Page 9 of August Lane

“That won’t happen,” he said, because he knew his triggers.

He’d also developed coping strategies that came in handy when he couldn’t avoid them.

One was listening to the will of the universe, the way it held up a mirror and forced him to face his mistakes.

He couldn’t work the steps without truly working them.

He couldn’t accept another windfall that fell into his lap without trying to become a man who deserved it.

“Stay away from your mother,” Charlotte advised. She’d met Ava only twice, but the few stories he’d shared had been enough to convince her he should block the woman’s number.

“I’ll get a motel room,” Luke said. His bank account disagreed, but he’d deal with that later. “It’s just a few rehearsals, then the show.”

Charlotte didn’t seem convinced, but she sighed in defeat. She looked down at the divorce papers. “All this stuff is scary, right?”

He knew she wasn’t just talking about him anymore.

They’d both seen the punishment for making waves in country.

Radio stopped playing you. Your singles vanished from the charts.

If Charlotte came out, it would be inspiring to the fans who’d already sensed the sapphic tone of her recent releases, but it would feel like a slap in the face to others, the fans who looked to her music for nostalgia about an ignorant way of life.

She’d also have to face the same questions he did from people who were confused by her refusal to switch genres.

Luke had once performed at an HBCU that asked him to sit on a panel to discuss lynching imagery in country music.

He’d stumbled through three different explanations about why he’d chosen to sing country before he finally heard the real question they were asking: How could you love this thing that hates you?

It made him think of August: Because that’s what I do.

He envied Charlotte despite her current misery. There was an obvious light at the end of her tunnel. She could wake up beside the woman she loved, decide she’d had enough, and choose the happy ending right in front of her. “You’ve got Darla,” he reminded her. “Whatever happens, you’ll be okay.”

“And what about you?” She leaned in and met his eyes. “Are you going to be okay?”

He was slow to answer. For him, okay was survival: a roof over his head, another show lined up, enough money for food and clothes. But now, sitting next to Charlotte, a woman with more to lose than he’d ever have in his lifetime, it felt like a cowardly way to live. “Maybe. All I can do is try.”

The show was in two months, enough time to make things right with August. He’d been eager to believe that David Henry’s offer was some reward for years of toiling at the bottom, when it was really this. A reckoning.

August woke up hungover and queasy, with Birdie’s ghost chasing her out of bed.

It was Sunday morning, and her grandmother had never let her skip church.

“Saturday sins won’t seek their own forgiveness,” she used to say, before yanking the bed covers away.

August could never argue with that, even though today it felt like making empty promises to Santa for a bicycle.

No amount of praying would erase the fact that she’d wrestled in the dirt with Shirley Dixon.

The scratches on her face were begging to be used as an excuse to hide in her apartment.

But again, Birdie’s voice clattered in her ear.

“That’s coward’s thinking. You’ve been a lot of things, August, but never that. ”

Her grandmother had been the only person who considered August’s special brand of bravery a virtue.

Everyone else thought she was just stubborn.

Or worse, ornery, like a wild horse too stupid to know it should break.

“Comes from her father” they would say, as though August’s mother hadn’t devoted twenty-five years to a genre that had to be publicly shamed into claiming her.

But Jojo was famous. A homegrown success story that lifted all their ships.

Everything people didn’t like about August was blamed on her father, Theo King—a man so despised she heard the church threw a celebratory BBQ when he disappeared.

The list of things August knew about her father wasn’t very long.

Theo was the youngest of the five King boys, one of two who were still alive.

His father had run numbers. His mother had disappeared so suddenly that it made the town uneasy, constantly on the lookout for a hasty burial ground.

During his brief relationship with her mother, he taught Jojo how to play piano, even though she refused to do it, even to this day.

The list of things August didn’t know about Theo was too long to care about.

But there was one thing in the middle, a truth everyone avoided, reflected in how people looked at her and, more often, in how they didn’t.

