Thursday, 8/4: Travel Day

"You know, you're terribly brave, sticking with this so long," I said somberly as I laid down my cards slowly, one at a time. "If I were you, I'd've folded a long time ago."

"Oh, you are made of bitch," A.J. groaned as I laid down my final card, revealing three 4's and two 7's, all hearts and spades, a full house.

"Sucks to suck, gentlemen," I said glibly as I gathered up a growing pile of nickels from the three grumbling guys around me, including all of A.J.'s.

It was my last travel day and second-to-last day of the tour, and I marveled at how quickly the time had slipped away. Fortunately, we had a long day ahead, driving through the mountains from Charlotte to Nashville, where the guys would play a remarkably different sort of show at the Grand Ole Opry tomorrow night.

We were on the second movie of the day, Inglourious Basterds, but only Nick and Howie were watching it. A.J., Brian, Jay and I were playing Texas hold ‘em on the floor between bunks, betting nickels, five rolls of which Brian had squirreled away in his bag for just such an occasion.

"I do wonder why y'all don't use real money," Jay mused. "It's not like y'all are hurting."

"Yeah, but some people on this bus still get pissed off over real money," Brian pointed out from his spot on his bunk as he shuffled the deck. "Nickels are great because they don't really count. And they're useful," he added with a grin. "You can put ‘em in a sock and use ‘em for self-defense."

"In your case, you oughta be able to defend the whole bus," A.J. said to me as I counted up my winnings. He shook his head, glaring across the floor at me. "Totally uncool."

"What's uncool about it?" I retorted cheerfully. "Not used to a chick who can hold her own playing poker? One of many life skills you learn in a newsroom full of dudes."

A.J. made a face. "It's more that I'm not used to a chick who has an actual poker face."

"Poker face?" Nick echoed. "I hardly know ‘er."

"Go back to sleep, Nick," Brian called up to the front of the bus, where a burst of gunfire issued forth from the TV.

A second burst of gunfire, and the bus suddenly jolted hard. Jay, who was sitting on the bunk above me, pitched forward. My life briefly flashed before my eyes.

"Pulling over!" Frank shouted, and with a screech of brakes, we slid to the side of the road, bumping violently along.

"Aw, damn it, I spilled my water," Nick grumbled.

"That's your angel punishing you," Brian replied, holding on to the top of his bunk for dear life.

Frank scrambled off the bus as soon as it lurched to a stop. A few seconds later, I could hear his furious shouts from outside the bus. The four of us exchanged an anxious look, and we got to our feet and filed off the bus, joined by Nick and Howie.

"Son of a whore!" Frank bellowed as we got off the bus. He looked up at us, his face red. "The goddamn tire blew out."

We all stared down at the right front wheel, which was cradled now by shreds of rubber.

Nick screwed up his mouth. "Shit."

"That's your angel punishing you for beating us in poker," A.J. said to me.

"Now why would my angel punish the entire bus?" I snapped back.

A.J. glowered at me. "Because that last hand was an abomination from hell."

"Sore loser much?" Brian chastised him, winking at me.

Jay looked back and forth. "Damn, dude, I bet I'm the only black man for a hundred miles."

We were the second of only two buses traveling today. The dancers weren't needed for the show in Nashville, which was going to be much smaller, so they were rejoining the tour in Louisville. The first bus was half a mile in front of us, and I expected someone's phone to ring any minute.

Sure enough, it was Frank's. He yanked it out of his pocket and grimaced. "That bitch. Someone else answer this."

Howie took the phone from him and answered it with a big fake smile in his voice. "Hi, Christine. We blew a tire."

I could hear Christine's screech of dismay from 10 feet away. I turned around, not wanting any part of this conversation. A control freak's worst nightmare, this.

"Where the hell are we?" I wondered out loud. We had detoured onto a two-lane highway at Asheville to avoid an accident that had shut down the westbound lanes of the interstate. So it could be worse, I reasoned. Unfortunately, that meant we were more than likely in the middle of nowhere. Nothing around us but trees, dirt and a narrow ribbon of pale, pockmarked pavement.

Frank kicked at the dirt. "Seven, eight miles into Tennessee, give or take."

Yep. Middle of nowhere.

Howie sounded angry for the first time all week. He jammed his free hand into his pocket and paced back and forth. "We only have two buses today, remember? We can't fit six more people onto the crew bus for the next five hours. That's insane."

"Gimme my damn phone back," Frank said to Howie. "I gotta call someone to bring us a new friggin' tire." He made a face. "We'll need one before Nashville anyway."

"Christine, I gotta go," Howie said, sounding obviously relieved. "Frank needs the mechanic's number out of his phone. Bye."

