Run Rose Run(34)

She looked over his shoulder as he watched. The camera was shaky and the sound was terrible, but even in a tiny iPhone video, AnnieLee’s talent was outsized. Her mix of power and vulnerability commanded the stage; Ruthanna could practically sense the crowd holding its breath so as not to miss a single sweet note.

“Take the wheel and just believe,” AnnieLee sang, “that you can change your life…”

When it was over, Ethan handed back the phone. “So you really think she’s got what it takes,” he said.

“I know she does. But she has to know she does, or it doesn’t mean a thing. Sustaining that kind of belief in yourself—that’s the hard part.”

“Tell me about it,” he said.

“That’s why AnnieLee needs us,” Ruthanna said. “So tell me, Ethan Blake. Are you in?”

He didn’t hesitate. “I’m in,” he said.





Chapter

32



AnnieLee closed her eyes, breathing in the rich scent of good, fertile soil. It was still early, but she’d been working for two hours already, tucking lettuce and cucumber starts into neat rows and hilling up soil around the potato plants. This was on top of the week she’d already spent clearing out the space for the garden itself.

It was part of the deal she’d worked out with Ruthanna: in exchange for the singer’s musical guidance, AnnieLee would plant a big four-square kitchen garden in what had been just another patch of emerald-green lawn. It’d been years since she’d tilled a vegetable bed, but she hadn’t forgotten how.

Just like riding a bike, she thought. Or playing a G chord.

Of course, Ruthanna had protested vehemently at first. For one thing, she could pay a professional to do it a thousand times over; for another, she “didn’t need some scrawny hillbilly digging a giant hole in the yard.” But AnnieLee had insisted. She wanted to feel as though she was taking care of her debts, even if she could never truly repay Ruthanna for taking her under her wing, not if she died trying.

Anyway, she liked the work. It distracted her from life—unlike songwriting, which demanded that she face everything head-on, no matter how painful it was. And though it was the writing that’d gotten her through the worst times, every once in a while she needed to take a tiny break from it.

AnnieLee shoved the spade into the dirt and wiped her sweaty face. Any minute now, she hoped, Ruthanna would swan outside in designer sunglasses and an enormous sun hat and regale AnnieLee with tales of her rise to fame.

AnnieLee couldn’t get enough of the stories. She’d learned how it took two full years for a kid named Pollyanna Poole to get a label to listen to her songs—and how the first thing they’d told her to do was change the name her beloved mama had given her. Six months later, the newly christened Ruthanna Ryder got a publishing deal with AMG Music, wrote “Big Dreams and Faded Jeans,” and watched another singer take it to number one on the charts and keep it there for sixteen solid weeks. “Didn’t know whether to jump for joy or cry for jealousy,” Ruthanna had mused.

Yesterday, as AnnieLee sowed beet seeds, Ruthanna had told her about how hard it was to be on tour. “The day starts at four thirty a.m. so you can hit the morning radio shows to promote your concert,” Ruthanna had said, sipping on Maya’s rocket fuel coffee. “And it doesn’t end until you’ve played your heart out onstage and then signed your last autograph outside the venue. You stumble onto the tour bus somewhere on the wrong side of midnight and fall into your bed, and by the time the sun comes up you’re in a different town. And then you do it all over again. Because the only thing harder than getting to the top, kiddo, is staying there.”

It sounded impossibly glamorous to AnnieLee, even if Ruthanna tried to convince her otherwise. She talked about working around the clock and barely having time to eat, about sweating blood trying to make enough money to pay the band, the production staff, the promoters, the organizers, and the concert spaces, “not to mention forking out a regular four figures on your spangly outfits.”

“It’s not a normal way to live,” Ruthanna had said.

Tell me more, was all AnnieLee could think.

She was lying in the sunshine, taking a five-minute break, when Ruthanna threw open the back door and said, “Tomato-gate.”

AnnieLee sat up and looked over at the Early Girls she’d planted and staked the other day, wondering if Ruthanna thought she needed to put a fence around them. Because that would be…well, weird.

“Do you know why salad is significant to country music?” Ruthanna said, coming outside and folding herself onto a cushioned bench at the garden’s edge.

“Um, because salads are good for you, and country music is, too?” AnnieLee guessed, slipping her work gloves back on.

Ruthanna said, “Yeah, I’d laugh if the truth weren’t so damn maddening.”

Then she told AnnieLee about what a powerful radio consultant had said about women in country music. Male musicians, he’d argued, were the truly important artists—the “lettuce” in the playlist salad. Female singers should just be sprinkled into airplay now and again as garnish.

“‘The tomatoes of our salad are the females,’” Ruthanna said. “That was his exact quote. And that’s why they call it Tomato-gate.”