Free Long Way Gone by Charles Martin

Hot and cold running water. And decent cell phone reception if you stand in the right spot on the porch.”
    We climbed the steps to the porch, where she stood waiting on me to unlock the door. My hands were full. I spoke over four bags of groceries. “It’s unlocked.”
    I set the groceries in the kitchen, lit a fire to knock the chill off, and then found her on the back porch, staring out across the world. It was a clear night. Moon high. I extended my arm and allowed her to look along the end of my finger. “That peak is about two hundred miles away. Dad would stand right where you are on nights like this and say, ‘The veil is thin up here.’ ”
    She whispered, “He was right.”
    She leaned against me and locked her arm in mine, too tired to talk. I held her hand and led her to the spare bedroom, where I cracked a window, and she slipped off her boots and lay down. I covered her with a blanket, cut the light, and stood at the door.
    “Can I ask you something?” I said.
    “Anything.”
    “Why didn’t you sing any of your own stuff tonight?”
    “With my third album, Sam thought I needed to become more edgy. More”—she raised fingers in the air to form quotation marks—“ relevant . A few years passed, and I was standing on a stage somewhere in California, or maybe Washington, and I realized the folks in the audience didn’t know the songs. Didn’t know the words. Didn’t sing along. And between the lights, the lasers, the makeup, and the explosions, I didn’t blame them.” A self-effacing admission. “The songs were no good. Junk. Why should they care? I certainly didn’t, and they could tell when I sang them. But I had to make a living, so I began singing what they did know. Covers. Songs they cared about.” A pause. “It paid the bills . . . for a while.”
    “Speaking of Sam, how is he?”
    Her eyes dropped. “Haven’t talked in a long time. When I call him, he’ll call me back, but . . . I don’t think he ever forgave himself for shooting you. If he’d known it was you, he’d never have pulled the trigger. He thought it was just two guys . . .”
    I let it go. Figured this was not the time to correct her view of history. “What happened between you two?”
    I could hear embarrassment in her voice.
    “I looked at Sam like an uncle. He looked at me like, well . . . I was young. It took me awhile to realize that a man thirty years older could want something physical from me.” A shrug. “A few months after you left, he came to me with some excitement and said he’d put together a collection of really great songs and wanted to make a follow-up record to release on the heels of the successful tour of the album you and I made. So we did. And he was right, it was a great collection of ballads. All right in my sweet spot. Two platinum records. Five number ones. We were all riding the wave. On the surface life was good.
    “Then he and Bernadette divorced, and I came home from tour to a candlelight dinner, his shirt unbuttoned to the middle of his chest, and what felt like a date. He put his hand on my thigh, I refused him, told him that wasn’t how I saw him. I moved out of the apartment he’d rented for me and handed him the keys. Felt that was best for our relationship. Keep it professional. He was really good about it . . . said he wanted whatever made me happy.”
    She sat up on the bed and drew up her knees, hugging them to her chest.
    “Then I walked into the studio to record my fourth album, and his assistant was driving my Mercedes and the songs I was looking at were nothing like what I’d sung in the past. They were lifeless. Superficial. Pop candy. When I approached Sam, he said the current inventory of available songs was limited. It’s just something that happens in the business. Life in Nashville is a function of who writes the best songs. It was the best he could do.” She looked up at me. “Then he signed a new girl and she cut a record with some songs that I thought