It said she shouldn’t be here. Theo King had done a bad thing, one of the worst they could imagine, and it had robbed them of their beauty queen.

If Jojo had never had August, she wouldn’t have lost that historic crown and embarked on a singing career they initially found confusing and still occasionally considered embarrassing.

Birdie told August that Theo was the coldest man she’d ever met.

“He had eyes that would make you shiver in July” was how her grandmother put it.

“Nothing ever got to him.” It was the only trait of his that August had tried to emulate.

Emotional control. Immunity from the elements.

August had divided her life into two lists: things that needed immediate attention and things that didn’t matter.

For the last decade, the first list had a single item: Birdie’s welfare.

The other list held everything else: Her lack of a career.

Other people’s opinions. Anything resembling a love life.

The mental wall she’d erected between them was a dam that occasionally leaked.

That’s what happened when Birdie died. The only item on her list that mattered had vanished and left a space she didn’t know how to fill.

Terry was the closest thing within reach, a warm body to grind herself numb against. It didn’t work.

Instead of shoring up the dam, more of the other list leaked through.

Like how long it had been since she’d laughed at anything.

Or how horrible it felt to hear I love you from a man you didn’t trust.

Luke’s imminent return would cause a flood.

Birdie had called her brave, but that man made her the biggest coward.

There was no way she could face him, not when her life was a desolate canyon.

The only music she still made was as a back row alto in the First Baptist choir, because it was a Lane family tradition.

Birdie was the first to sing at the church, sending her elegant soprano to the rafters in a way that caught the eye of a deacon almost twice her age.

Caroline, Birdie’s oldest daughter, led the praise and worship team despite having an average voice, something appropriate for lullabies and starting happy birthday songs.

Then came Jojo, the star, hitting those impossibly high notes that made the congregation thank almighty God for such a blessing.

August didn’t sing like Jojo or Birdie. She didn’t even have her aunt Caroline’s lifeless tone.

Her voice was throaty chaos that insisted on getting louder instead of higher, with a vocal fry that her grandmother had given up trying to train out of her years ago.

It was a voice people called interesting but never beautiful, the kind you couldn’t comfortably sink into.

Every choir director had buried it beneath more polished singers to tame its impact, which had bothered her when she was younger and desperate to be on someone’s stage.

These days, she was grateful to have a small sliver of something that used to be her world.

But Luke wouldn’t see it that way. “What sliver?” is what he’d say, if he bothered to speak to her at all. “Your mouth was moving, but I couldn’t hear a thing.”

August’s hopes of slipping into the church unnoticed evaporated as soon as she entered the sanctuary.

A line of heads whipped around to stare.

Shirley sat in the front pew, proudly displaying a large bruise on her chin.

To her left was Terry, a lifelong apostate, stuffed like a sausage into a dark suit he’d pulled from the back of his closet.

His eyes were fixed firmly on the floor.

A rough hand jerked her backward until she stood behind a tall, skinny body encased in a jarring floral print that reminded her of Birdie’s bedsheets.

Mavis Reed’s wide-brimmed hat was supposed to be pinned at a jaunty angle but had skewed sideways into an imperfect lurch, a flaw that was completely out of character.

Her cousin kept an iron grip on her pastor’s wife image, which included being photo ready at all times in outfits she copied from Pinterest and Greenleaf episodes.

Still facing the congregation with a fake smile, Mavis hissed, “What are you doing here?” Her chignon was an oil slick, the relaxed hair slathered with a pound of Eco Styler and pulled tight enough to make her skin pucker at the edges. Paired with her bared teeth, the effect was slightly ghoulish.

“It’s Sunday,” August said. “Where else would I be?”

Mavis shot her murder eyes and then dragged her to the pastor’s study. She rounded on August the moment the door closed. “Are you trying to start another fight? Or finish the last one?”

“I didn’t start anything.” The image of Shirley’s flailing arms flashed in her mind. “I defended myself when she slapped me.”

“You slept with her husband and showed up at her house.”