Run Rose Run(10)

A gust of wind blew last winter’s dead leaves and a torn scrap of notebook paper toward AnnieLee’s face. As she brushed them away, she saw words scribbled in black marker on the paper: …ave never felt like this before, and it… The rest was ripped away.

She wondered if the note had ever gotten to the person it was meant for, or if it was just wadded up and pitched into the bushes.

Lines written but never read

Like a song only played inside your head, she sang softly.

Then she stopped to readjust her makeshift pillow. If she had a nickel for every scrap of a tune she’d ever written, she’d be curled under six-hundred-thread-count sheets in a fancy hotel instead of stuffed inside a polyester pawnshop sleeping bag underneath a damn elm.

She closed her eyes and thought back to earlier that evening, when she’d stepped onstage for the first time and sung her scared little heart out. Maybe there was a song in that experience. Certainly there was a story in how she’d got there, and what she was running from. And as she drifted off to sleep, she thought of Ethan Blake and the warmth of his dark eyes.

Eventually AnnieLee began to dream, and inside that dream, she spoke out loud. The words were nonsense at first, and then came a name. “Rose,” AnnieLee muttered as she curled tighter inside her sleeping bag. “Rose!” Her arms flew up as if to ward off a blow. “Oh, Rose, be careful!”





Chapter

9



Ethan Blake got to Ruthanna’s so early on Tuesday he had to wait twenty minutes in his truck before it was time to let himself into the kitchen. “Morning,” he said as Ruthanna’s cat, Biscuit, twirled itself around his legs. He reached down to pet its soft gray head.

“It sure is,” Ruthanna said. She was tucked into her favorite spot in the entire enormous house, against the cushions in the bay window, and the sunlight was falling on her red-gold hair. “You want coffee?”

“Thanks, I’m good,” he said. He’d made a stop at Bongo Java on the way, plus Maya, who was over by the stove, made coffee so strong he could practically feel it stripping the enamel from his teeth. He set his guitar case on the Florentine tiles and took an apple from the enormous fruit bowl on the kitchen island. “So I saw an amazing new singer last night,” he said.

Ruthanna gave Maya the side-eye, and Maya giggled into her fist. Ethan braced himself for the ribbing he could tell was coming.

“So, Blake,” Ruthanna said, “what was so amazing—her face or her boobs?”

“How do you know the singer was a girl?” Ethan asked, his mouth full of apple.

“Because I’m not dumb,” Ruthanna said.

“Fine,” he said. “But give me a little credit, why don’t you? It was her voice.”

“Mm-hmm,” Maya said, pouring herself a mug of her killer brew.

“Sang like an angel, did she?” Ruthanna asked.

“If you don’t mind a cliché like that,” Ethan said, “then yeah, she did.” He still felt moved by the blunt power of AnnieLee’s lyrics and the soaring ache of her voice. “She sang like an angel who’s been cast out of heaven, yearning to fly back up to where she belongs.”

Ruthanna stared at him. “That’s some highfalutin poetics for nine a.m. Also, to be perfectly honest, she sounds depressing.”

Ethan rolled his eyes, and Ruthanna laughed at him. “She was hot, though, wasn’t she?”

“That’s not the point,” he said.

“Of course it is,” Ruthanna said. “What’d that old bird Tennyson say? ‘In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.’”

“Now who’s got the poetics?” Maya asked. “Also, I think that poem ends sort of tragically.”

“Seriously, Ruthanna, I’d think you’d care,” Ethan protested. “She’s good, and she was playing at the Cat’s Paw. That’s your bar, if you recall, and in my mind, that gives you dibs.”

Ruthanna got up from her window seat and slid across the kitchen in her gold velvet slippers. “I don’t know what you’re talking about dibs for. She’s not mine because she sang in my bar, you big oaf. I’ve got no interest in wannabe country singers, anyway,” she said. “I don’t care if they sing like angels or pick like Doc Watson. I don’t care if that girl was born with a Dobro in her hand and a harmonica in her mouth.” Ruthanna was on a roll now, and her sentences became lines of a song she was making up as she went. “I don’t care if she’s pretty as a daisy or if she can belt out the high notes in ‘Crazy,’” she sang.

Maya came in with her low, rich alto. “Ruthanna’s retired and she deserves to be lazy…”

Ethan started laughing—he couldn’t help it. “Are you two about done?” he said.

They turned toward him, grinning. “Probably,” said Ruthanna. “I can’t think of anything else that rhymes with lazy.”

“Jay-Z?” Maya offered.

“Look,” Ethan said. “I’m not telling you this for my own good. I’m just here to say that I think you’d really like this girl.” He patted Ruthanna on the shoulder. “She’s a lot like you,” he said. “Beautiful, talented…and mean as tobacco spit.”