Chapter 9

Boatwright's hand was shaking.

He had spent the whole afternoon telling himself a story - that he was protecting the store, the signing, the day - and the story had run out at 1:58 p.m. on a sidewalk with three hundred people watching and a photographer from the Austin paper lifting a camera over the crowd.

He held the pickup an inch above Rue's open palm. Rue did not close his fingers until Cade nodded. Then Cade nodded, and Rue closed his hand, and something in his shoulders let go for the first time in thirty-one years.

Sunny turned to Boatwright.

"Keys."

"Sunny-"

"Keys. The fob. Your tablet. And the earpiece."

He took them out slowly, one at a time, and put them in her hand. The earpiece left a red line on his ear.

"You're done," she said. "I'll mail your last check. Don't come back on the floor."

"I was doing my job."

"You were protecting a number." She looked at the pickup in Rue's hand, and then at the crowd, and then back at the man she'd hired eight months ago because he was fast and clean and good with the tablet. "You put your hands on a man's property and called the police on him so you could keep the room pretty. That's not a mistake, Trey. That's who you are when it costs something. Go home."

He went. Nobody clapped. Nobody yelled at him either, which was somehow worse - three hundred people just watching him walk down South Congress past the coffee shop to a silver car parked two blocks down. Somebody in line filmed it. Officer Delgado wrote one more line in his notebook, closed it, and said there was no theft, no arrest, and nothing to file.

Cade sat down on the shop's front step - the same step in the photograph - and Rue sat down next to him, an arm's length apart, because neither of them knew how to do anything else yet.

"You left a guitar here in '94," Rue said. "I asked Rusk to sell it to you cheap when you were old enough."

"He did," Sunny said from the doorway. "Four twenty and a set of strings. I told him the pickup was good work."

Rue laughed once, without sound.

"She took the picture," he said, nodding at the margin. "Your mother. Rusk had a camera that day. She wrote on it before we even got home. She died in March, and I couldn't stay in a house with her handwriting in it, and I made a mess of the next four years, and by the time I could stand up straight I figured you were better off with the story you already had." He looked at the cards. "So I mailed things. It was all I could figure out how to do."

Cade picked up the first card, the one from 2002. Happy 13th. Keep playing.

"These come home with me," he said.

"They always were yours."

At 3:40 that afternoon, a bus left Austin for Amarillo with one empty seat. Rue still had the ticket. He kept it folded in his jacket pocket, and later he used it to mark his place in a chord book, which is a thing a man does when he isn't going anywhere.

At eight o'clock, Cade Merrick walked onto the stage of a sold-out theater in front of three thousand people with a black guitar in his hand and a small metal object held up between two fingers.

"This is the pickup in this guitar," he said into the microphone. "I bought this guitar off a rack on South Congress when I was nineteen. I've played it on every record I've ever made." He let that sit. "The man who wound it is named Rufus Calder. He's my father. He mailed me thirty-one of these, one every year, and I never knew who he was."

Then he turned and held out his hand toward the side of the stage, where Rue stood in his navy windbreaker with a guitar in his hands and no idea what to do with his face.

Three thousand people turned toward him.

And they clapped.