by Marsha Moyer
"But that's good news, isn't it?"
"I don't know! I guess I was hoping you could—not betray your, your vows or anything, but just tell me if he's…"
Punch set down his cup. "If he's what?"
I bit my lip and turned to face the window. Across the street, in front of some kind of meeting hall, workers were unloading stacks of linens and baskets of artificial flowers out of the back of a van. Two men hoisted a white-painted arbor, which they angled in sideways through the door.
"Bridal fair," Punch said. "Oh, look, there's Missy Connally. I'm marrying her next month." He glanced at me and smiled. "Performing the service, I meant."
"Do you ever wish you'd had the chance? To get married?" I asked.
"There you go, changing the subject again. But to answer your question, I had a chance. And I chose this instead." He opened his hands, palms up. They were big-knuckled, scuffed-up looking hands, not soft and pale like you might think a priest's would be. Working hands; fighter's hands.
"Can I offer an opinion? Unsolicited, but then, here you are. Looking for answers."
"Please," I said.
"I think you're asking the wrong question. It's not 'What's going on with Ash?' so much as 'What's going on with Lucy?'"
I gazed down at my hands, wrapped around the bowl of my cup. My head was full of spiraling images: Ash in his sweaty T-shirt standing at the top of the stairs on the open platform of his new house, framed by water and sky; Jude's legs dangling over the side of the kitchen table in Hardy Knox's kitchen, their voices floating heavenward like a couple of angels; Audrey in the cooler in Hardy's arms, surrounded by flowers; the sight of my feet on the restroom linoleum, like they didn't belong to my body anymore. Audrey was right: it was better to feel pain than to live this way, shut off from your feelings, sealed up so tight that you couldn't even recognize your own body. You might as well be dead.
"Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?" Punch asked. "When you left Ash last year, in Nashville—what was it you were running from?"
I had to gather my thoughts for a moment; I'd never told anyone the whole story before.
"We'd been living in Nashville almost five years," I said. "Things had been heading south for a while, maybe two years, by then. Ash was drinking a lot, staying out till all hours in who knows what kind of company, showing up late for gigs, not returning his manager's calls. A couple of times he turned up practically knee-walking drunk onstage, barely made it through the shows—wouldn't have, if it hadn't been for the guys in his band, who were real pros. But even they were getting disgusted, called him out a time or two. It was like he knew he was going down in flames and he didn't give a damn. He tried rehab a couple of times, but he'd only stay for a few days. Claimed it wasn't the way for him—whatever "the way" was, I didn't know. The times I tried to talk to him about it, we ended up yelling, slamming doors, making Jude cry.
"Finally we were just more or less living under the same roof, trying to stay out of each other's way. I thought about leaving plenty of times, even threatened to. 'This is it,' I must've said a hundred times. 'I can't take this. Can't you see it hurts me, too?' But as crazy as it sounds, every now and then I'd catch a glimpse of the man he used to be, the one I fell in love with, and I'd tell myself there was still a chance that we could work things out. And, like I told you before, I wanted Jude to grow up knowing his daddy, the way Ash and I never got to.
"Then, out of the blue, Ash got nominated for some song-writing award. I don't even recall the name of it, but it was something the industry gave out, a big deal. He kept trying to act like it wasn't, but I knew he was excited and scared to death at the same time. He was up against some big shots, and I know it sounds like a cliche, but it truly was an honor just to be nominated. But any fool knows you want to win. And looking back, I think maybe Ash thought it was his last chance. To, you know, give him that push over the top, prove he had the stuff.
"By the night of the awards ceremony, he was a wreck—high one minute, in a funk the next. I remember riding to the theater in the back of the limo just praying out of one-hundred-percent pure selfishness that he would win, because if he didn't, I knew, things between us would finally come to a head.
"I can't even recall now who did win. I guess I don't have to tell you it wasn't Ash. They announced the name, and people started clapping, and I reached over for Ash's hand and his fist was clenched so tight I couldn't have pried his fingers apart with a crowbar. I don't know how we got through the rest of the ceremony.
