Maggie buried her head beneath her pillow. She knew it was her mom knocking on the hotel door. It was a perky knock, like there was a grinning face behind it. Yep, that was her mom. With a groan, she tossed the pillow aside and glanced at the clock. Twelve-thirty. No wonder her stomach was growling. She didn’t usually sleep in so late.
“Open up, hon!”
Maggie rolled out of bed and went to the door, where she looked through the peephole and undid the locks. “Morning, Mom . . . er, afternoon.”
Her mom held out Maggie’s favorite cardigan and said in her Tennessee accent, “You left this in the dressin’ room last night.”
Maggie took it and slipped it on. It was soft and the color of newly cut grass. It smelled like Cole, for some reason, and she wrapped it tight around herself and sat on the edge of her bed. She wanted to tell her mom about Cole leaving the band, but it wasn’t her place to do so. Instead, she rubbed her eyes and yawned.
“Stay up too late?” her mom asked, tilting her head.
Maggie nodded and looked at her mom’s flawless makeup and glossy red fingernails. She was wearing a chocolate brown blazer fitted to her petite frame. “Yeah, I couldn’t sleep, so I stayed up watching shows.”
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry.” She walked to the bed and sat down next to Maggie. She put her arm around her and squeezed. “Do you still like all of this?” she asked. “The shows? The travelin’? I appreciate you doin’ pictures with us last night, but I had an empty chair next to mine the entire evenin’.”
Maggie rested her head on her mom’s shoulder. The smell of her shampoo was strong but nice—tea tree or something like it. “I couldn’t go out there,” she answered. “I’m sorry, Mom. It’s not because I don’t want to support you. I guess it’s because I want so much of what you have. Not your celebrity status or anything, but why you do what you do. You love to sing and you get to do it every single day. It makes people happy. It makes you happy, and I want that too. Seeing you up there over and over and over, I feel . . .”
Her voice faded as she tried to figure out what she wanted to finish saying. None of it would come, though. Sandy squeezed her tighter. “I know you want to sing, honey, but we’ve already hashed out the problems with that. Remember how much we tried with voice lessons? You don’t have the voice for it. The sooner you accept that, the happier you’re goin’ to be. There are so many other things you can do. This kind of life is hard. You know that.”
Maggie thought of Cole’s advice to go after what she wanted. “Yeah, but . . . it’s all I know, Mom. It’s all you’ve ever shown me. If someone told you to stop singing right now, could you?”
In the long silence that followed, Maggie pulled herself away from her mom, knowing she had hit a nerve.
“No, I couldn’t do that, you’re right.”
Maggie narrowed her eyes. Her mom’s tone was too flat and remote. Normally, she would brush off such a question. She would laugh and joke about how she was tied to her career and what a “burden” it was, but this morning she didn’t. As Maggie watched her expression and noticed her eyes glossing over with tears, she realized it wasn’t the question subduing her. It was something else, a flash of something far deeper than the thought of never singing again. It was so cold it punched Maggie like a left hook to her cheek. There were times when her mom wasn’t herself, usually when she was sick with the flu. She would lock herself in her room for three or four days, but she always used the excuse that she didn’t want to get anyone else sick. Today didn’t seem like one of those days. It was worse. Her mom had never seemed cold any of those other times.
Truly concerned, Maggie opened her mouth to ask her mom what was going on, but then she was smiling and Maggie wasn’t sure if she had seen anything at all. Maybe she had imagined it to make her mom a little less perfect. Did she cry when nobody else was looking, or was she really as happy as she seemed?
“Well, Maggie,” she said, slapping her knees with both palms before standing up. “We can talk about all this singin’ stuff later. Today we need to go shoppin’ so you can look great tonight.” She turned and looked Maggie up and down.
“I know, I know,” Maggie laughed, pushing away her concern. “I look horrible.”
“No worries, darlin’. I’ll get you lookin’ sharp in no time.”
* * *
Cole texted Maggie thirty minutes before they were supposed to meet for the big “family dinner.”
Need a ride to the restaurant?
She imagined him all sullen and depressed as he typed the message, mainly because that was how she felt as she typed back, I’d love that. Normally, she looked forward to the dinner after CMA. It was at a fancy French restaurant where her dad had proposed to Sandy, so they reserved the whole place around the same time every year, whether they won an award or not. It was always a party. This time, however, it felt like a death march as she climbed into Cole’s rental truck and buckled herself in.
“You look great,” he said, nodding at her sleek black dress and teal cowboy boots she had bought with her mother that afternoon. She was tired from shopping all day, and the boots were brand new, so they were starting to hurt already.
“Thanks,” she answered, pulling up the zipper of her coat. “This one actually has a back.”
Cole shook his head and smirked. “Darn.”
