Colton Gentry's Third Act

by Jeff Zentner

Genres: Small Town & Rural; Southern; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

"A story of love, healing, and second chances ” (Emily Henry) following a down on his luck country musician who, in the throes of grief after a shocking loss, moves back home and rekindles a relationship with his high school sweetheart, from award-winning author Jeff Zentner.

Colton Gentry is riding high. His first hit in nearly a decade has caught fire, he’s opening for country megastar Brant Lucas, and he’s married to one of the hottest acts in the country. But he’s hurting. Only a few weeks earlier, his best friend, Duane, was murdered onstage by a mass shooter at a country music festival. One night, with his trauma festering and Jim Beam flowing through his veins, Colton stands before a sold-out arena crowd of country music fans and offers his unfiltered opinion on guns. It goes over poorly.
 
Immediately, his career and marriage implode. Left with few choices or funds, he retreats to his rural Kentucky hometown. He’s resigned himself to has-been-dom, until a chance encounter at his town’s new farm-to-table restaurant gives him a second shot at life: a job working in the kitchen with Luann, his first love, who has undergone her own reinvention. Told through perspectives alternating between his senior year of high school, his time coming up with Duane as hungry musicians in Nashville, and the present, COLTON GENTRY’S THIRD ACT is a story of coming home, undoing past heartbreaks, and navigating grief, and is a reminder that there are next acts in life, no matter how unlikely they may seem.

Release date: April 30, 2024

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 320

Sample

May 2015

Charlotte, North Carolina

COLTON GENTRY IS HURTING, WHICH LATELY MEANS THAT HE’S DRUNK AND very much so.

Not a gentle buzz but rather the kind of inebriation that involves spontaneous crying when you tell a friend how much they mean to you. The skin over your scarlet heart thin as a baby robin’s.

This wouldn’t be a problem but for his being onstage in front of a capacity crowd of almost twenty thousand at PNC Music Pavilion in Charlotte, opening for Brant Lucas on his Dirt Road Dance Party tour. Even this precarious combination wouldn’t necessarily be a concern—Colton had certainly performed good shows while four sheets to the wind before—except that in his sightline is a ruddy-faced man, dark crescent moons of sweat under his armpits in the sultry, breezeless Southern spring heat, trying to get his attention. The man is flipping him off with one hand and holding defiantly aloft in the other a “Colt .45” T-shirt with an antique revolver silkscreened on it. It strikes Colton as mordantly funny that the guy paid twenty-five bucks for one of his T-shirts, only to taunt him with it.

Before Colton had played a note of his set, the normally impatient tolerance that greets a stadium act’s opener had yielded to something more weighted and hostile. It was nothing specific Colton could have pointed to (until heckle-tax-paying man)—but the electricity in the air. A twinge in the part of his gut that’s attuned to danger.

“Fifteen minutes, Colton.”

Brant Lucas’s stage manager’s terse voice coming through Colton’s inear monitors startles him from his momentary stupor. He’s only played a couple of songs and wasn’t expecting the fifteen-minute warning so soon. No detail escapes the stage manager, and she’s surely noticed Colton’s bleary, unfocused gaze, slurred speech, and unsteady footing. And maybe she senses too that this crowd has it in for him. He decides it might be best if he doesn’t study the concertgoers too closely for the remainder of his set. He and his band play another song to tepid, cursory applause.

His short-lived resolution fails him as soon as he notices that another man has joined the T-shirt brandisher. He’s holding high a crudely lettered sign that says “From my cold dead hands!” One of his warm, living hands has its middle finger extended, to match his new compatriot’s.

Magmatic fury surges perilously from beneath Colton’s solar plexus. His face reddens. Sober, maybe he’d be thinking Hey, man, let’s sit down together and crack a cold one, and I’ll tell you about my buddy Duane and what he meant to me and how shattered I am that he’s gone, and we can put our loves on the scale and see whose outweighs whose. But sober is back home, curled up on the couch, wearing a bathrobe and watching The Bachelor, and he is here. He draws a deep breath to try to calm himself. He’s going too long between songs, and he knows it.

He looks over to see his rhythm guitarist approach. For the thousandth time in the last few weeks, he wonders what might have been if he could have afforded to hire Duane for this tour. It was nothing compared to the cost of not hiring him. You were too proud to even ask for the friend discount.

