Twang (21 page)

The Eagle was a smooth bird, cruising along I-40 and into Little Rock with hardly a lurch or a shimmy. Both Mike and my publicist hovered over their laptops. When we got onto I-440 West toward Texarkana, Tonilynn and I sat watching
Braveheart
on my laptop. I’d brought the movie to distract myself, to push my angst into one dark corner of my mind. Right before we merged onto I-30 West toward Hot Springs, we stopped to refuel the bus and grab some fountain drinks.
“Here’s to knocking ’em dead in Houston!” Tonilynn said, lifting her Diet Coke toward me. “We’ll be in Texas real soon. Yippee!”

“Yippee,” I said, holding my Mountain Dew high, silently willing time to slow down, stop. I found myself short of breath, my heartbeat accelerating as I thought about performing “Daddy, Don’t Come Home.”

We climbed back on the bus and the driver tuned the radio to a local station. Taylor Swift sang “You Belong With Me,” and then came “Lost You Anyway,” by Toby Keith, followed by a surreal clip of me singing “Blue Mountain Blues,” and an advertisement for tomorrow night’s performance, the deejay saying it was sold-out.

“Listen!” Tonilynn reached over to grab my arm. “A total sellout! Old Holt’s ugly mudslinging didn’t hurt your career one teeny bit.”

She turned to me when I didn’t answer. “You hear me? Girl, your success has not faded one smidgen! You got your third consecutive album debuting at number one on Billboard 200
and
Billboard Country!” Tonilynn gulped her drink, looked hard at me. “Seriously, Jennifer, sometimes I don’t think you realize what you’ve accomplished. Nashville’s like Hollywood—she chews up and spits out tons of wannabes every single new season.”

Tonilynn was right. I wasn’t grateful enough. Many singers and bands, even ones who got big radio play and had lots of money behind them, faded away fairly quickly. And she was right about Holt too. His accusations hadn’t hurt my career as I’d feared. I guess it was hard to rejoice too much because Holt’s career was in full upswing as well. If vengeance was the Lord’s, like Tonilynn claimed, seemed his songs should be tanking. I mean, come on—a mean, drunk, porn addict? Happily, my feelings for Holt remained in the disgust category.
The few times we’d crossed paths, I totally ignored him. Recently I’d been sitting in one of the recording rooms of Flint Recording just staring at some pages in my song notebook, at lyrics about forever love and kisses to die for, and I began to wonder,
Why was I such a fool? How could I not have seen the truth about Holt? Could I really have been into a man who brought back ugly memories of someone else I knew?
Knowing I’d overcome this hurdle was empowering, but not enough.

“Jennifer, look at me.”

I turned my eyes from the quarter moon I’d been watching out the bus’s window.

“Talk to Tonilynn. Are you okay?”

I didn’t know how to say what I was feeling. I wanted her to pull it out of me, use her supernatural gift. But then it struck me like a lightning bolt, that her asking me was I okay proved her so-called gift was a sham! I squeezed the padded armrests.
What was I going to do now?

It was dark when the Eagle pulled onto US-59 toward Houston. Tonilynn was in her pink satin nightgown, a white mask of cold cream on her face. “I’m off to bed now, hon,” she said a bit after eleven. “You get some good rest tonight, hear? Be ready to knock Houston off their feet.”

I was so weary of fighting the memories, so tired of battling them alone. But how could I close my eyes when the concert was less than twenty-four hours away? The awful stage fright was proof I wasn’t going to triumph after all.

“Know how you were saying you didn’t have a friend in this world when you were growing up?” Tonilynn rummaged around in her beauty case for a palette of creamy foundations that don’t melt under stage lights. “Well, it’s put me in mind of
that sweet hymn, ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus.’ You know it, don’t you?”

I didn’t feel like talking. Besides being exhausted from a night spent tossing and turning, I had only three hours until I was up onstage, and before my concerts I liked to kind of draw inward, reflect on my song lineup, what I planned to say between numbers, and that sort of thing. Today this preparation was extra heavy on my mind and even heavier on my heart. I shrugged one shoulder, but Tonilynn didn’t take the hint.

