we'd grown so far apart? I'd used Ash's drinking as the excuse, but the truth was I'd been a coward. Instead of letting myself see how far gone he really was, I'd turned tail and run.

  This time, I made myself look. Maybe I knew I'd never be able to live with myself if I didn't, or maybe I was ready now, in a way I hadn't been before. What I felt was the thing I'd felt the first time I'd ever sat with Ash under these trees, the sense that we knew each other in some way that went beyond the here and now, that harked back to old souls, past lives. I'd been raised Baptist, and a lot of the old ways still ran deep in me, but part of me was sure, in a way that went beyond the doors of a church or the pages of a Bible, that there was something else out there. Life was short, and you never knew when you might run into a fellow traveler—a countryman, as Ash liked to call them—but I knew they were rare, and that when you found one, you were bound to him or her, obliged to stand up for each other. Ash and I had failed each other over and over, in so many ways, and yet here we were—-again, still—in the only place that felt like home.