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By Root 240 0

her posture, the honey light, her throat clearing but her voice sounding reserved, her fingers too jittery to focus. But she held them on the strings just as Cheno had shown her, and took a deep breath, imagining herself on the television sets at Stewart’s Appliances, remembering that the singers and the fiddle players and the horn section always faced the camera. So Teresa looked up, as if she were facing an audience herself. Ahead of her, on the opposite wall, a long horizon of mirror stretched from one end of the wall to the other. There she was, with her denim skirt and her white blouse, and the light coming down like hot honey. She was too far away from the mirror to see herself clearly—her features, her face, the way her eyes must have looked, confused and full of apprehension—but she was close enough to see that she would never be a distant figure to anyone in that cantina. She would be close enough to the patrons that the songs would mean something if she sang them the way she did in the quiet of her rented room above the bowling alley, and she could focus on the image of herself in the mirror if she didn’t want to look in their eyes, just the way she did with Dan Watson outside in the heat of the day, his eyes squinting to conceal what he was really seeing.

Seeing herself in the mirror, she suddenly felt calm, the idea of her singing not so ludicrous.

She began, her fingers already on the strings, and she strummed the first notes, watching herself in the mirror as the opening words came out of her mouth:

I had a man

In Abilene

Man of my dreams

But lowdown mean.

She was mesmerized by the sight of her hands caressing the guitar, her fingers moving in time over in that mirror and keeping up, but it lasted only a moment—Teresa felt the next notes getting away from her, and she stopped singing but kept playing. She had to bend her head to watch the strings, to concentrate, to remember the words and keep time.

Prettiest eyes

I ever seen

In Abilene.

The song had escaped her: her voice was clear, but her guitar playing lagged behind badly and she had to strum the chords between lines a few times to catch up. As she sang, her mind wandered to the ease of those women on the television sets, all of their energy focused just on the emotion of a song she couldn’t even hear through the heavy plate glass. They had it easy, she thought, struggling, her knees growing heavy from the guitar. She watched the strings, watched her fingers, but when she neared the last verse, she stopped playing the guitar and just hummed, looking up at herself in the mirror, focused entirely on the way she always wished she could see herself: poised, controlled, assured, brave. Not lonely, not frightened behind two locked doors, not longing for her mother, not longing for Cheno to be a different man, not opening her eyes to yet another morning of a life with no one in it, no money, her heart too heavy with worry. Her own image in the mirror showed this to her with such nakedness that she found herself singing as loudly as she could, and she surprised herself at how much lament she was able to muster, as if to make up for her uninspired performance, as if to sing out to herself in the mirror. She wanted to watch herself, but she found her eyes closing, her head rising up some as if the last notes knew on their own that they could slide out of the arch of her throat.

Dan clapped from his dark spot, emerging into her honey light, smiling so widely that Teresa could only believe he was doing so to make her feel better. She looked down at the guitar as if it were to blame, and as Dan’s boots sounded closer against the wooden floor, she felt foolish and sorry for herself. That was what she had seen in the mirror—her own deep need, all of her longing apparent—but nothing about it could be appealing. She thought of Cheno watching her in front of Stewart’s Appliances and had to look at the floor.

“Don’t put your head down,” Dan admonished her. “That was great.” Then he reached over slowly and tipped her chin up, one finger and tenderly. He didn’t