“Well,” she said, leaning in and squinting to dab concealer beneath my right eye, “I like to picture this image of Jesus holding my hand like a best friend. In my mind’s eye, you know? I do that whenever I get to feeling scared or down or just plain-out lonely. And let me tell you, he’s got the gentlest hands. Sometimes I can even feel where the nail scars are. I want you to have that too—the assurance that if you put your hand in his, you can walk through fire.”

Tonilynn raised an eyebrow and leaned in closer when I didn’t respond. “Jennifer, I’m feeling a lot of anxiety in you. I want to make sure you have peace. Every single one of us goes through hard trials, you know? We all fall into the pit from time to time. But if you got Jesus holding your hand, you know everything’ll be all right in the end. You know all those ugly things have a purpose.” She squeezed my shoulder. “ ’Course, before I was saved, I couldn’t see how any of the messes in my past would ever work out to make me stronger.”

Tonilynn seemed sure that someone somewhere orchestrated everything to her advantage, the good and the bad. I had to admit it would be nice if some benign higher power could wave a wand over my past and make it all okay. But there were things in my life I
knew
had no redeeming aspects whatsoever. You could dig them up, analyze them from every angle, and
never find a way to use them for good. What a simple soul Tonilynn was! This realization made me feel tender and mad toward her at the same time. It also hit me then, like a knife in the heart, that I’d never have Tonilynn’s peace. I would go on my whole life just like this, running and hurting.

“Hey, hey, what’s this about?” Tonilynn moved to the end of my kneecaps. She set the foundation palette down and took my hands in hers. “Don’t cry. If you got ugly things back there, just commit them to the Lord, and I promise he’ll use them for your good. It may not be right now, or even in the next couple of years, but someday he’ll
use
them.”

All I could do was shake my head, swallow my tears. Tonilynn let my hands go so she could wrap me in her arms. She pressed my tense body to her, and I buried my face in her shoulder. It felt good to be held as I breathed in her honeysuckle smell, and she murmured comforting words, telling me it would all be fine, that I was a sweet little lamb, and I’d never have to walk through life alone. After a while she pulled away, lifted my chin with her pointer finger, looked at me with pleading eyes. “I think it’s time to tell you a little story about bad things working out good in the end.

I nodded, and she hooked a lacquered fingernail into the collar of her blouse, pulled it away to expose a tattoo inked over her left breast. It was a red and blue heart, like a medical drawing in a textbook, with black wings spreading out on either side and a banner scrolled across the top, stretching to the tips of the wings that said: “Robert Lee Gooch.”

“Janis Joplin was my idol. I thought she was so cool.” Tonilynn let her blouse fall back. “I was fourteen, running around with a bunch of wild kids. We’d skip school, get drunk, and go for rides all over the county. Thought we were invincible. Didn’t give a fig about nothing or nobody.” She shook her head. “If I needed money for beer or cigarettes or
dope, I just took whatever I needed, including every last dime from Aunt Gomer’s handbag or the jar of change she saved for the missionaries. At times us kids would be so high we didn’t hardly remember plowing down somebody’s mailbox, trenching their lawn, or worse.

“But we were living for the minute. I got to hanging out so much with one particular group of brothers, three of the Gooch boys, and by and by I fell for Robert. I’d just turned fifteen, thought I knew everything. He was a good bit older, a bad boy, pure wild, and when he started flirting around with me, I thought I was Miss Everything. One day he said ‘Let’s drop out of school and go traveling across country on my motorcycle.’

“I thought that sounded like the best thing in this world. Getting away from a Holy Roller to run with a Rock ’n’ Roller.” Tonilynn chuckled. “Me and Robert took off, free as birds and partying like there was no tomorrow. Well, I got knee-walking drunk one night when we were in Louisiana, and woke up with the tattoo I just showed you.”

