Page 11 of The Cadence
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I didn’t know him very well,” I reassured him. “He was locked up for most of my life and I never visited until I came to live here and she became my guardian. You don’t get to know someonewhen you only see him across a table once a week in a room with a hundred other visitors at the prison.”
“I’m still sorry. You don’t have any people left?”
“No. Hang on, I’m going to grab my tissues. It was so nice of you to give me all those boxes.”
When I returned from my bedroom, he was checking his phone and frowning at it.
“Is something happening with your new business?” I asked. “I was thinking about it more.”
“No, nothing about that. My agent—never mind. Did you ever consider leaving Tennessee?”
“Leaving?” I repeated. “You mean like living in Georgia?” The state line wasn’t that far away.
“I mean going farther,” he said, and I felt my eyebrows raise.
“No, I never did. My car isn’t reliable and everyone I know is here.”
“Do you have a lot of friends from high school?”
“I mean my grandmother’s friends from church. But they care about me,” I added, “and I care about them, too.”
“Besides them, there’s nothing tying you to this place.”
“I have two jobs now,” I said, “one at the Biscuit Barrel and I’m also a stocker and bagger at the grocery store around the corner. That’s great because I don’t even need to take the bus.”
“You could get jobs like that anywhere,” Will told me.
“The biscuits wouldn’t be as good.”
“This is serious, Calla.” His face didn’t show it, but his voice was run through with frustration. “You’re about to be evicted and your plan is to live in your car.”
“I understand the seriousness of not having a stable home better than most people. I’m doing the best I can!” I told him. “What do you think I should try next, spinning straw into gold?”
“No, I have another idea.” He had a totally different plan, which he described over a second glass of tea. It was not anything that I expected, but I liked what he was telling me.
And it wasn’t too long before I heard myself saying “yes” to it.
Chapter 3
“Calla? Are you breathing?”
I nodded and then did actually force myself to take in some air, sucking it hard into my lungs.
“Maybe we should switch seats,” Will said next. “It might be worse if you’re staring outside.”
“I want to sit at the window,” I answered. “It is scary that there won’t be any ground beneath us, but I really want to see.” I took another deep breath. There was ground directly beneath us right now because we were still rolling on wheels like a car, but soon we would be lifting into the air with nothing to support us at all.
“We could go over Bernoulli’s principle again,” he suggested.
“No, thanks.” I’d understood that after the fourth or so time he’d talked it through, so now I knew how planes stayed in the sky. I was ready to try flying and I was thrilled to travel and to see a new place, too. But it was hard to grasp that after twenty-oneyears, I was leaving Tennessee for the first time. On an airplane. With Will!
It really was difficult to believe and in fact, no one had. “I’m sorry to have to quit on you like this,” I had told my boss at the Biscuit Barrel. “I have another opportunity and I can’t let it slip away.”
“What are you doing?” she’d asked. She didn’t get interested until…ok, I had been a little too excited and I name-dropped. I mentioned the man who was probably the most famous in our town’s long history, from all the way back when it was just a railroad depot on the way to Atlanta.
“I’m going to Michigan to work for Will Bodine. William Franklin Bodine,” I’d told her, speaking each of his three names distinctly, and then I even repeated them. By that point, she’d waved over the other clerk and her daughter, the waitress. Even the baker had stepped out from the back to hear.
