Run, Rose, Run(9)

Not yet, anyway.

“Suit yourself,” Billy said amiably.

“They make a good burger here, you know,” came a new voice. “Of course, it’s cat meat.”

AnnieLee swiveled around on her stool and saw a man in a denim shirt and faded blue jeans smiling at her. He was dark-haired and coal-eyed and as long-legged as a young Johnny Cash, and her heart gave a little skip in her chest. He had just about the nicest face she’d ever seen.

“I’m kidding. I hope that’s obvious.” He held out his hand. “I’m Ethan Blake,” he said. “I’m a big fan.”

She drew in a slow and deliberate breath. She’d die a thousand deaths before she’d let him see that he’d flustered her. “Are you, now?” she asked.

His smile got wider, and a dimple appeared in each lightly stubbled cheek. “Yes,” he said. “I’m really a fan, and my name is really Ethan.” He gestured to the empty seat next to her. “Do you mind if I join you?”

She gazed down into her drink; the ice cubes had all but melted. “Suit yourself,” she said.

“Can I buy you a beer?” he asked. “Or a glass of wine, or a carton of milk?”

She bit back a smile as she stirred the club soda with her straw. “No, thank you.”

“You were really something, though,” he said. “You wrote those songs?”

That made her look over at him again, and this time there was fire in her eyes. “Of course I did. Does that surprise you, Ethan Blake? Do you think I look too young to write them? Too meek? Too female?”

He held up a hand. “No, no, not at all. Sorry. I’m just trying to make conversation.”

AnnieLee scooted her stool a few inches away from him. The last thing she needed was a man hitting on her; it didn’t matter one bit how handsome he was. “Well, I don’t generally talk to strangers,” she said.

“Okay, I get it,” he said, and he sounded good-natured as opposed to defensive. “That’s totally fair. But Nashville’s a small town, and maybe someday we’ll be friends.”

“I doubt it,” she said.

He put a twenty down on the bar and called, “See if you can buy her a drink for me, will you, Billy? She did good up there.”

Then he walked away. AnnieLee watched him go, prepared to look the other direction if he turned back around. But he didn’t. He just picked up that same old bar guitar and started heading toward the stage.

Her stomach gave a terrible lurch. Keyes, you utter fool, she thought. You were rude to the next act.





Chapter

8



AnnieLee grabbed her coat and ducked out of the bar before Ethan Blake started to play. If he was bad, she didn’t want to hear him. And if he was good—well, she didn’t want to know. No sense kicking herself all night for being snotty to the next Luke Combs. She’d been kicked enough already.

Outside the air was cool and the street empty and quiet. Lower Broadway, Nashville’s honky-tonk hotbed, was just a few blocks to the southeast. But from where she stood, AnnieLee could hear nothing but the electric hum of a streetlight and the whir of a police siren far in the distance.

After glancing around to make sure that she was alone on the block, AnnieLee hunched up her shoulders and started walking. The early spring breeze was chilly and her shirt was still damp with sweat. She walked quickly, alertly, occasionally stopping to look behind her, wary as a rabbit in a wide-open field.

But no one was following her. She slipped along the streets, beneath flowering crab apples whose blossoms seemed to glow in the darkness. She turned one corner, then another, heading for the water.

Along the Cumberland River, which snaked its way around and through Nashville, lay a narrow strip of a park that AnnieLee had called home for two nights now. She’d slept in better places, that was for sure. But she’d also slept in worse.

She crossed Gay Street and climbed over a low stone wall, and in another few steps she was standing beneath trees just coming into their leaves. Though it’d been eighty degrees the day she’d left Houston, spring was late this year in Tennessee. She could hear the river sliding along its banks and the sound of traffic on the bridge.

Ducking down between two giant hydrangeas, AnnieLee pulled her backpack from its hiding place. She took out her tarp and lay it on a smooth patch of ground beneath an elm tree, humming softly, almost tunelessly, to herself. Then she unrolled the lightweight down sleeping bag she’d gotten—along with a knockoff Swiss Army knife, forty dollars in cash, and a lewd proposition—in exchange for Maybelle at Jeb’s Pawn.

A folded sweater served as her pillow. Light from a neon Coca-Cola sign on the other side of Gay Street flickered through the tangle of branches.

Sleeping outside reminded AnnieLee of summer nights when she was a kid, when she’d lie in the back of her mom’s pickup truck as it sat parked in the driveway. Mary Grace had been alive and happy then, and sometimes she’d join her daughter under the stars, singing her to sleep with old folk lullabies like “500 Miles” and “Star of the County Down.”

It had felt like a wonderful adventure to slip into dreams with her mother beside her and the whole sky of stars hanging right there above them. But bedding down outside like this now? It was nothing but a cold and lonely necessity.