She couldn’t help the smile spreading across her face. “This truck reeks,” she said after taking a deep breath and regretting it.
“Yeah, I know. I tried to get something older, but as usual, they looked at me like I was batshit crazy. Who wants an old, beat-up rental car, right?”
“Right,” she laughed. This truck was the same make and model as Cole’s truck back home, a Ford F150, but Cole’s was a 1977, so that made it a thousand times better than this brand new piece of crap. She had never liked new cars. The smell, for one, made her skin crawl. Cole’s Ford smelled like good clean engine grease and pine because his house was by a Christmas tree farm. He liked to pretend he was in the mountains next to a forest. All of that made her realize that even when he wore a tuxedo, he was country right down to the “work hard, play hard, love deep” attitude. Was it possible to take all that too seriously? Or was it just what made Cole who he was? Now that he was leaving, she was afraid she’d never find out.
“So, how long?” she asked as they entered the freeway.
“For what?” He was wearing his Stetson, and it cast a dark shadow across his face, hiding the barely-there freckles scattered across his nose. He hated those freckles.
“’Til you leave,” she answered.
He jutted out his jaw and sighed. “This was my last gig with the band,” he said softly then cleared his throat. “Now I guess it’s pretty much over . . . so that’s that.”
“Okay, well, at least I know now.”
Cole slowed the truck a little, even though they were on the freeway. “I’m going to miss the band . . . and you . . . like crazy,” he said. “I hope you know that.”
“Then why are you leaving?”
Shaking his head, he tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “It’s complicated.”
She grunted. “Complicated like when we broke up?”
Silence.
Cole took the next freeway exit and they were soon on the road leading to the restaurant. Once they pulled into the parking lot, he stared straight ahead. The radio still played softly in the background, and Maggie realized it was her mom and dad—the song they had played on stage yesterday.
“Your mom has a voice like fireworks,” Cole said. “It sparks when she hits certain notes. I’ve heard people say they get goose bumps when they hear her in person.”
A pang of jealousy hit Maggie in the gut. She understood what Cole was saying because the fireworks happened to her all the time when she listened to her mom’s voice melding perfectly with her dad’s weighty, gravelly voice. There was a reason her parents were famous. How had they given birth to a daughter with no control over her vocal chords?
“So?” Maggie asked, trying to bring Cole back to the moment. “Is all of this because we broke up? Because it was too complicated then and you think it’s going to get like that again? Maybe things wouldn’t have been so complicated if we had communicated a little better.”
What she really wanted to say was maybe things wouldn’t have been so complicated if he had communicated a little better. There was one thing in particular that had always bothered her—a girl he had once told her about, someone he had dated for a few years before he joined Down Sugar Road. Since she and Cole hadn’t wanted her parents to know they were together at the time, she had snuck out of the house one night and he’d picked her up a few blocks away.
They had driven to the tree farm and parked, spreading out some blankets in the bed of his truck so they could watch the stars as they breathed in the sharp spice of the pine trees and made out so much she got a rash on her chin from his stubble and had to cover it with makeup for a week afterward. It had never felt right to go further than kissing, even then. They had munched on strawberry Twizzlers and stale potato chips, and that was when Cole told her about the girl, how she’d lived down the road when they were in high school and they’d hung out in his basement where he could play his drums and she’d fiddle around with his electric guitars. She was the only other girl he had been with seriously. Maggie tried not to be jealous, but it was difficult. She pushed for more information about the girl, but Cole wouldn’t budge. “Things got . . . out of hand,” was all he would say.
Out of hand. She still didn’t know what to make of that.
“No, Maggie,” Cole said. “It’s not because of you or our breakup, I promise. I wish it was that simple . . . that easy.”
“You can tell me the reason,” she said. “Some people work hard their whole lives to get to where you are. Leaving that seems so random. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know.” He slowly undid his seatbelt. “For now, I hope you can be okay with knowing only part of my reasons. I’ve told you all I can. The rest is . . . I can’t talk about it yet.”
As they got out of the truck, Maggie decided pushing him was not the way to learn anything. She would have to wait until he was ready.
Inside the restaurant, Ray and Ben, the oldest members of the band, were going at it on their instruments. Ray, a sixty-year-old hardcore traditional cowboy who still combed his silver hair like he was living in the fifties, played his fiddle with all the gusto of a twenty-year-old. Ben, a little younger but still old in Maggie’s eyes, strummed his favorite guitar. They grinned ear to ear while everybody else listened from a long table set up just for the group.
“Maggie! Cole!” Ben yelled out, still playing as she and Cole entered the dining room. “’Bout time you showed up!”