“Hey, Colt? You good?” Ever the professional performer, Colton’s guitarist grins broadly while asking the question, so to all observers it appears that they’re sharing a quick private joke.

Colton swelters under the lights and in the humid air. His building rage has reached the base of his neck. He forces himself to return his guitarist’s smile and nods. The one thing he still has in his life that’s good, that brings him unambiguous joy, is that feeling when the crowd cheers for him. Maybe between the drink and the smattering of perfunctory applause that has broken through this crowd’s antipathy, he can find some sort of refuge, he thinks.

He gives his acoustic guitar a couple of quick strums and steps back to the mic. A pack of five frat boys with shaggy hair, pastel polo shirts, khaki shorts, and flip-flops or boat shoes have joined T-shirt guy and cold-dead-hands man. They cup their mouths and, in unison, shout “Libturd,” cutting through the buzz of the crowd. Then, all five theatrically turn their backs on him in unison, guffawing at their own bayonet-sharp wit.

The scalding anger is now at the back of Colton’s throat, like burping up stomach acid after eating too much Nashville hot chicken, which is exactly how he spent one of the last times he saw Duane alive.

A few more minutes. A couple more songs. Pretend you’re back in high school, on the football field, it’s fourth and goal, you’re down by five, there are ten seconds left in the game, and you’re holding that ball with your fingers between the seams, ready to throw. You’ve always been clutch.

His band starts in behind him. He inhales to sing. At the precise moment he’s about to, someone sounds a deafening blast on an airhorn. Colton’s mind immediately flashes to Duane, and the piercing AR-15 shots that were the last thing he heard.

Grief undermines your structural integrity. It crazes your foundation. Alcohol does the same, from another direction. Sometimes they meet in the middle, and when they do, once-solid things crumble. When the crumbling begins, it quickly becomes catastrophic. Somewhere, deep inside himself, where the ember of good judgment still smolders, Colton Gentry knows he’s about to make a terrible mistake. But he just doesn’t care.

“Hey, no, hang on,” Colton says into the microphone, waving his band off. They’re keenly attuned to his direction and come to a tentative, clattering halt. For a second or two there’s a coiled, anticipatory silence in the assembled crowd and among the musicians onstage.

Colton turns his gaze to the small clump of hecklers. He points at them and speaks into the mic, his voice booming and reverberant. “Lemme tell y’all something. Y’all listening? Screw your guns. Okay? No, actually fuck your guns and fuck you. Lemme tell you—”

That’s when Colton’s mic cuts off. Before he could say about my buddy Duane and how much I loved him. Even as far gone as he is, he’s surprised Brant Lucas’s hypervigilant stage manager has allowed him this much rope.

Now her voice crackles in his in-ear monitors like a downed power line. “You’re done. Offstage. Now.”

A gray-green miasma of groans and boos wafts off the audience like the stench from a road-killed skunk.

Out of the corner of his eye, Colton sees his rhythm guitarist approaching again. His genial, aren’t-we-having-fun ersatz smile is gone. In its place is pallid mortification. He’s visibly searching for the right words. “Hey, bro… this is—I dunno, man.”

Colton won’t meet his gaze. He’s got a show to finish, stage manager be damned. He claps. “Let’s go. ‘Honeysuckle Summer’ to close, and then we’re off.”

His band shoots each other uncomfortable glances. We’re not actually going to try to play another song, are we? their eyes say. The boos have become a sustained drone, like an airliner spooling up for takeoff.

Brant Lucas’s stage manager saves them. She strides across the stage to Colton, grabs his forearm with a bear-trap grip, and puts her lips directly to his ear. “What’d I say? Off. Now. Done.”

Colton regards her for a moment through his fogged eyes and lowers his gaze in defeat. A hurled Mountain Dew bottle flies past him, nearly hitting his shoulder. Someone shouts, “Honey, suckle my balls!” A chant of “We want Brant” replaces some of the jeering. Colton and his band slink offstage to rancorous applause and catcalls. He tries to walk without too much weaving, to preserve some semblance of dignity. He fails.