She paused to pop the tab on a Diet Coke. “But I wasn’t mature enough to realize actions have consequences, and pretty soon I found out I needed more’n a boy’s idea of love. When I told Robert I was pregnant, you never saw a change in nobody so fast in all your life. Robert claimed he’d never really loved me. Claimed it wasn’t his. Left me in a back alley in Shreveport.

“Sometimes, I look back and shake my head. It was kind of like history repeating itself, you know? How my own father took off?”

I managed a nod.

“Well, anyway, I called Aunt Gomer and she quoted Proverbs 11:22 to me: ‘As a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout, so is a fair woman without discretion.’ Made me so mad. I cussed and
yelled at her, and at God, or my idea of him anyway, until my voice gave out. It just made me determined to be even wilder, and I fell in with an even worse crowd.” Tonilynn paused to tuck a wisp of hair back up into place.

“I got into the big H, you know? Heroin felt like the answer to squashing the awful pain inside me. For a while anyway. I didn’t care if it hurt me, but I probably wouldn’t have done it if somebody told me it could hurt the baby. I’m always thanking God that my Bobby Lee has no side effects from all my stupidness. That’s pure mercy. Thankfully, I got busted for possession, and when I got probation, I managed to kick my habit, got a job at a dry cleaners because by that time I did have a baby to support. But my soul still hurt me, you know? So eventually I started up all over again with cocaine. Getting high as often as I could afford it, which wasn’t too often and which made me start stealing things.

“I was pretty talented, you know? But one day I got busted for shoplifting some jewelry, and sitting in jail the only person I could think of to call was Aunt Gomer. I sure didn’t want to, and part of me, a big part, figured she’d do me like she had before. But she was my last chance. She was my baby’s last chance too. I’d never been a religious person, but I got down on my knees on that cement floor and I said to God that if he could perform a miracle and make Aunt Gomer happy to come get me, then I’d know without a doubt he existed and I would straighten myself out and . . .”

Tonilynn trailed off, gazing into the distance, smiling nostalgically.

“What happened?”

“Man, oh man,” she breathed in an awestruck voice, still staring. “I vomited all over the floor, and then I called Aunt Gomer, and when she said, sweetly, ‘Let me get my handbag and I’ll be there directly,’ I thought I was having a dream, and
then, when I realized it was real, I felt this million-pound weight lifting off me and I started screaming, ‘Thank you, Jesus!’ over and over so loud the guards had to restrain me.

“I knew then God was real, and I knew he was powerful when Aunt Gomer didn’t fuss a lick that whole long car ride home. When we got back to Cagle Mountain and I’d gotten myself cleaned up, I found a part-time job at The Beauty Nook, and learned I was a pure natural when it came to both hair and makeup. I felt like the Lord had a plan for me, you know?”

“Hm.”

“I asked him to do a makeover on me. He swept away all the pain and the guilt, and day by day, I found peace with him, also with myself and other people. Now heaven knows I ain’t no saint,” she laughed at her rhyme, “and I still may not be exactly what I should be 100 percent of the time, but I sure ain’t what I used to be.”

She waited for me to respond. When I didn’t, she said, “See? I wanted to wring Aunt Gomer’s neck that first time, when she wouldn’t come rescue me. But looking back, I see it was all part of the Lord’s plan, his timing. I
needed
to go through all that ugly stuff, to experience pain, so when I finally
did
get saved I’d be able to use what I learned to help folks. It helps me understand what certain folks are experiencing. I truly believe my purpose here on earth is to beautify not only people’s outsides but also their insides. I love leading them to Jesus so he can wash all their ugly stains away.”

I wouldn’t look at Tonilynn. Did she think her story meant anything to me? I couldn’t help feeling mad about her acting like her faith was this magic wand she could wave to smooth over the bumps and valleys in her past. Though I now felt blameless in the blowup with Holt Cantrell, another ugly stain was my part in Mr. Anglin’s death. Plus, there were plenty of others, most originating with my father. As I started thinking
of him, I felt the root of bitterness nestling down farther into the rich soil of a hidden place in the depths of me. “Save your breath,” I told Tonilynn in a cool voice. “I’ve asked God for help more times than I can count, and you know what? My father’s still breathing.”