"Afterwards, there was a party at some hotel. We got in the limo and the driver automatically headed in that direction, jabbering away, asking us if we'd had a good night, if we were looking forward to the party. Ash didn't say a word, and I was afraid to. Finally, a few blocks from the hotel, we pulled up at a light, and Ash just opened the door and got out of the car and walked off down some side street. I climbed out and started yelling at him to come back. The poor driver didn't know what was going on. I asked him to wait and ran after Ash, caught up to him in front of a Chinese restaurant.
"Somehow I managed to talk him into getting back in the car, asked the driver to turn around and take us home. I paid the babysitter and sent her on her way, went upstairs to check on Jude. I remember standing there watching him sleep and feeling lost, just totally helpless. I could hear Ash slamming around downstairs, making himself a drink. I mean, I knew he was heartbroken, I was heartbroken for him, but I was so damned tired of it all, too, the way he'd just turned on himself, turned against me. I'd hitched myself to his wagon, after all, and it wasn't that I expected everything to be sunshine and roses, it's just that I knew we didn't have a chance of making it so long as he kept shutting me out. I knew he thought I'd given up on him, but I hadn't. I never have. But he'd given up on himself, and that was something I didn't know how to fix.
"I went downstairs and found him in the kitchen, with a glass and a bottle sitting on the butcher block. 'We've got to talk,' I said, but he didn't answer me, wouldn't even look at me. 'I don't know how to handle this,' I told him. 1 want to help you, but I don't know what you expect me to do.'
" 'You want to help me?' he said. 'Then get out of my face. I'm sick of seeing you mooning around here, making me feel worse than I already do. You never wanted to come here in the first place. You never believed I had what it took.' Well, none of that was true, and I said so, but he was wound up so tight, he wouldn't even listen. He turned around and started to pour himself another drink.
"I moved over and tried to get between him and the butcher block, to get my hand on the bottle before he could. We grabbed for it at the same time, and I lost my footing on the tile floor. My feet went straight out from under me, and I clipped my head on the corner of the butcher block at the same time Ash dropped the bottle.
"When I came to, things were swirling. Glass and whiskey everywhere. I tried to sit up and slipped, and cut my hand on a piece of broken glass. Ash was just standing there watching me with the most terrible expression on his face. I remember thinking that he was more upset about breaking the bottle than he was about the fact that I was bleeding and had a knot the size of a goose egg on the back of my head. I remember thinking, If I don't get out of here, I am going to die.
"I went upstairs and got Jude out of bed, snatched up my purse and my keys. I didn't even slow down long enough to bandage up my hand or change my clothes, much less pack a bag. I carried Jude out to my truck and buckled him into his safety seat—he never even woke up—and climbed in and cranked up the engine, and that's when Ash came running out of the house, yelling and waving his arms in the air. I thought he wanted to kill me, because everything that had happened was my fault. I just mashed down the gas pedal and took off, spinning the tires on the pavement, Ash running behind us all the way down the driveway out to the road. I'll never forget how his face looked in the rearview mirror, lit up red by the taillights, like a madman's. I didn't know it then, but it was the last time I'd see him for eight months. W
hen we got to the highway I turned south, and by morning Jude and I were in Mooney. But I don't—■ What was your question, again?"
"I was asking why you left."
"Well, isn't it obvious? I had to protect myself, and my little boy."
Across the street, two men were jockeying a multitiered cardboard wedding cake out of the van. "Did it work?" Punch asked.
"I thought so, at first. Then Ash showed up here—in Mooney, I mean—and the whole mess started all over again."
"Where did things start to go wrong, do you think?"
"We should never have gone to Nashville in the first place. At least I shouldn't have. It was Ash's dream, and I thought… I thought there'd be a place in it for me. But there wasn't. I hated it there. Everything was so glittery and fake, everybody all the time grinning at you with these big shiny teeth when they'd just as soon stab you in the back as look at you. I've lived in Texas all my life, and in forty years I never heard so much BS as I heard in the three years I was up there. It was nothing like Ash painted out it would be."
"Did you ever think that maybe it was the same for Ash?"