Everyone turned to look at them. “I didn’t realize we were late,” Maggie answered, laughing. Her dad motioned her over to an empty chair between him and her mom. He loved this place. It was ridiculously overpriced, and Maggie couldn’t read most of the menu, but she knew her dad had hoped it would impress Sandy when he proposed to her, and it had a special place in his heart.
Maggie left Cole’s side and walked around the table to give her dad a hug. “Congrats on best duo,” she whispered into his ear, realizing she hadn’t had a chance to talk to him since the few quick photos after the show. She brushed her lips across his cheek, right above his neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard. He smelled like Old Spice, and she breathed it in and smiled as she sat next to him.
Her mom squeezed her shoulder. “How’s the boots, hon? They look fabulous.”
Maggie winced. “They hurt, but I’ll break them in soon enough.”
“Of course you will!” She turned and started talking to Lynnette, the world’s most talented and prettiest bass player, at least according to Maggie. Her platinum hair was curled in smooth ringlets, giving her an almost schoolgirl appearance even though she had just turned forty and hitched herself to a guy who worked at the Denver Zoo as a bird keeper. It seemed an odd choice for Lynnette, but they fit together perfectly once all was said and done.
“Think we’ll ever get to order?” Cole asked from across the table, nudging her foot with his toe. He nodded to Ray and Ben, who were starting another song. They were both red-cheeked and tipsy.
“It’ll be a miracle,” she laughed, looking around the table. The same sense of satisfaction she always felt around Down Sugar Road filled her. Family. That’s what they were, even if they weren’t bound by blood, they might as well be. Band members came and went, but some like Ray had been around since the beginning. It was another reason she wanted to sing. Singing meant this kind of connection—everyone laughing and singing and smiling, just happy to be around each other.
There were eleven of them in the room—herself, Cole, her parents, Lynnette, and Martin, their agent, who called her Mags in an English accent even though he knew it bothered her. Then there was Ray and Ben, and across the table next to Cole were Mark, the keyboardist and extra drummer, Scott, the banjo and mandolin player, and Aaron, the rhythm guitarist. Everyone was singing.
Feeling content, Maggie opened her mouth to sing with them, focusing on her voice as much as she could. Whenever she sang in a group, everything sounded so cluttered in her head. For a minute, she didn’t care. She smiled at Cole across from her as he lifted his glass of fancy wine and took a sip.
Then, for the five billionth time in her life, she remembered standing in the church choir when she was ten. They were singing “Amazing Grace,” her favorite song of all time. She knew every note, every word, and she was so tuned in to her own voice it took her a full minute to realize someone was snickering behind her. Miss Mandy, the chorister, kept waving her hand as if nothing was happening. She always seemed to have a squinty-eyed cringe on her face as she led the music. Finally, the laughing got so loud that everyone else started snickering too.
“Holy cow, Maggie!” Austin, a boy Maggie thought was her friend at the time, yelled out above all the singing. “You sound like a dying cat!”
Everybody stopped singing through their laughter and Miss Mandy’s waving arm limped to a halt.
“Now, Austin,” she said in a scolding tone. “That wasn’t very nice at all. Do I need to ask you to leave?”
Austin folded his arms as everyone’s giggles faded out. “I can’t sing when Maggie sounds so bad,” he said. Maggie looked behind her shoulder and saw him glance at her with twitching lips as he tried to keep his laughter inside. “She sounds so bad, it makes me laugh.”
Miss Mandy sniffed and looked at Maggie, as if trying to figure out what to say. The rest of the children started whispering.
“Maggie,” Miss Mandy said in a gentle voice. “Let’s finish practicing for today, and then I’d like to speak to you after class about some private lessons. Is that all right?”
Horrified, Maggie nodded and felt like she wanted to sink into the floor. She had a pretty voice. It wasn’t strangled or ugly. At least, that was what she had always believed. Nobody had ever told her otherwise.
For the rest of class, she sang in barely a whisper.
“You’ll never be like your parents,” Austin chided as he walked past her and out the door, and something hit her in the chest. It was as physical as a fist, but nobody could see or feel it except her. Austin stuck his tongue out at her as she slunk toward Miss Mandy.
She would never forget that day in the choir. Her mom put her in voice lessons after that, but the teacher gave up three months in. She was a “lost cause,” Maggie heard her teacher say to her mom. “Your daughter should never sing in public—not with where your career is going.”
Undaunted, her mom put her in more voice lessons, but every teacher came to the same conclusion. She could not sing.
Despite all that, Maggie sang louder now. It was her only defense against everybody who didn’t believe in her. She ignored a few friendly smirks from Scott and Aaron, and sang so hard her throat turned scratchy. She grabbed her mom’s glass of wine and took a sip. Since she had turned twenty, her parents let her drink as long as she was supervised. Of course, sometimes she and Grace defied that rule together. That wouldn’t be happening anymore.