Backstage, as they file toward the green room, Colton, already aware of the gravity of what he’s done to his own career but also to his band’s financial prospects, tries to touch his bassist’s shoulder, a gesture of contrition. His bassist flicks his hand off. None of Colton’s bandmates will make eye contact. They haven’t been together through thick and thin. They aren’t buddies. This is a pickup band of skilled touring musicians who needed a paycheck and so they chose this gig over others, learned and rehearsed a bunch of Colton Gentry songs, and now he’s certainly just gotten them fired.

Colton wishes, after being perp-walked offstage, that he’d taken a last look at the crowd, hostile though they were, assembled before him in the dark, their cell phones glowing here and there like fireflies. He always loved that in better days—the pinpricks of light from people texting those they love and recording memories. A small, luminous city of humanity spread before him. You may never see it again.

Another stone of heartbreak to pile on his chest.

COLTON SITS ALONE IN THE GREEN ROOM, FACE IN HIS HANDS, HEAD SPINNING. As his tide of adrenaline ebbs, the urge to retch constricts his innards. His sweat-logged T-shirt adheres clammily against his skin in the air-conditioning. His band rebuffed every attempt to apologize. Dude, you can’t possibly think an apology in the state you’re in means jack, his drummer had said.

He senses someone standing before him.

“Hey. Hey.”

Colton looks up into Brant Lucas’s face.

“Stupid, insane, or both? Which?” Brant asks.

Colton starts to speak.

“Or both and drunk,” Brant interjects.

“All these choices you’re giving me.” Colton had been ready to apologize, even though Brant had generally been a prick to him on this tour and otherwise. But now?

“So a smart-ass too.” Brant’s harried makeup artist catches up with him and lifts the bill of his John Deere cap—which has never been within ten country miles of any tractor, John Deere or otherwise—to touch up his foundation. She obviously thought she’d have more time for this.

“Definitely drunk. That one for sure.”

“After I helped you. You stupid, ungrateful clown sonofabitch.”

“Now that one you chose.”

“Only reason you were here was as a favor to Maisy.”

“One minute,” Brant’s stage manager calls.

“She ain’t gonna bone you, man,” Colton says. “According to Us Weekly, she prefers hockey players.” He pantomimes hitting a puck.

Brant shakes his head. “You’re pathetic.”

“Seems to be the consensus.”

“Thirty seconds,” the stage manager calls.

With a final glare at Colton, Brant turns on the heel of one of his $1,500 black ostrich Luccheses, and trots off in the direction of the stage, dodging one of his roadies.

Colton hears the crowd erupt as Brant takes the stage.

Brant’s voice is muffled coming through the walls. “Y’all, first I wanna apologize for y’all’s having to listen to that. America’s the greatest country on Earth, and it’s because of our God-given freedoms. Now who’s ready to party?” The crowd loudly expresses their party preparedness. Brant starts in on his most recent radio hit, “High Lifes and High Trucks.”

His head already swimming, Colton wants nothing more than to close the circle by drinking himself into a blackout—it’s the forgetting that he craves more than anything. But now Brant’s tour manager steps in front of him.

“Colton? We need to chat.”

“Lemme check my calendar.”

The tour manager walks over to the green room door, closes it, and returns. “This isn’t a fun conversation, and I wish we didn’t need to hold it in your present… condition, but Brant has directed that you be separated from the tour.”

“Separated?”

“Fired.”

“Then why not just say fired. Damn, son.”

“Soften the blow.”

“Ought to say what you mean.”

“Because that’s worked wonders for you.”

“Touché, big hoss.”

“Gather your things. We’ll have a car take you back to the hotel. You’ll fly home in the morning. Any questions?”

“You know if there’s an open mic nearby? I was hoping to play those last few songs tonight.”

The tour manager eyes him with incredulous disgust. “You’re sure taking this well. If I’d just said the worst thing you can say to a country music audience, I’d be in no mood to joke.”

Colton holds up his thumb and forefinger, almost touching, and squints through the gap with one eye. “I’m a lil’ bit tipsy. Case you didn’t notice.”

“Oh, I did.” The tour manager leans in close, like he’s about to share some juicy bit of scuttlebutt. “You baffle me. Here you are, thirty-seven—”

“Thirty-eight. Just turned.”