"How do you mean?"
"That things weren't working out for him any better than they were for you? That, in fact, maybe it was even worse for him, since he was the one who painted the picture to begin with?"
"Not till— He tried to talk to me about it when he first came back, a couple of months ago. About how he felt like he got set up, by the record company and the whole, sort of, industry machine, and when it didn't work out like they expected, they just pretty much dropped him without a net."
"So it sounds as if you were both in the same boat, and you just didn't know it."
"I don't think so."
"Why not? Didn't you both go up there thinking things were going to be a certain way, and didn't things turn out differently than you expected, for both of you?"
"I guess. But—"
"I see it all the time. Two people go chasing off after something they think they want, and then somehow, without even meaning to, their wires get crossed, and pretty soon they think the only solution is to go their separate ways." Dee walked over, holding the coffeepot, but Punch waved her away. "Let me ask you this," he said to me. "What made you fall in love with Ash in the first place?"
I was surprised—shocked, really—at how hard it was to answer Punch's question. Sometimes I thought there'd never been anything between Ash and me but sex, that I'd been so swept up by our physical attraction that my small-town Baptist raising didn't know what else to call it but love. Then Jude came along and sealed the deal. Sometimes I blamed myself for roping Ash into something he didn't really want, that he wasn't ready for, that Jude and I were nothing but a roadblock on the way to his hopes and dreams. But in my heart I knew that wasn't the answer, that it was cowardly of me to reduce what we'd had to something so stripped-down.
"Not too long after I first met Ash," I said, "he drove me up to this little barbeque spot outside town. Later on, we used to refer to it, sort of joking, as our first real date, though I never would have called it that at the time—my husband had only been dead six weeks or so, and it just wasn't seemly, you know? But we ate pork ribs at a picnic table under the pines, and we talked for what seemed like forever, and I remember laughing, really laughing, for what felt like the first time since my husband died.
"And at some point I asked Ash, in all seriousness, if he felt like we'd known each other before, in some past life. This probably sounds like blasphemy to you. But the way I felt when I was with him… I mean, I'd only met him—in this life—a few days before, but it seemed like we were bound together in some way that had been going on before us and would keep on after we're gone. Oh, I know this is— Am I making any sense at all?"
Punch grinned. "That's a pretty fancy philosophy for a Southern Baptist girl."
"You can see why my mama barely speaks to me."
"So can you honestly tell me you don't still feel what you felt that first day, eating barbeque under the trees? Because I think you do, and I think Ash does, too."
"But we've gotten so far from that."
"Then go back."
"Back?"
Punch turned and motioned to Dee for the check. "Remember that old Beatles song? 'Back to where you once belonged'?"
"But how do we do that? How do we know if it's even possible?"
Punch dug in his jeans pocket and handed Dee a ten, and she carried it off toward the register. "I can't tell you that. I don't think anybody can." I sighed, and Punch nodded. "I know. It'd be nice if there were a pill we could swallow that would solve all our troubles, just like that. Of course, if that were the case, I'd be out of a job."
"My first husband was a farmer," I told Punch. "Just an ordinary man, steady as they come. When I took up with Ash, I knew he was different, that he was going places most folks never get to go. I guess I thought my job would be to stand on the sidelines and cheer a lot. I didn't expect it to be—well, like this."
"Is that how you see yourself?" Punch asked. "As a cheerleader? Because—I hope I'm not betraying a confidence when I say this—but you're wrong."
"What do you mean?"
He toyed for a moment with his coffee cup before answering. "I remember once, when I first met him, Ash described you as his 'light.' The old-fashioned term used to be 'muse.' Meaning— you know—his inspiration. All artists have them, or so the story goes. It seems to me it's no small privilege to be one." I shook my head, letting his words sink in. "Hard, too, I suppose. Considering that it's probably something you didn't ask for. That maybe it, well, implicates you, in a way, in Ash's success or failure."
"You mean it's my fault he's a drunk and thinks his career is over?"
"Of course not. Just that maybe, when he saw things start to fade, it scared him. Made him reckless, trying to find that light again."
