Free 9 Letters by Blake Austin Page A

keeping mine in.
    “I really, really loved the
way you were when you played music. Not just your music itself, but
the way you were. You open up when the words come out of you. You let
the world in, and you’re a strong man already but it makes you
even stronger. So tune up your guitar. Maybe get new strings if
you’ve got to. Practice. Get those callouses back.”
    It wasn’t just my guitar
callouses I’d lost in the last year.
    “I’ve got two first
memories of hearing you play guitar. The first time, the real first
time, you didn’t know I was there. It was after school one day.
I think you were waiting on practice. You were sitting in the back of
your daddy’s pickup and you were picking at the strings and
playing something I’ve never heard you play since. You weren’t
singing, just kind of humming along. Maybe you made it up just then.
Maybe it’s a tune that’s never been played before and
will never be played again. And I was walking up through the parking
lot, the next row over, and you didn’t see me, because you had
your head down over your guitar, so I leaned up against the next car
over and listened. I’d already kissed you, but that was the
first time I felt like I had a taste, a real taste, of your soul. Of
who you are to God. Of the best of you.”
    I’d been trying to write
her a love song. I hadn’t been waiting on practice, practice
had been waiting on me. Every day for weeks, I’d tried to write
her that song for a couple minutes every day before practice. Given
up, eventually. I hadn’t thought about that song in years.
    “Then there was the first
time you played for me. You played me Johnny Cash, because you knew I
loved outlaw country, and you knew you couldn’t go wrong with
‘Give My Love to Rose.’ We were sitting on top of the cab
in the parking lot of, I don’t know, I think CVS, and there you
were with your hat on backwards and the sun on your face and you sang
to me like I was the only person in the world. Never told you this
either, but that’s when I knew I was in love with you. Because
love isn’t a one-way thing. Love is a relationship between two
people. I knew how I felt already, but I didn’t know it was
love until I heard you play and I knew you loved me too.”
    I thought I’d been too
chicken to tell her I loved her for another six months still, because
the first time I said it aloud was that next Christmas, my senior
year, after we’d eaten dinner with my family and I realized I
wanted her as my family more than I wanted anything else in the
world. But it turns out, I’d told her already.
    “So that’s all.
Just...play your guitar.”
    I read the letter over once more,
wiped my eyes with my sleeve, and then folded the paper up and put it
back in the envelope. Onto the left hand side of the table. Three
read, six remaining.
    “Hey King,” I said,
when I finally felt like I could speak. The dog looked up from where
he was lying near the door. “Where the hell’s my guitar?”
    I hadn’t seen it while I
was cleaning, which meant it was in the garage.
    The garage had been a mess since
before we’d moved in, because my granddad hadn’t ever
really bothered cleaning the place out. But my Gibson acoustic was
where I must have left it in the corner, in its case on top of a pile
of junk. A pick was still stuck between the strings, the capo still
clipped onto the head. The high E was busted—that was probably
why I’d put it away. I’d probably been too lazy to put on
new strings, even though there was a complete set in the case next to
the tuner.
    I brought the Gibson inside,
along with the strings and a pair of dykes. Sat down on the couch,
started going through and pulling off the old strings, putting on the
new ones. New strings are a pain in the ass. It takes a while for
them to hold a tune. But it’s got to be done, sometimes. I got
them wrapped around the pegs, snipped off the extra length, then
tuned the thing.
    I had no idea what to play, so