Description: 1 She met him on a Monday. Her heart stood still. At the time, she was sure his did, too. Of course she turned out to be right about that. The place was called the Back Way Out, a uniquely Charlotte sort of shithole, tricked out like a real juke joint with crooked shingles hammered over the drywall and sawdust shavings scattered across the stain-resistant vinyl-and-tile flooring. The Gimmick, even more than the décor, gave the bar away as the young-banker haven it was: everyone who entered got a laminated, folding yellow card, with a clip-art sketch of a beer mug on it and eighty-seven tiny squares. Fill each square by drinking-or at least ordering-all eighty-seven varieties of microbrew the bar served and you became a Back Way Out legend and got your photo on the Crossroads Wall behind the stage. Fill forty-three squares and you got a yellow Halfway Out the Back T-shirt, complete with drooling smiley-face logo. Natalie considered it a small sign of hope for humanity that she saw at least half a dozen drooling smiley-face T-shirts as Sophie dragged her through the door, but no new photos on the Crossroads Wall. The last time they'd come, eighteen months before, there'd been the same three grinning frat-boy idiots up there, in matching oversized Hornets jerseys. Eighteen months, Natalie found herself wondering. Was that really all? It seemed so much longer. Way back in their old lives. Back when they'd had lives. Now, she just wanted to go home. She held up her cell phone. "I'm going to go call them," she said, wincing as the guy in the Stetson on the stage unleashed a feedback shriek while trying to tune his guitar. "It's not really halfway," Sophie said, cocking her hip and folding her hands under her breasts so that they surfaced in the V of her summer dress. Right on cue, half a dozen pairs of beer-glazed eyes swung in her direction. Natalie rubbed a tired hand over her face. She'd taken her longest shower in over a year before coming out tonight, combed and given a curl to her hair, which was still new-road black even if she hadn't had it cut in months, applied actual perfume for the first time since forever. And still, she smelled like Johnson & Johnson. "Excuse you?" she said. "Forty-three. Isn't really halfway to eighty-seven." "It's a convenient stop on the road to Moronville." "Spoken like you've been there," Sophie said. She'd loosened her arms, let her breasts dip just far enough back into the V to draw at least a few of those beer-glazed gazes upward, and now she was having fun locking eyes with them. "It's not all their fault, after all. They're not the ones went and got themselves knocked up." "That's because they're" Natalie started, caught the eyes of one bespectacled, boots-sporting pretend-cowboy who'd gone straight past Sophie to her, and felt herself blush. Did she really look decent in this dress anymore? Twenty-four years old and she already felt like a mom who'd donned a cheerleader costume in the hopes of feeling sexy again. Except Sophie'd been the cheerleader. And Johnson & Johnson wasn't sexy, no matter what dress it was wearing. Only the mom part was right. "I'm going to check on our children," Natalie said. "Watch this." Sophie pulled her arms in tight again, grinning as the poor bankers' chins dipped. "It's like playing beach ball with seals." "Two beach balls," Natalie muttered, and Sophie laughed. "There's my Nat." "Where?" Natalie said, and moved off toward the hallway by the restrooms to get some relative quiet. When she came back ten minutes later, Sophie was sitting at a table near the stage with three guys in loosened ties, her unknotted blond hair spilling artfully over her one shoulder. In front of her sat three separate umbrella drinks, each a different shade of Day-Glo. "Saved one for you," Sophie chirped. Natalie stared down at her oldest friend, flushed and smiling and still nowhere near pre-pregnancy weight and not caring. Then she stared at the drinks, then at the guys Sophie had collected. One of them bald, another black. Clean, pleasant faces, well shaven or meticulously unshaven. On the right, farthest from Sophie, sat the spectacle guy who'd eyed her before. He was eying her still, shyly. He'd pushed back far enough from the table that Natalie could just see the Kenneth Cole messenger bag leaning against his right boot. In spite of herself, and her now-perpetual exhaustion, and her own mother's voice still echoing in her ears-Your babies are