What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [31]
“Thank you,” she said, but she couldn’t look at him, at his brown eyes, nor back down at the guitar strings, so she went back to herself, over in the horizon of mirror, looked at herself as Dan Watson stood over her, his wide back, and the honey light coming down.
“You’re a good singer,” he said. “A sad voice sells a lot of beers.”
“Sad songs are good?”
“Oh, yes. Especially here. If you want to dance, you go over to Ed’s place. Get drunk and cry? Right here.”
Dan reached over for the guitar and she gently released it to him. Confidently, he started up the song again, this time with a bold, strong rhythm and none of her hesitation. She watched his fingers along the fret board, astounded. They were strong hands, agile, one dancing along the arm of the guitar with instinct, the other striding along with equal, easy fervor. “Your guitar playing needs a little work, though.”
She laughed, but he kept playing, smiling back at her. He wasn’t watching his fingers—he didn’t need to. Dan Watson was looking right at her, his brown eyes wide and inviting. “Sing,” he said. “Come on.”
What the song sounded like, now, was what she remembered from her days with her mother, and she didn’t need to close her eyes to make the words arrive. They came on their own, and because Dan Watson was now blocking her view of herself in the mirror, she looked at him as she sang. She kept her voice low, but the feeling was there, the sorrow. But now she was beginning to understand that such sorrow had a different shading to it, that it could lift into something else if she permitted herself to sink exactly into the whirl of Dan Watson’s brown eyes, the eyes the song warned about.
Teresa kept her voice low and the two of them carried through the song with an easy harmony that actually made her smile when they finished.
“I knew what song you were trying to sing,” Dan said. “My mama used to listen to it a lot.”
“So did mine,” Teresa said. “It was one of her favorites.”
“You changed the words around.”
“I didn’t remember them,” she admitted. “Or I remembered hearing it differently.”
“You start inventing words, that’s true,” Dan said, handing back the guitar. “Playing is harder than it looks. You practice a lot?”
“Not enough. I don’t know that much about how to play.”
“Who taught you? Your daddy?”
She couldn’t find the best answer, thinking of Cheno outside, wondering if he was searching up and down the street for her.
“You have a nice voice, though,” he said, reassuring her.
He stood smiling at her, and when Teresa couldn’t think of how to respond, she laughed nervously. He laughed with her but wouldn’t say anything more to help her out of the fluttering tension in her hands, her stomach, her throat. She looked down at the guitar and picked at one of the strings.
Dan reached over and moved her left hand to the fret board, positioning her fingers. “Right there. Bend this finger. Firm as can be.” Satisfied with her grip, he eased right behind her with one solid step and cast his arm over her shoulder. Not touching her, but close enough for Teresa to feel the soft fabric of his shirt. He helped her play the briefest of notes, just the beginning of something, unsaid and unsung and sad-sounding enough to warrant feeling that way, and then stopped.
Outside, through the open door, a vehicle sounded across the gravel, slowing down. The vehicle stopped and they could hear a door open and close. “That’s Ed,” he said. “Across the street.”
He stepped away from her, and Teresa rose from the stool to look out the door, but all she saw was the vehicle—another Ford truck—and Cheno nowhere in sight.
“Sing for me,” Dan said.
“That’s the only song I know.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I mean, sing for me, not Ed.”
That’s how it begins, the women on the television told her. You have to open your arms wide first.
“I’ll play guitar,” Dan said. “Or someone else will.