“How long has it been?”
“Properly playing? Four months. Before that, I was just going through the motions. Everything got busy last year. I canceled shows and backed out of a collaboration I’d been building toward for a year.” She looks out the window. “The people I let down were kind about it, but I saw their faces.”
I keep my eyes on the road and give her the space to talk.
“I probably burned bridges,” she says, her breath hitching. “I spent so much time not playing that I almost forgot it was mine. Like I’d loaned it to someone and forgotten to ask for it back.”
She looks down at her hands. A musician’s hands. I can see the calluses on her fingertips even from here.
“You didn’t ruin it,” I tell her.
“You can’t know that.”
“No,” I agree. “But I know what I read in that article, and I know I’ve been listening to you play for most of my life. You don’t lose that.”
She doesn’t answer, but she doesn’t argue either, which is something.
As we drive, the radio moves onto Fleetwood Mac. Piper turns it up and scrunches the empty chip bag into the footwell. The valley is enormous out here.
It’s good to be back. I didn’t let myself say that for the first six months because it felt like conceding something, but it’s true.
Ahead, a water tower crests the horizon, followed by a billboard:
WELCOME TO SUTTER FLATS.
Below it, in letters large enough to read from a mile out:
SUTTER FLATS ANNUAL COUNTY FAIR—THIS WEEKEND!
And then, in red, underlined twice:
WORLD’S LARGEST TRAVELLING BALL OF STRING ON DISPLAY NOW.
I look at it. Piper looks at it. We look at each other.
“We’re going,” she says.
“Absolutely, we are.”
I hit the turn signal and take the exit.
Eighteen
Piper
The ball of string is genuinely impressive.
It’s five feet tall, weighs what the hand-painted sign claims to be nine hundred and forty-two pounds, and has been wound by a man named Gerald Hutchins for over thirty-one years. Gerald is here, sitting in a lawn chair next to the display.
Griffin and Gerald speak for eleven minutes.
I time it.
They discuss the structural density and tensile properties of twine. At one point, Griffin actually crouches down to examine the base of the ball, and Gerald looks like a man whose entire thirty-one years of work have just been validated.
After the string, we do the rest of it. There are livestock pens, pie judging, and a demolition derby that won’t start for two hours but is already drawing a crowd.
I feel… at peace.