"I remember a song he played for me once," I said. "By some other writer, not one of his. But there was a line in it that I thought was Ash to a T: 'I'd rather be a comet than a star.'" I pushed away my coffee cup. "You see, that's the difference between us. He's all dazzle and motion, and all I want is just to stay and shine in one place."
"But that's the way the world works, doesn't it?" Punch said. "God gives us different gifts—none less important than the others, just different. And maybe comets need stars to steer by, to find their way home."
A passing car caught my eye, a flash of sun on chrome, and just like that I was back in Ash's old kitchen, years before it was mine, hearing him say, "Sometimes you just have to cut your losses and go. But sometimes, if you're lucky, you get to go around again." The memory caught in my throat like a copper penny, sharp and cold. Then I swallowed, and it, like my luck, was gone.
I looked at my watch. "I need to pick up my son," I said. "I'm sorry for just dropping in like this, out of the blue. I took up a big chunk of your time, and I'm not even one of your regulars."
"Don't be silly. I enjoyed the company, and I got Dee's pot pie for supper in the meantime." We got up and waved good-bye to Dee, then pushed our way out onto the sunny sidewalk, setting off in silence toward St. Jude's.
"You know, it can be frustrating," Punch said after a minute.
"What's that?"
"One of the drawbacks, I guess you'd call it, of my job is that a lot of the time you never really know if you've helped somebody. All you can do is try to tell them what you feel they need to do and send them on their way. But even priests appreciate a sign now and then."
"A big old lightning bolt, you mean?"
He laughed. "Now and then that'd be nice, yeah. But most of the time, I think God's sneakier than that. Likes to slip things in right under your nose when you're not paying attention. Then all of a sudden you see them and say, 'Hey! What I was looking for was right here, all the time.' "
My Blazer and an old Fiat convertible were the only cars in the parking lot at St. Jude's. I unlocked the Blazer and held out my hand, and Punch clasped it
in his big, chapped red one.
"Thanks for the pie," I said.
He held the door for me as I climbed into the driver's seat. "Keep your eyes peeled," he said. "Let me know if you see that lightning bolt."
I drove back up Highway 59, the sun setting in a gilded blaze in my rearview mirror, the sky ahead over Mooney towering with pink-tipped clouds. I rolled down the windows a crack, hoping to catch a whiff of rain. But by the time I pulled up to the curb in front of Dove's house, the clouds had dissolved and the sky was the flat blue-white of another July dusk: one more night without a chance for lightning.
chapter twenty-one
Every evening for a month, after Jude was tucked into bed or when Ash had him for the night, I laced on my old track shoes and traipsed up and down Little Hope Road, the dogs snuffling in circles around me, then running ahead and loping back as bats swooped in the purple sky and frogs croaked sorrowfully from the dry creekbeds, like they'd given up any hope for rain. I turned my conversation with Punch over and over in my head like a kid holding a marble to the light, thinking that if I
could catch it just right, a pattern would shine through.
Instead, I found myself combing back through my old life with Ash, remembering the days when we were courting, the night I'd met him when I'd thought he was the cockiest, most insufferable man on the planet, then the sure but steady way he'd won me over: tilling my garden, fixing my plumbing, singing old cowboy songs under my kitchen window at midnight, till the next thing I knew we were sitting in his pickup at Willie B.'s with rain drizzling down the windshield and talking about knowing each other in a past life. "I want to know you in this lifetime, Lucy," he'd said that night. "What if we never get another try?" And before I knew it, I was on my back on a scratchy wool blanket beside Flat Creek with Ash in my arms, moonlight streaming all around us and my heart so full I didn't think my body could hold it. Even now, it was enough to make me search out the rock wall of the old graveyard in the dark and sit a minute and try to untwist the knots in my chest. The ghosts Ash and Denny used to talk about, whispering and dancing among the crumbling headstones, were no match for the ghosts in my head, waltzing thigh-to-thigh to the tunes on Dub Crookshank's jukebox, spending Sundays with the shades drawn and the doors latched, observing their own private, unsanctioned form of worship.