He hung up and thrust the phone at Frank as if it had bitten him. A moment later, a loud ringing issued forth from his own pocket. "Damn it anyway!" he muttered, answering the phone. "No, Christine, you are not turning the bus around, it's just a travel day..."

And now Frank was on the phone with the mechanic. Evidently it wasn't going well. "Two goddamn hours?" he shouted. "We're only an hour out of Asheville! This is fucking nuts!"

Nick started walking away.

"Where the hell are you going?" Brian said.

"I saw a gas station a quarter-mile back," Nick replied. "I want a soda. And I gotta get away from this clusterfuck."

I smothered a grin. It was always my belief that a tour was one unscheduled disaster away from anarchy. This was proof positive. I ran onto the bus, slung my camera over one arm and my purse over the other, and followed Nick, Brian and A.J. down the road.

It was a bright, sunny, miserably hot day in Appalachia, and I soon regretted wearing jeans. By the time I reached the gas station, they were rolled to my knees, and the guys were already inside.

The gas station didn't appear to be from this millennium. The pumps were small, the kind that looked like ‘80s robots, with the pumps on the sides and a physically separate display on the top; pay-at-the-pump was a foreign concept. The inside of the convenience store had three fans blowing warm, stale air around, and the soda fountain displayed a Pepsi logo I hadn't seen since middle school. An old country song droned in the background: I've got heartaches by the number, I've got troubles by the score...

"We can't stop here! This is bat country!" I whispered to Brian, who was holding up a copy of what had to be the local newspaper, a thin broadsheet screaming from the front page about a water main break under a headline with a glaring typo.

He opened the paper to hide both our faces. "Fear and Loathing?"

I grinned up at him. "You know it."

"I was thinkin' more along the lines of..." He made a soft twanging sound with his mouth, humming a few notes of "Dueling Banjos."

I rolled my eyes. "You would."

"Dude, check it." Nick was standing in the middle of the candy aisle, one hand in a Laffy Taffy jar, the other already clutching a massive fountain soda. He fished out a piece of chewy candy and read its pink wrapper. "What's black and white and red all over? A sunburned zebra!" He slapped his knee and guffawed with fake laughter.

A.J. was already up at the counter, having not wasted any time. He was juggling two bottles of Coke and four anemic-looking hot dogs in paper cartons.

"We're gonna be here a while," he said to me as he dug around in his wallet. "Might as well have some lunch."

"You don't think Christine will insist on coming back for us?" I asked.

He rolled his eyes. "I think I'd rather lay down in the middle of the road and wait for death by semi than try to squeeze 15 people and our crap onto one bus to Nashville, with one toilet. No, I'm pretty sure Howie will talk her out of it."

"He better," Nick said as he deposited his gallon of fountain soda, three bags of 50-cent candy and a hot dog on the counter. "I wanna spend half a day on a bus with her like I want a colonoscopy. Sorry, ma'am," he said quickly to the middle-aged woman behind the counter, who arched a heavily penciled, mildly offended eyebrow at him.

A.J. and Nick paid in a hurry, gathered up their purchases and headed for the door. "We'll see y'all back at the bus," Nick said.

"Much appreciated, ma'am," A.J. added, beaming over his shoulder at the cashier as the jingle bells on the door tinkled their farewell to the guys.

"Y'all with a tour group or somethin'?" the cashier asked in a thick Southern accent. She was dark-haired and heavyset, with kind green eyes and the thickest mustache I'd ever seen on a woman.

Brian folded up the newspaper and gave her a charming smile. "You could say that, ma'am."

"Well, y'all boys sure are handsome gentlemen." The woman smiled sweetly, then turned to me. "And what's a naas lady lock yew doin' with these troublemakers?"

Brian slung a fraternal arm around my shoulders. "She keeps us in line, ma'am," he said, still ever the charmer. He patted my arm, then started walking toward the soda fountain. "And just for that, what do you want out of the fountain?"

I put my hands on my hips. "Why would you even have to ask that?"

He pointed a little shooter finger and winked at me before sticking the largest cup available under the Diet Coke spigot.

"Ooooh, yew keep yer eye on that one, girl," the cashier said to me with a conspiratorial wink. I didn't even know where to begin to respond to her, so I feigned interest in the newspaper Brian had left on the counter.

Brian came back with a huge soda in each hand and plunked them on the counter, pulling his wallet out of his pocket. "Don't even think about it," he said to me as I reached for my purse.

I held up my hands in mock surrender. "Who's thinking?"

The cashier squinted at Brian as she handed him his change. Suddenly, recognition dawned in her eyes. "Whaaah, ah know yew! I seen yew in an old poster on mah daughter's bedroom wall!"

