Bet hadn’t spoken to Eric Chandler in years. She preferred remembering the boy she and Dylan had looked up to when they were children, not the grad student who broke her heart. He looked much the same as he had in Ellensburg. His wheat-colored hair had thinned a bit, but he still wore his trademark black Levis, Doc Martens, and flannel shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow. She knew his eyes would still be an icy shade of blue. He looked like he hadn’t gained an ounce, a lean one hundred seventy pounds on his six-foot-two frame.
Emotions flooded her the moment she saw him across the room. The joy of seeing him was soon replaced by pain. The final moment as he walked out the door of the apartment they lived in together, slipped into the hot rod he’d owned since high school, and drove away. The bombshell that he wanted someone else was still a fresh crater at her feet.
Two years before that, Bet had walked into English 101 to find Eric standing at the front of the class. A graduate student in English, her childhood friend was the teaching assistant for the semester. One thing had led to another, and after reminiscing over a beer, they ended up making out in the back seat of his car. Halfway through her junior year, she’d moved into his tiny apartment. A week before graduation, she’d come home to find his belongings packed and him waiting on the sofa with the news he’d gotten another woman pregnant and decided to “do the right thing.”
Bet moved to Los Angeles and never spoke to him again.
She wondered if she could slip out without Eric noticing her, except she had to walk in front of him to get out the door. Eric’s mother had lived in Collier until she died a year ago, and Bet occasionally saw Dylan when the two visited town at the same time. She and Dylan remained friends in that awkward way people have when childhood memories are the only thing left in common. But Bet had managed to avoid Eric. He’d moved back east, and she wished he’d stayed there. He was a successful writer, but Bet refused to read his published works. She didn’t want any insights into his emotional life.
Rope’s voice broke through her thoughts. “Anything else, Bet?”
“I’d best get home,” she said, pulling cash out of her fanny pack.
“Your money’s no good tonight,” the bartender said. “Rob Collier said I should put your dinner on his tab.”
Bet didn’t want any favors from Rob Collier. “Oh, he did, did he?”
“Said I should get you anything else you wanted before you left.”
Bet contemplated refusing it and buying her own dinner, but common sense told her she had nothing to gain. Rob probably wouldn’t even notice when he paid his bar tab, so the gesture would go unnoticed and she’d be out the cash.
“Music is just getting ready to start; you don’t want to miss it again,” Rope said.
She sat back down on the barstool to listen. “All right, then, I’ll take one of your fancy root beers.” Rope handcrafted his own.
“Coming up.” Rope moved with the grace big men could have in their element.
Bet leaned against the wall, the pressure of the rough wood reassuring against her back. A group of people crowded the bar and blocked Eric from her view. If she waited long enough, the room would have enough bodies in it to allow her to exit unnoticed.
After Rope delivered her root beer, she sat, sipping and listening to the songs learned in childhood. The bluegrass her father played and her mother sung, Fiona’s lilt changing the words into something more poignant. Mournful ballads and lively jigs, Bet’s mother one generation out of Appalachia. Bet could picture her father there, sitting at the hearth, guitar in his lap. Light glinting off the strings while Bet grew drowsy in her mother’s arms.
Earle met Fiona while in boot camp at Fort Benning, Georgia. They’d both said music brought them together and it was love at first sight, but Bet wondered at the price her mother had paid for falling in love with a man who could never stay long from Collier. There would be no return to the soft coves of the Appalachian hills for the future Mrs. Rivers. She’d given up her ties to the South when she married Earle, embracing instead the sharp peaks and hard, rocky ground of the Cascades.
Bet couldn’t remember her mother’s face, but she remembered her voice and the feel of that voice vibrating against her cheek as she nestled against her. The strangeness of how she’d spoken her words, the elongated vowels and clipped consonants, lingered in Bet’s ear. Slang from another culture. A skift of snow, a clever person being not smart but friendly. Bet had tried to speak like her mother, the burr of Scotland rippling through hundreds of years in the mountains of North Carolina, but she’d never been able to capture the sound. Once her mother died, no model remained and Bet’s father rebuked her when she tried on her mother’s accent, so she stilled her tongue.
Bet reached the bottom of her glass and, having spent enough time with her mother’s ghost, set it down along with a couple dollars’ tip. She waved goodbye to Rope and stood to go. The musicians were in lively debate about the next song to play, and Bet moved out among the crush of people standing behind the tables and chairs closer to the fireplace, Schweitzer tight against her side. She felt secure Eric wouldn’t notice her cross the room.
“Now, if we could just get my old friend Bet Rivers to join us on this one,” she heard his voice say. It pierced her, the timbre of it. The voice that had once said, “I love you,” and later, “I’m leaving.”
The room took up his cause. “Come on, Bet,” and “Let’s hear it, Sheriff,” echoed around the room. All eyes turned to her. A pathway opened up in front of her until nothing stood between them.
“What do you say, Bet? It’s been too long.”
Bet looked around at all the faces. Her people. Her town. Not Eric’s. She belonged here, not him. These were people she cared for, watched over. Everyone in town expected her to sing. She had ever since she was a child. She couldn’t walk out without everyone wondering why.
She nodded and stepped up to take the spot Eric indicated next to him. Sensing Bet’s discomfort, Schweitzer placed his body between the two of them. She patted the dog and glanced sideways at Eric. Sitting this close, Bet could see the years did show in his face. Lines had etched their way into the corners of his eyes and grooves had formed around his mouth that might spell unhappiness, or maybe that was just her hope.
Eric started a haunting melody, and she joined her alto voice to his baritone on the old Stephen Foster tune. She released herself to the music and let her mind go blank, the lyrics indelibly burned into her memory so as not to require her attention.
‘Tis a sigh that is wafted across the troubled wave.
‘Tis a wail that is heard upon the shore.
‘Tis a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave.
Oh, hard times, come again no more.
Images of the body sliding through the broken ice rose unprompted in her imagination. Images that continued to sharpen in her mind, pelting her over and over. Panic swelled in her chest. She couldn’t breathe and fought to keep singing the words.
She remembered Eric as a teenage boy. The scraggly beard he’d tried to grow like the grunge band singers he emulated. She looked at his profile, clean-shaven now. The man in the dark with the body at the lake. Eric had been tall as a young man. Her panic grew.
Bet stood at the end of the song and exited as quickly as she could, begging off singing another with excuses of work and Schweitzer needing a walk. When Eric reached out to stop her, his face full of yearning, she slipped easily from his grasp and hit the front door at a near run.
She pretended not to hear him say, “It sure felt good to sing with you again.” She didn’t want him to know the woman in her agreed, while the sheriff wondered what brought him to town.