By the time the song was over, the energy in the room was practically electric. Two waiters came to the table and Maggie ordered the andouillette.
“You know that’s made out of pig intestines,” Cole said.
“It is?” she said with a mock gasp as she clutched her chest. “Damn! I thought I was ordering the snails!”
Cole cracked up laughing until his face turned red and the waiter came around to his chair. He knew something like pig intestines didn’t faze Maggie, not after she had been eating at this restaurant since she was a kid.
“Same as her,” Cole said to the waiter, gesturing to Maggie. “Might as well share your fate,” he said once the waiter was gone. “Although, I hear this restaurant prides itself on its andouillette, so maybe we’re smart.”
“Of course we are.”
Coal grinned, nudging her foot under the table again. He lingered there for a minute, then cleared his throat and pulled his foot away.
When they were halfway through their meal, Todd stood up and raised his wine glass. “A toast to all of you,” he said with a warm smile. “Without you, Sandy and I wouldn’t be where we are. You make our voices bigger than life, and I wouldn’t spend my time with anyone else.” For a second, he looked emotional as everyone got to their feet and raised their own glasses. Maggie loved that her parents were so thrilled about winning their award, even after winning so many others in the past. Ray said something about going to a bar later for some proper whisky, and the group laughed.
Lifting her own glass, Maggie glanced at Cole. He winked, and her hope that he had changed his mind about leaving soared toward the ceiling. Then he opened his mouth after everyone clinked their glasses together and drank.
“I’ve got an announcement,” he said with a slight tremble in his voice. Everyone sat back down, and Maggie looked up at him, knowing he was nervous by the way he hooked one thumb in his belt loop and dug his nail into his hip. Poor Cole. This couldn’t be easy for him.
“What is it?” her dad asked, still glowing from the toast.
Cole cleared his throat. He was still holding his wine glass. It had one good swallow left in it. “I want to tell all of you how great it’s been these past four years. You are my family . . . the only close family I’ve had for a long, long time.” He looked down and his loose curls fell across his forehead. As usual, they were mashed from his hat now hanging on a coat rack by the door.
Sandy let out a nervous laugh. “Cole? What’s this all about? You’re talkin’ like you’re gonna leave.”
He nodded and looked up, sliding his eyes from one person to the next, avoiding Maggie completely. Ray’s eyes were as big as silver dollars. He and Cole had always been close, with Ray stepping in as a father figure when Cole’s dad passed away a few years ago. Maggie was surprised Cole hadn’t told Ray before this.
“I am leaving,” he said as the room fell deathly silent. The energy from earlier sputtered out like a broken light bulb.
“What?” Todd asked in a higher-pitched voice than normal. “Leave where?”
“I’m leaving the band,” Cole answered, swallowing and wincing at the same time. “You have Mark now. It’s not like I’ll be leaving you high and dry.”
“Well, sure,” Todd retorted, “but that doesn’t mean you’re not valuable. We have a big tour this year and we’ll need you. The more we’ve got the better. You’re . . . you’re family. You signed for the coming year, didn’t you?” He glanced at Martin, who shook his head.
“His contract ended last week. I’ve been waiting for him to sign a new one.” He looked up at Cole. “Guess this is why you haven’t sent it over.”
Cole shrugged and took the last drink of his wine.
“Why?” Lynnette asked. “I’ve worked out how to live two lives since I married Daniel. You can too. It’s possible.”
Ray laughed. “Two lives, huh Lynn? Who else you sleepin’ with besides your husband?”
Maggie rolled her eyes. Ray, just like her dad, always joking.
Blushing, Lynnette threw him a dirty look. “Oh, hush. You know exactly what I’m talking about. This life ain’t easy, but if it’s what you want, you can’t give up on it.”
Maggie’s chest swelled with hope, and she touched the necklace at her throat. Lynnette was right, just like Grace and Cole.
“C’mon, hon,” Lynnette continued as she looked up at Cole. “Tell us why you’re leaving. We can help you figure out a solution.”
Cole set down his glass and backed away from the table, pushing his chair behind him. “I’m sorry.” Without another word, he stepped away from the table, grabbed his hat from the coat rack, and walked out of the restaurant.
Everyone looked from the empty doorway to Maggie, as if she might be able to answer the questions hanging in the air. She glanced at her mom, once again surprised to see that distant look in her eyes. Maggie was sure it didn’t have to do with Cole, but with the reason she was sitting between her parents. They always sat together.
“You okay?” Sandy asked, touching her elbow.
“I’m fine,” Maggie answered in the warmest way she could. “I need to be alone. I’m sorry.” Standing, she turned to everyone still looking to her for answers. “I don’t know why he’s leaving,” she stated, “but it’s not because of me. If it was, I’d fix it.”