Three nights later, Kate came back to his door with someone else.
She knocked, and when John opened it, she was standing there with a woman who looked as though she’d been traveling for a week and hadn’t slept for two of those days.
Her hair was short and dark, tucked behind her ears.
She carried a guitar case with a sticker from a Portland music shop still stuck to the side.
“This is Amy,” Kate said.
“Amy Harris. She needs to talk to you.”
Amy lifted a hand, not quite a wave.
“Sorry. Kate said you might be able to help.”
He let them in.
Amy set the guitar against the wall and sat on the couch.
Her hands folded in her lap as though she wasn’t sure what to do with them.
Kate sat beside her, a few inches away, looking at John with an expression that said she knew this was last minute, but Amy really needed his help.
“I’ve been writing songs for a few years,” Amy said.
“Not professionally. I mean, I’ve tried to be professional, but it never really worked out. I’ve been in two bands, and both of them fell apart. I moved to Portland. That didn’t work either, so I moved back.”
She took a breath.
“I’ve got some things I’ve written, but every time I try to finish one, I can’t.”
She looked down at her hands.
“Kate said you wrote something. A song, I mean. The one people here kept singing. She said you didn’t want credit for it. She said you wrote it and then let it go.”
John leaned back in his chair.
“I just wrote something. It wasn’t that big a deal.”
“It was,” Amy said.
She looked at him.
“Because I heard someone sing it at a coffee shop in Portland. A guy with a guitar. He didn’t know who wrote it, but the song was good. It was really good.”
She paused.
“And I thought, if someone can write something that good and just walk away from it, maybe they know something I don’t.”
She opened her case and took out a notebook.
She turned to a page filled with writing, crossed out lines, and rewritten words.
“I keep stopping here. I don’t know where to go.”
John took the notebook.
The handwriting was small and careful.
The song was about moving from one city to another, from one relationship to the next, never quite arriving anywhere.
The line she’d stopped on read:
I left another one behind.
He read it twice.
Then he asked, “Do you know what you wanted to say after that?”
Amy shook her head.
“Every time I try, I feel like I’m just saying the same thing over again.”
John handed the notebook back.
“Can you play what you have?”
She took her guitar and played the first verse, the chorus, and the second verse, all the way up to that line.
Her voice was rough around the edges, not polished, but honest.
It was the kind of voice you remembered because it felt as though she were telling you a secret.
When she stopped, John was quiet for a long moment.
“You wrote this because you’re tired of leaving and never staying,” he said.
Amy looked at him.
“Right?”
“Yeah.”
“And you stopped because you don’t know how to tell someone you want to stay. Or maybe you don’t even know if you want to stay.”
She nodded.
John thought for a moment.
Then he said, “What if you wrote something like, ‘I’ve been so far, but I’ve never been home.'”
Amy stared at him.
Her fingers were still resting on the strings.
“That’s it,” she said.
She quickly wrote the line down.
John held up a hand.
Amy sat quietly for a long time, pencil still in hand.
Then she started writing.
She wrote for a few minutes, crossed something out, and wrote again.
She played a new phrase under her breath and hummed a melody that wasn’t on the page yet.
Then she played it again.
When she finally looked up, her face had changed.
She didn’t look happy exactly.
She looked like she’d found something she’d thought was lost.
“Thank you,” she said.
“I think I know what to do now.”
Kate smiled.
She didn’t say I told you so.
She simply sat there, looking pleased.
They stayed for another hour.
Amy played more of the song, a new version she was still working on.
John listened without saying much.
When she finished, he said, “You sing it. Not me. It’s your song.”
“I know,” she said.
“I’m not trying to take credit. I just needed to hear it once.”
Kate drove Amy home.
At the door, Amy paused and looked back.
“You don’t sing anymore,” she said.
“Not really.”
“You should.”
John didn’t answer.
Amy nodded as if she understood and walked out.