fine, Nat, God's sakes. Have a hard one on me-she felt herself nod. "Saved one," she said. "What if I want two?" "There's my Nat," Sophie said, slapping the table while the black guy blinked and the bald guy trembled and spectacle banker's eyes went just a bit wider. The musician onstage was strictly Advanced Karaoke, perfect for a training-wheel New South bar like the Back Way Out, but he had some taste, at least. "A Thousand Miles from Nowhere," "Sally Sue Brown." Spectacle guy, once he got up the nerve to sprinkle in some conversation with the shy glances, turned out to be enough of a Baltimore Orioles fan to have recognized Merv Rettenmund at a truck stop once, which Natalie figured qualified him, at the very least, to hear her Dave McNally hiccough story a little later in the evening. After some dancing. If he could dance. She had her fingers curled around a tallboy, her head cocked just enough so she could hear Sophie's laughter over the music and spectacle guy's increasingly animated, friendly chatter, and had finally remembered what it was-besides the boys, the beautiful, pitiful, sweating, shining boys-that she really had almost loved about all this when the lights went out. They went all at once, as if there'd been a power outage or someone had flipped a switch. As it turned out, that's what had happened, because of course the Back Way Out had no dimmers, no spotlight, wasn't set up for anything other than the game almost anyone who ever walked through its doors imagined they were playing. One row of track lights-the wrong one, too far back near the bar-blinked on, then off again. Then the row over the stage, right above their table, and Natalie squinted. "Holy shit," she murmured. Spectacle guy hadn't even turned around, wasn't curious, was too hell-bent on getting to her. Which of course doomed him, as far as Natalie was concerned. Then she stopped thinking about him entirely. "Whoa," said Sophie, one hand grasping the black guy's forearm. "You see that? That guy just-" "Ladies and gentlemen," boomed a gravelly woman's voice from the back. "We hope you appreciate the gravity of your good fortune." The new figure onstage really seemed simply to have appeared, a junkie-thin scarecrow all in black, complete with button-up work shirt, unlaced, half-collapsed hiking boots that looked more like potatoes than shoes, and a completely incongruous sombrero that mashed his dark hair down around his face. His narrow nose tilted to the right, and his fingers seemed to tremble slightly as he sketched a wave at the drinkers of the Back Way Out and then slid his hands deep into his pant pockets. Natalie took all of that in but soon found herself staring at his mouth, which looked too rounded, the lips forming a near-perfect circle. "He looks like a blow-up doll," Sophie whispered in her ear, hitting a simile exactly right, for once. Then she added, "With a leak," and Natalie wanted to hug her, and also to cry, but she didn't know why. "You know who that is, right?" She watched the guitarist shift, straighten his Stetson, and go still, apparently awaiting some communication from his new companion. "I know you do," said Sophie. "It's the Whistler. It has to be." "No shit." "Who's the Whistler?" said spectacle guy, and Sophie stuck her index finger to his lips and shook her head. "Dude," she said. What had Natalie expected them to play? Some George Jones wallow, maybe. One of the Blue Yodels. Something that let the Whistler communicate just how lonesome-sorry he was, since that's what he was famous for among the truckers who came into the Waffle House where Natalie worked nights and the handful of music-nerd friends from her two years at UNCC who'd spirited her off on weekend jaunts into western Georgia, down to Lake Charles, Louisiana, in search of the ghosts and echoes of what they called the real stuff. As if ghosts and echoes were the closest to real anyone could get anymore. Her friends, she realized, would have been at once electrified and horrified to discover the Whistler at the Back Way Out. The Whistler cleared his throat, shivered his bony shoulders. Natalie half-expected stalks of straw to poke out through his buttonholes. Then he muttered low to the guitarist, who swayed in place. Broke into a dazed smile, as if he couldn't believe his luck. "Well, y'all," he said, and tuned his E string again, even though it was already in tune. "I never thought I'd get a chance to do this. With this man."

Please Wait