I snickered, took my soda and excused myself as the lady fawned over Brian. I knew he could fend for himself with one middle-aged Southern woman. I'd seen glimpses of the Southern gentleman, the one who would smile sincerely and call her "ma'am" in that gentle drawl all day.

The hot, dusty day and the deserted road outside the gas station were begging for a harmonica solo. I looked up and down the road again as I sucked down a mouthful of Diet Coke. On my walk here, I'd seen maybe three cars - far fewer than I would have expected when you considered the interstate detour. There were no other structures between here and the bus.

I looked in the other direction. A little white clapboard church that had seen better days sat a few hundred feet away. Oh, what the hell. I had my camera. I started walking.

The bells of the gas station door jingled faintly behind me, and a moment later, I heard footsteps behind me. "Bus is that way," I heard Brian say.

I stopped and let him catch up, taking another deep pull on my straw. "You can go back and listen to Frank bitch about the tire and the guys try to talk Christine out of coming back and playing mother hen. You have my number. I need some me time."

Another charming smile. "No such thing around here."

I started walking away from the bus again. He matched my stride. I shook my head as a smile tugged at the corners of my mouth. "You're a real pain in the ass, Littrell."

"Thank you. So where we goin'?"

We were almost to the church now, and I nodded in its direction. "Just want to take a look." I could see now that it had fallen into considerable disrepair. There were sizable holes in the roof and in at least one of its windows, which made it all the more appealing - a slice of decaying rural life that awakened something deeply nostalgic in a reformed country girl like me.

We stopped in front of the church. Its sign looked like it had been completely blank for some time. I couldn't begin to guess when it had been deserted. Part of me wanted to peek inside, but a bigger part of me had no interest in being arrested on this rejected set from Deliverance. There was plenty to see outside. I put my soda on the ground, hoisted up my camera and started snapping photos.

I was about to walk around the side of the country chapel, taking my chances in the knee-high grass, when I heard a doorknob creak. I looked up to see Brian opening the door. Either it had been unlocked all this time, or he was committing a high-level misdemeanor.

I gaped at him. "Jesus. You want Barney Fife to come looking for you?"

He just shot me a mischievous smile over his shoulder and walked in.

The inside of the church was perhaps even more beautifully depressing, warped by the forces of nature. Rain obviously had fallen into the church, warping some of the three dozen or so wooden pews and nurturing an overwhelmingly musty smell. But a cross at the front seemed undamaged, and the stained glass windows were still beautiful, albeit grimy, depicting simple but lovingly rendered biblical scenes, saints gazing toward the heavens with basset-hound eyes. I walked up to one of them with my camera and started snapping away.

Brian was standing a few windows down, hands stuffed in the pockets of his shorts, gazing up in reverence. Sweat trickled down his cheek, but he looked so serene and handsome in profile, I couldn't resist. I held up the camera and took the shot. He looked over at me, a bemused smile on his face, and I took another one. I ducked to one side and snapped a few more as he leaned against the end of one pew, the cross in the background.

"You ever thought about having photos taken in a church?" I asked him. "You know, for your solo album or whatever."

He chuckled as he sat down in a pew. "Maybe some other time. Record companies kinda frown on you sweating like a pig on your album covers."

I sat down in the pew in front of him, turning around to face him as I scrolled through the pictures. It was always hard to say whether my pictures were any good moments after I'd taken them, but so far, so good. I tried not to linger too long on the pictures of him, lest my heart speed up and betray me.

"How long have you been taking pictures?" Brian was leaning forward, craning his neck over the back of my pew to try to see the pictures. His face was inches from mine, but I dared not look up.

I blew out a breath, trying to calculate the years in my head. "I don't know. Casually, since I was 14 or 15, maybe? Seriously, since I moved to New York."

He held out a hand. "Can I...?"

I thumbed the dial back to shooting mode and handed him the camera gingerly. "You drop it, I break all your fingers," I threatened him, only half-teasing. "That thing has some miles on it, but it's still worth more than my life."

He held up the camera, took a few tentative shots pointed toward the altar. I smiled, taking advantage of the break to pull my hair out of its ponytail and shake out the sweaty mess a bit. I had no idea if he was any sort of photographer, but it always tickled me to see someone testing the waters, in the way that it still got me right in the heart when a little girl proudly told me she wanted to be a reporter when she grew up.

Then he turned the camera toward me: another snap. An embarrassed laugh escaped me, and I looked down, away from the lens.

"Aw, come on," he protested softly. A few more snaps.

I shook my head. "Nope. Being in front of the camera is not for me. That's why I became a writer, not a teleprompter jockey."

Brian lowered the camera and clicked the dial tentatively over, evidently in search of review mode. "Aha!" He smiled that funny little smile down at the camera, then back up at me. "It's, ah, it's not nearly as bad as you think."