“Even better. You get your first big record deal when you’re in your twenties. It flops. Now you’re married to Maisy Martin, one of the biggest acts on Earth, you’re just shy of forty, you have this ‘Honeysuckle Summer’ single catch fire out of nowhere, and now you’re getting a second chance, the break a lot of musicians never get. And you? You win the lottery and then wipe your ass with the ticket. Help me understand.”

Colton pauses for a long time before speaking. “Remember that mass shooting at Countryfest in Tampa a few weeks back?”

“Of course. Seventeen people died. Horrible.”

“One of those seventeen was Duane Arnett.”

“I know. Brant auditioned him for lead guitar a few years back.”

“Duane was my best buddy. We roomed together in East Nashville when I moved to town. He and I’d sit in those flimsy white plastic chairs in the backyard on summer nights. You know the ones? Where it collapses if you lean back?”

“Yeah.”

“We’d listen to Waylon and Merle, drink Coronas. Cicadas all around. Us sweating our asses off. Talk about girls, life, music, whatever. He was the first person I told when I met Maisy. He was best man at our wedding on Cumberland Island. I loved him. Like a brother.” I must be really starving to talk about this if opening up to even this asshole feels so good.

If the tour manager feels chastised, he scarcely shows it. “Guess that explains your interview with Fox News a couple weeks back. Should’ve left things at ‘We have a gun problem in America that we need to fix.’ That wasn’t ideal, obviously, seeing as it brought out the hecklers at shows—”

“Maybe if Fox hadn’t edited out the part where I talked about Duane so I’d look more like a villain, I wouldn’t have hecklers.”

“Yeah, Colton, maybe. Or maybe they wouldn’t have given a shit. Anyway, you’re a professional musician. You should be used to dealing with noisy drunks. You can survive that. Not this.”

“Well, thanks, man, for your sympathies. And the great advice.”

“Look, I’m truly sorry about Duane. That can’t be easy. But sorry won’t cut it here. We still have a job to do.”

“Yeah, I know. Anyway. You asked me to help you understand.” Colton meets the tour manager’s eyes. “I was missing someone a whole lot tonight and every night. Feeling a little lonely in this world. Simple as that. Nothing else to understand.”

HE AWAKES TO POUNDING ON HIS HOTEL ROOM DOOR; A PHONE FULL OF TEXTS and voicemails from his agent, manager, label, and wife (although it feels strange to use any sort of possessive with her); and a head largely devoid of memories from the night before, but for the biggies. Where the inside of his skull lacks for recollection, though, it more than makes up for with blinding, searing pain.

“You packed?” the tour manager asks when Colton answers, as though the answer isn’t plain from looking past him into the dark recesses of the room, where clothing is strewn about like dead branches after a storm, mixed with the flotsam of empty minibar bottles. As if Colton’s standing before him in his boxer-briefs, still reeking of drink, leaves him doubting.

“Just gotta throw a few things in a suitcase,” Colton mutters, scratching his sternum.

“Well, the van is downstairs right now. You’re on a flight back to Dallas in an hour and a half. So I suggest putting your ass in high gear.”

Colton nods, and so gently as to seem tender, closes the door in the man’s face.

The airport bar is the only place where you can drink without judgment at nine thirty a.m., and so Colton sits and has a bit of the hair of the dog that ended his career while he waits for the next flight to Dallas, having missed his scheduled flight. He wears a faded black denim jacket that it’s too hot for and sunglasses, both to block out the light and to lend some marginal disguise. Not that he need worry too much. He inhabits that odd twilight that precedes true fame where many people who have heard and love his song could never pick him out of a crowd. Still, he gets a few dirty looks.

He texts Maisy. Heading home. She texts back a terse K, see you there. He wishes she would have said call me, even though he wouldn’t have, even though she’s already implicitly (or perhaps explicitly—he wouldn’t know because he hasn’t listened) extended that invitation with the three voicemails she left.

There’s a bank of televisions in the bar, and one is tuned to CNN. Continuing his recent pattern of acting against better judgment, Colton allows himself to watch. He immediately regrets it.

In other news this morning, country musician Colton Gentry is once more embroiled in controversy for anti-gun comments he made onstage last night in Charlotte, North Carolina, while opening for Brant Lucas, just weeks after stirring outrage by stating his support for gun control after the mass shooting at a country music festival in Tampa, Florida. A concertgoer captured the moment… Gentry could not be reached for comment. His management company, Big Sky Artists, released a statement saying, “Colton Gentry’s profane and inappropriate comments do not reflect the views of Big Sky Artists, which supports the right of peaceful, law-abiding Americans to keep and bear arms.”

