Her heart beat harder. What time was it? Quarter ’til four, by the alarm clock. She would have to be getting up in a few minutes anyway.
A guitar. Imagine that.
She switched on the bedside lamp. She stood up, wrapped her cotton robe around herself, and left her room to go to Jenn’s, which was two steps away.
The door was closed. She knocked.
The guitar playing immediately stopped.
“Open up!” she said.
There was a hesitation. She could feel Jenn inside the room, maybe sitting on her bed, staring at the door.
“I heard you playin’, hon. It sounded nice.”
Footsteps. Quiet ones. Jenn was light on her feet.
The door opened, and her daughter peered out.
“I didn’t mean to wake you up,” Jenn said.
“Aw, baby! You don’t worry about that! I was glad to hear it.” And that, she thought, was the biggest fish that ever passed as a minnow. She saw that Jenn must not have gone to sleep last night. She was still wearing her jeans and the T-shirt she’d worn to the concert. Jenn looked tired, her brown eyes were a little hazy. “Were you up all night?”
“I’m okay,” Jenn said.
“Hm.” She glanced into the room, at the posters on the walls. It was a typical room for a sixteen-year-old girl. Jenn’s guitar, the old Washburn Joel had bought for her at the downtown pawn shop three years ago, was sitting on its stand next to the bed. “Well, then.” Did she dare to ask the next question? She did. “You want a little breakfast? An egg? Slice of bacon?”
Jenn was thinking about it. She had a way of compressing her lips tightly together when she was thinking. “Can I have two slices?” she asked.
“Comin’ up,” said the woman, and when she turned away from her daughter to go to the kitchen in the small house on Lancelot Lane her mouth trembled and tears had jumped into her eyes.
Jenn retreated into her room, but she left the door cracked open.
She picked up her guitar. She sat on her bed and played a little bit. Nothing special, just strumming some chords. Hearing the ring of the notes. They looked copper-colored, like her mother’s hair. She tried some hammer-ons and pull-offs, gradually picking up the speed. Those were okay, but her fingers were so stiff. She tried some tapping, again increasing the speed.
Ouch. That sounded like Pop Rocks dropped into a big bowl of mess.
Try it one more time.
No, she had a ways to go yet.
She returned to strumming, slowly, letting the copper orbs fly around the room and bounce off the walls. At least, in her mind they did. Some of them bounced off the posters. They evaporated in the air, after they were done singing.
She turned her head. She gazed past her ugly reflection in the mirror over the dresser to the cork bulletin board with pictures of herself and her dad on it. In those pictures, they were both playing guitars. She was fourteen, and he was still alive. In a corner of the board was a blue ribbon that said First Place Winner, Talent Show, Cedar Park High School, 2006.
Her eyes returned to the face of her father. He had been so handsome. A big man, and rugged. He had been an auto mechanic at the Felix Gogo Toyota dealership in Temple. He’d said there wasn’t an engine made he couldn’t fix. He’d driven fifty-seven miles there in the morning, and fifty-seven miles back at night. Every weekday for as long as she could remember. He had called her Birdy.
“Birdy,” he said, “the crows will fly.”
And that was exactly as he said it, the will pushed down like a thumb on a sore spot.
It was what he said to explain that bad things are going to happen, no matter how much you pray for them not to. No matter how much you ask God to save your father. No matter how much you cry in your room, and lie there on the bed thinking about how handsome he was, and how big and how rugged, before the cancer starting eating at him and shrinking him down. Those crows, they’re gonna fly.
“You know what, Birdy?” he said in the hospital room, with the afternoon light streaming through the window and those tubes up his nose. “Have to take me down in size some. So I can get through the Pearly Gates. Aw, honey, it ain’t nothin’. Come on, wipe your eyes. Laurie, get her a tissue. Listen, listen.” He gave her the stern look, the one that always worked. “Get yourself together. Mom tells me you’re not eatin’. Is that right?”
“Not hungry,” Jenn had answered.
“You better get hungry, girl. One thing for a big ol’ hoss like me to shrink down, and it’s another for a twig like you.”
“Dad,” Jenn had said, and her eyes had almost flooded out of her head.
And he was such a good guitar player, too. His hands were big, sure, but they moved so lightly on the strings. Together they sat on the porch, and they played songs like America’s ‘A Horse With No Name’, and Waylon Jennings’s ‘Luckenbach, Texas’, and his ‘Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys’. And so many, many others.
She was named after Waylon Jennings, who had taken the time to shake her father’s hand and talk to him like a regular person at a concert in Austin long before she was born. Her name wasn’t ‘Jennifer’, it was just ‘Jenn’. Jenn Stewart, that was her.
“Birdy,” he’d said one day in July on the porch, and this was just before he’d gotten sick, “you are a natural-born guitar player. And I swear, you’ve got lightning in those fingers. I can’t even do licks like those! Lord girl, you put me to shame!”
But that was his way of saying he was proud.
Her nickname, Birdy, came from him too. He said she could sing the birds out of the trees. Said she must be half-bird herself, to sing like that. That voice going up and up, right to the clouds. Up and up, right to God’s ear. You must be half-bird, Birdy. The other half’s an ol’ stinkbug! Ain’t that right, Laurie?
And her mother Laurie would grin and say, “Just like her daddy!”
Jenn had her father’s eyes, but she mostly resembled her mother. She was thin—much thinner now—and wiry, with the same copper-colored hair. She was a pretty girl—used to be—with high cheekbones and an elegant nose, again like her mother’s. That was a good thing, because many of the Stewarts and the Ingrahams had honkers. She could be funny, she had a quick wit and she liked to dance, but there was a side of her that had some of the hard earth of Texas in it. That side was serious and sometimes moody. That side didn’t go in for a lot of foolishness. An old soul, her mother called her when that side showed itself. Old beyond her years. That was the side that told her not to smoke pot or cigarettes, though her mother had admitted smoking pot herself back in the days when she was—and she said this with some pride in her voice—“kind of a hippie”. Jenn had tried beer at a party after the Crosstown Showdown, but she went back to her sweet tea.
Sometimes she wore her hair like her mother did, in braids. Today, though, it lay loose about her shoulders. It didn’t shine, though. It was dull.
She strummed the guitar some more, just trying it out again. Her fingers were not what they used to be. How long had it been since she’d brought this guitar out of its case in the closet? Three, four months? Half a year? Maybe so.
It had been a good concert last night at the Vista Futura. Her mom had told her about meeting The Five at the Denny’s, where she was a waitress.
You know what one of them said when I asked him what that thing with the fist and the peace sign meant? He said ‘Bullshit!’ His exact word. I almost pooted, tryin’ to hold back a laugh. But the girl was nice. She seemed kind. She’s the one who gave me the shirt.
Won’t you eat just a little dinner, honey?
< >
Jenn had seen them on television. She’d followed their progress, and in a way shared their tribulations. First off, the sniper shooting the bass player in Sweetwater. Her grandmother lived in Sweetwater, so it had riveted her attention. Then what had happened to their road manager in Tucson. And that Stone Church thing, and finally two deaths in the New Mexico desert.