He handed me the camera. I hardly recognized myself on the screen. He had caught me in profile, with one hand in my hair, seemingly staring off into space, the remnants of a smile on my face. I looked almost like I was daydreaming. I was sweaty, but it looked like the sweat of someone who had accomplished something, not someone a bit out of shape who was dripping wet from a walk in the heat. My hair looked like nothing so much as a chaotic modern-day halo. I looked gritty and real and tough and content.

I looked like the person I always tried to be. Somehow, he had captured that. I didn't know what to say. Incredibly, I felt a lump in my throat.

"Well, OK," I heard myself croak, a sheepish smile spreading across my face. I looked down and cleared my throat. "Point taken. Not as bad as I thought. You done good, Littrell."

He looked at the screen for a few seconds. "Jeez, you're beautiful."

I froze. Time froze. I was afraid to look up. For a crazy moment, I thought I'd dreamed his saying that, thought I was hallucinating in real life. I finally forced myself to meet his eyes, and he was staring at me in frank astonishment, as if even he couldn't believe he'd just said that out loud.

But there was something else mixed in with the astonishment. Something I hadn't seen directed at me in too long. Something that made me think the heat enveloping me wasn't just the stagnant summer air.

His elbows were resting on the back of my pew. He reached up with one hand, slowly, hesitantly, and toyed with my hair, twirling an unruly curl around one finger. His gaze was tender, intrigued.

"You act like nobody's ever said that to you before," he said softly. "That's a crime."

I stopped breathing. My eyes closed in spite of themselves, and I found myself squeezing them shut, wishing the moment would end without action. It wasn't that I didn't want action, but I couldn't stand for it to happen. He had proven himself to be pretty great this week, and whatever little spark there was between us was burning a hell of a lot more confidently now, but...everything I had worked for...everything I tried to avoid for the sake of being competent in my chosen profession...

"Meg?" I opened my eyes. He was still looking at me. His voice was still very soft. "I know I shouldn't be saying this. I know you probably think I'm just another crazy musician and I'm not worth it."

"I didn't say that," came a husky, tentative voice I didn't recognize from somewhere within me.

He went on like I hadn't spoken. "But I like you a lot, as a person, and you should know that. And I like you a lot as a woman, and you should know that, too." He dropped his hand. That little smile was back. "I still feel like I don't know hardly a thing about you, and I want to know everything about you."

The way he said "everything" suggested he meant a lot more than my astrological sign.

A nervous giggle escaped my mouth, again from some previously unknown cave inside me. "What's to know? I'm from the Midwest. I've had two dads and now I have none. I've been a writer since I was a little kid. I'm horribly allergic to ragweed. The only songs I remember how to play on the piano are ‘Heart and Soul' and the M*A*S*H theme song." I swallowed hard, trying to stop my next words from tumbling out, but it was no use: here we go. "I haven't been on a second date since before I moved to New York. I don't exactly have a whole lot of time for guys. No, I don't remember the last time someone said I was beautiful. I don't even remember the last time someone looked at me like that."

"Am I bothering you?" He didn't look away.

"No." The word slipped out before I could stop it, but what else was there to say? I tried to smile, but couldn't. "But you know, every moment we're together, I'm working."

It was useless trying to BS him, I realized. That little smile cut right through the crap. His gaze dropped, a little more purposeful now. I realized he was looking at my mouth. "What if you weren't working? Then what would you say?"

I couldn't speak. The church was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. He started to lean in closer, a little hesitantly. And I couldn't bring myself to stop him. My eyes fell closed again.

A low hum sounded. Then the tinkling of piano keys. Horror seized my insides. Thomas had found me. He'd felt some kind of disturbance in the Force, his alleged favorite staff writer starting down the dark path of boinking a source, forever to dominate her destiny.

But it wasn't my phone. I heard Brian sigh heavily through his nose. I opened my eyes, and he was pulling his phone out, leaning back.

"Yeah," he answered it, rubbing his forehead. "...Nothing. Meg and I went for a walk. ...Oh, no kidding? ...Yeah, we'll head back there. ...All right, see ya."

He lowered the phone. "They found somebody closer. Repairman's five minutes out."

"Oh. Good." My voice sounded hollow.

Brian looked at me for a long moment. There was an almost helpless look in his eyes.

I shrugged at him, just as helpless. "What do you want me to say? I got a job to do here. That's the only reason you even know who I am. How I feel is irrelevant."

"I know." He stood up, ran a hand through hair that was damp with sweat, looked down at me. A smile crossed his face, but didn't reach his eyes. "I notice you didn't say you don't feel anything."

"No. I didn't."

I held his gaze, silently pleading with him to see reason. He turned and walked out.