Chapter 8: The Tape

I played the cassette four times before my mother found me in the back room at six in the morning.

She sat on the arm of the old couch in her robe and listened to the last verse with her eyes closed.

"That's not Dax," Donna said.

"I know."

"Dax has never sung a word that cost him anything."

"Whose voice is it, Mom?"

"I don't know, baby. But somebody sat in a room and meant every word."

On Thursday morning Calla Allbritton performed "Paper Moon" on a local television show.

Donna made me watch.

"If you're going to hurt," she said, "you'll do it where I can reach you."

Calla stood in a cream dress in front of a painted window, with a guitar she didn't play.

The band behind her was only a backing track.

She looked straight into the camera, and her eyes were wet.

"I wrote this for my grandfather, the week we lost him," she said.

"He used to say the moon was only paper if you didn't believe in it."

I stopped breathing.

My father had said that to me.

He said it in the kitchen when I was nine, over a cracked plate.

I had written it down the night he died.

Calla sang the first verse a half step under the note, and the pitch correction dragged her up and dropped her again.

The host dabbed his own eyes.

The caption said: "Rising star Calla Allbritton, in her own words."

Donna switched off the television.

"Go," she said.

"Where?"

"Wherever you were going to go before you sat down."

I walked out of the house in only my jacket.

I walked to the bus stop and rode a route I didn't know.

It took me an hour and a half to reach East Nashville.

I stopped in front of a converted garage behind a yellow house.

A light was on.

I knocked.

Abel opened the door in a gray T-shirt with a guitar pick between his teeth.

He took the pick out slowly when he saw my face.

"You've been crying," he said.

"I watched her say my father's words on television."

"I saw."

"You've seen it already?"

"Gil had it on in the office." His voice was rough. "I turned the sound off and left."

I held up the cassette.

"Who is this?"

"Come in."

"Who sings on this tape, Abel?"

"Someone I'm not ready to be asked about," he said. "Please come in."

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