“Come back from where? You never did tell me where you are right now.”

“I’m going to Atlanta,” Annajane said. “I need to talk to Shane.”

“To tell him it’s over between you?” Pokey said hopefully.

“To confess my sins and ask forgiveness,” Annajane said.

“Bad idea. Terrible idea,” Pokey said. “Clearly, something, even if it wasn’t full-blown, buck-nekkid car sex, is going on between you and my brother. You need to turn around and come back here and get it all sorted out. And then take another ride in the Chevelle to finish off what y’all started last night. Hopefully to a motel or somewhere twenty miles away from the prying eyes of Grady Witherspoon.”

Annajane’s phone beeped again. “I’m gonna let you get this,” she told Pokey. “But please, don’t bother calling me back with any more reports of who said what. I can’t take any more.”

23

Shane’s faded blue Aerostar van was parked in front of the cabin. A beat-up bicycle leaned against the concrete-block foundation, and his yellow lab, Wyley, barked once as she pulled the car under the shade of a huge old dogwood with fading pink blooms.

A minute later, Shane stood on the porch, his face alight with pleasure.

“Hey!” he called, grinning. “Awesome!”

Annajane ran from the car and threw herself into his arms. “I’ve missed you,” she whispered into his neck. “I just had to come to remind myself why.”

“I’m glad,” Shane said, patting her back reassuringly. “Totally.”

He rubbed his cheek on hers, the dark stubble scraping against her skin. He was dressed in rumpled khakis and a faded Doc Watson T-shirt, and his feet were bare.

He pulled back a little. “But I wish you’d called to let me know you were on your way. The place is a wreck. They guys and I have been pulling all-nighters, working on stuff for the tour.”

“Who cares?” Annajane said. Wyley bumped up against her leg, nudging her hand with his muzzle until she relented and leaned down to scratch his ears.

“See? We’re both glad to see you,” Shane said.

He retrieved her overnight bag from the car, and they walked inside arm in arm. The cabin was essentially two rooms: a combined living and dining room with a small kitchen L, and a tiny bedroom with adjoining bath.

It didn’t look like it had been cleaned since the last time Annajane was there a month earlier.

Newspapers and books littered the floor and tabletops. A guitar and a Dobro were leaned up against the soot-blackened brick fireplace, and the leather sofa and matching armchair were coated in a fine layer of yellow dog hair. The coffee table in front of the sofa held an open laptop computer, a cereal box, and an empty plastic milk jug. Music wafted from a pair of enormous old stereo speakers that served as Shane’s end tables.

The tiny kitchen counter and sink held an array of dirty dishes, and the trash can overflowed with beer bottles and pizza boxes.

Annajane wrinkled her nose. “You really do need a woman’s touch.”

“That’s what I’ve been telling you,” he said. “I’m sorry you had to see the place like this, but the guys and I have been working on new material,” Shane said. “Wait til you hear.”

He swept the newspapers off the sofa and pulled her down beside him. “We’ve got almost enough material for a new album.” He tapped some keys of the lapboard and turned up the sound.

Banjos and fiddle music and a harmonica and three voices, combined in high harmony, with lyrics about pleasing and sneezing, and summer and bummer.

“Nice,” Annajane said, nodding her head to the beat. “What’s it called?”

Shane beamed. “Ragweed Rag. I mean, this is just kinda the first pass. Corey wants me to finesse the lyrics some. I’m kinda worried about the bass line. What do you think? Too clunky?”

Without waiting for a response, he started the song over again.

“It’s good,” Annajane said. “But you know I don’t know that much about bluegrass…”

“You’ll learn,” he said, squeezing her knee. “Let me play you the song we were working on last night. Okay?”

“Actually,” Annajane said, catching his hand, “there’s something important I need to talk to you about. It’s why I came down here today.”

“Sure,” Shane said, still tapping at the computer’s keyboard. “Hang on just a sec, can you? Corey just IM’ed me. He’s got an idea for the melody for the bridge for one of the new songs.” He grabbed his Dobro and started to strum, nodding and pausing.

She got up and wandered into the kitchen and began putting it to rights without giving it much thought. The space was too tiny for a dishwasher, so she ran a sink full of hot soapy water and scrubbed and rinsed and dried virtually every dish, spoon, or fork Shane owned. When the dishes were dried and put away in the one tiny cupboard, she bagged up the trash and took it outside to the garbage can, which was also overflowing with what looked like a month’s worth of bagged-up trash.

The bedroom was a disaster. A plastic laundry basket erupted with dirty clothing. The bedding was a tangled knot of threadbare sheets with a worn green sleeping bag stretched across them. And frankly, she thought, the place smelled like a swamp.

“Ugh.” She tugged at the window, finally forcing it upward. But the window had no screen, and a fine film of yellow pollen drifted inside. She sneezed but left it open. With a singular motion, she swept all the bed linens into the laundry basket, took them out to the tiny mud porch at the back of the cabin, and unceremoniously dumped everything into the washing machine.

She would not, she decided, be spending the night at the cabin tonight. She would have to find a tactful way to suggest that a night at a nice motel would be just the thing to reignite their romance.

When she’d done all she could in the way of housekeeping, Annajane rejoined him.

Shane was still noodling around on the Dobro, but now he was talking on his cell to one of his bandmates. She recognized that he was in what he liked to call his “groove,” and with a shrug, she found a weather-beaten broom and gave the entire house a thorough sweep.

“You don’t have to do that, baby,” Shane said, glancing up from his playing. He slapped the sofa cushion next to his. “Come sit down. I’ll get that later. Didn’t you say you needed to talk to me about something?”

“Okay,” Annajane said, feeling a lump in the pit of her stomach. Just tell him, she thought. Don’t be a chickenshit. Get the truth out in the open, and everything will be all right.

She sank down onto the sofa and turned to face him. “First off,” she said nervously. “I don’t want there to be any lies between us. Remember when we first started seeing each other, the promise we made to each other?”

“Right,” he said. “No lies. It’s the foundation of our relationship.”

“Okay, well, the thing is, some stuff has come up with Mason.”

“Your ex? Didn’t he just get remarried, like, yesterday?”

She took a deep breath. “He was supposed to get married on Saturday, but his little girl got sick right in the middle of the ceremony, so they had to postpone it.”

“I’m sorry,” Shane said. “Is the kid okay?”

“She had an emergency appendectomy,” Annajane said. “She’ll be fine. Mason, on the other hand, may not be getting remarried after all.”

Shane frowned. “How come?”

“It’s a long story,” Annajane said. “Celia’s all wrong for him, but he’s just figuring that out. Better now than later, I guess, huh?”

“Better now than later,” Shane said, nodding solemnly.

“Uh, well, then we went out for a long drive together last night,” Annajane continued. “And he had a flask of bourbon in his glove box, and I found an old mix tape I made him, from years ago, and I don’t know, it might have been the combination of the bourbon and Journey, but I…”

“Wait!” Shane interrupted. His eyes were aglow. He grabbed up the laptop and started typing like a fiend.