Open Road Summer(4)

Dee grins at me, pointing at the bold-font headline. “Lissa is not happy, so, naturally, I’m thrilled. She’s making them change the title of the article.”

Most of Dee’s “look” has been a bickering match with her publicist at some point or another. The wardrobe battle raged on for months. Dee has a very specific sense of style, which is inspired mostly by the old movies she watched with her mom when she was little—shrunken blazers; girlie skirts or modest, colorful dresses; and delicate ballet flats. When Dee was starting out, Lissa fussed that her style was “too collegiate for our target demographic.” The record label wanted her in cowgirl boots, but Dee refused. After her first album, Dee was offered a promotional deal for J.Crew’s new teen line. Lissa’s eyes spun like a slot machine landing on dollar signs, and she never mentioned Dee’s clothing choices again.

I skim the article, hoping the interviewer played nice. Idiosync mocks clichés, which is why I like it, but if they made fun of Dee, I’ll have to cancel my subscription and send anonymous hate mail.

Country chanteuse Lilah Montgomery is everything you expect and a whole lot more that you don’t expect. She is a giggly blond gamine, she is affably coy about her personal life, and she is unpretentious to the point of eating a messy cheeseburger in my presence. In the two hours I spent with Lilah Montgomery at Smokin’ Pistols Saloon in Nashville, she proved sweet as pecan pie. But this rising star will raise her voice, all right. Just ask her if she plans to veer her upbeat country-gone-folksy song-book toward the pop music scene.

“Never,” she insists. Her voice carries vehemence, a resounding finality that defies the usual public-relations doublespeak. “No, let me rephrase that. I won’t change the way I write music; I won’t change my subject matter or add bass beats or refrain from using a banjo and harmonica in my backup band. But if people who enjoy pop music also enjoy my music, wonderful. I’m thrilled. But I won’t compromise who I am as an artist or songwriter.”

Industry critic Jon Wallace calls her a “musician’s musician”—an artist focused on instrumentation, on perfecting complicated harmonies and pioneering her own sound. Lilah cites Patty Griffin, Joni Mitchell, and Dolly Parton as her biggest musical inspirations, though her music is pointedly more cheerful than her inspirations suggest. Where does that extra spark come from? Her mother—songwriter Laura Montgomery.

While I read, Dee’s spinning her work phone in the palm of her hand without looking at it. Instead, her gaze shifts around the tour bus as if she’s tracking the flight pattern of an aimless gnat. When Dee’s mind darts around, her eyes do, too.

“Hey,” I say. “Relax.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She waves her hand at me. “I’m relaxed.”

This would be a lie no matter when she said it, even in her sleep. The first time I saw a diagram of nerve endings in my biology book, I thought they looked like tiny, splayed-out hands or the bird’s-eye view of a leafless tree. I’m pretty sure Dee’s nerve endings look like coiled springs.

“Terry texted me again. He won’t give it up.” Terry, her manager, is relentless.

“Which ‘it’?”

“Performing ‘My Own.’ Not gonna happen.” She taps her fingers on her phone, standing her ground.

The song is an upbeat powerhouse, complete with hand claps in the chorus.

On my own, you’ll see,

This ain’t no Les Miserables.

I’m wild and free and I’m seventeen,

And I’ll make it my job

To show you how good my life can be;

Ain’t no pain in my alone.

I’m happy to be just little ol’ me,

And I’ll make this world my own.

She thought if she could write a song about being happy without Jimmy, maybe it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. That plan didn’t work, but her label loved the song enough to put it on the record. Dee cares deeply about honest performances, and she can’t make herself prance around stage while singing a lie to her fans. When Dee refused to include “My Own” in the tour set list, Terry’s face looked like an oven-baked ham—pink and almost steaming.

The sky is nearly dark now, smudges of clouds across an inky sky, and the bus window reflects my image back to me—the sharp collarbones that have long been my least favorite feature, the wavy hair that’s hard to manage without the use of my left hand. But, worst of all, behind thick black eyeliner, my eyes look tired. And I am tired—weary, even—but at least I’m here, hiding in Dee’s life until I can handle my own.

As we barrel toward North Carolina, I take in the last glimpses of Tennessee that I’ll have till late August. I don’t think I’ll miss Nashville, except maybe the country sky at night, the way every centimeter is flecked with stars. It’s something I could never capture in a photograph, the hugeness of the universe and the smallness of everything else. When Dee and I were little, the world seemed so vast—so impossibly, frighteningly vast that we could never make it our own.

Does the sky go on forever? Dee asked me the summer we met. We were lying on our backs in the cool grass, facing up. She’d gotten a book of constellations for her eighth birthday, and we were using it to search the sky.

Yep, I told her. It’s called infinity.

Infinity, she repeated. There was a pause as I traced Ursa Minor with my finger, and I could feel her looking over at me. Do you think we could be friends for infinity? she asked.