Second Life: Dumping the Scum novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: The Year After

Emmylou read the number out loud.

Then she read it again, slower, and sat down on the kitchen floor.

"Kenz. That's a car."

"It's a used car."

"It's a used car you got from singing about a man checking his phone."

I bought groceries for a month and paid Wynona back the first piece of her advance.

She didn't say thank you.

She wrote "PAID" on the envelope in fountain pen and pinned it to the corkboard by the piano.

That was the year.

It went fast.

In the fall I wrote on the Hartsell porch every morning.

I sat on the sagging swing with a legal pad, and the screen door banged behind me.

The woman in the Titans cap taught me to stop apologizing for a good line.

The pencil man taught me that a chorus should be stupid enough to sing drunk and true enough to sing sober.

Rayburn Records had pulled Breckin's single the week after the Ryman.

In October I cut "Paper Lanterns" myself, in Studio B, the way it was written.

Hudson engineered.

Emmylou played drums.

Wynona sat in the control room in her cardigan and said "Again" a dozen times and "Fine" once.

Hartsell Music put it out in November.

Emmylou started a new band that winter with two women from the honky-tonk and a pedal steel player who was sixty and never spoke.

They played Broadway on Fridays.

She made a sign for the kick drum that said NO TEN PERCENT, and the crowd still sang it every night.

Sunday suppers were at Wynona's.

Ham, deviled eggs, the Titans cap, the pencil.

Wynona started calling Emmylou "the loud one" and me "the other one," and saved Emmylou the end piece of the pound cake every week.

At Christmas she gave Hudson the brass key to the Hartsell front door.

"Don't change anything," she said. "Change everything. I'll be on the porch to complain."

In January I saw Adalyn at a Monday open mic on the east side.

She played one song alone on a guitar she still couldn't play past four chords.

It wasn't good.

It was hers.

She saw me in the back and didn't come over.

I didn't go to her either.

But I clapped.

In February I went to a downtown hotel for a meeting with a writer from Texas.

The lobby bar had a little stage by the elevators.

A blond man was sitting on a stool there with an acoustic guitar, playing a cover for nobody.

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