Colton stares into his screwdriver. Duane had been his first celebratory call when he signed with Big Sky. Full circle.

A businessman sitting a few feet away stirs his Bloody Mary with a celery stalk, nods at the screen, and says, vaguely in Colton’s direction but without looking over, “Bet that went over like a fart in church.”

It’s obvious the man has no idea with whom he speaks, and Colton can’t help but smile at the moment’s absurdity. “When I was twelve, my buddy Ryan ripped ass in church. Real wet one. Mid-sermon. I’d say a solid forty percent of the congregation enjoyed it thoroughly, and the sixty percent who pretended not to still let him in the door that next Sunday.”

The businessman grunts and chuckles, eyes still glued to the TV. “That poor son of a bitch would have been better off going in on everyone’s mothers. Bet there were at least a couple of people in that crowd who don’t love their mothers.”

Colton pulls a twenty out of his wallet and slaps it down on the bar. Then he hurries to catch his flight.

September 1996

Nashville, Tennessee

IT WAS ALREADY LATE AFTERNOON WHEN COLTON PULLED UP TO THE TINY, ramshackle East Nashville bungalow. Across the street, a faded Oldsmobile Cutlass rested on blocks in the oil-stained driveway and a Rottweiler strained at the length of grimy clothesline binding it to a diseased oak. The house to the immediate right of the bungalow had ankle-length grass and a ragged square of blue tarp duct taped over a missing window. On the porch of the house to the left, a sunburned and barefoot pregnant girl who looked (generously) seventeen energetically told someone over a cordless phone that she was done with their shit.

Still, Colton’s freshly wounded and lonely heart thrummed ecstatically at sighting his first home away from his parents.

As he stepped down from the cab of his pickup and pulled his guitar from behind his seat, he heard the tinny jangle of someone chicken-pickin’ fast and clean through scales on an unamplified Telecaster. He ambled up the cracked and uneven concrete front walk and saw the source of the flurry of notes—a young man roughly Colton’s age sat on the porch. He had shaggy shoulder-length blond hair and muttonchops, and he wore a 1970s-vintage fringed buckskin jacket, suede cowboy boots, a hemp choker, and a broad-brimmed black Stevie Ray Vaughan hat with a concho hatband. His head was lowered in concentration, as if praying.

He looked up as Colton approached and gave one of the sunniest grins Colton had ever seen. He rose and carefully leaned the Tele against his wicker kitchen chair. “You Colton?”

“Yup. You Duane?”

“Duane, or friends call me Dee-wayne. Everything you’ve heard’s a lie.” He stepped down from the porch and extended a handshake to Colton.

Colton took it. “Really? ’Cause I heard you could play your ass off on guitar.”

Duane smiled even more broadly and looked away bashfully. “Hell.”

“Felt bad interrupting you.”

“Feel bad instead for looking like a damn movie star and not warning me. I mean shoot, son.” He spoke with a syrupy drawl, exuding a warmth that put Colton at ease.

“Come on now.” Colton shifted bashfully on his feet, his shoulders relaxing down a half inch.

“Come on your damn self. Now I won’t be able to bring any ladies I’m hoping to woo back to the house.”

Colton glanced earthward, licked his lips, and grinned ruefully. “Yeah, well, I’ve sworn off the ladyfolk for now, so no problem there.”

“Uh-oh. Seen that look before. If nothing else, makes for good songs, huh? Speaking of, let’s have a gander at that there guit-fiddle.” Duane nodded at Colton’s guitar case.

Intuiting he was in the presence of a true connoisseur, Colton set it down, opened it, and pulled out his guitar.

Duane took it carefully, looked it up and down, and whistled through his teeth. “Vintage Gibson,” he murmured. “Look at that tobacco sunburst finish.”

“1978 J-45. Was my dad’s.”

“Mind if I take a lick or two on it?”

“Go for it.” Colton realized as he said it that he’d never let anyone play his guitar before. But he already knew it was in the best of hands.

Duane strummed it. Made some quick adjustments to the tuning. Then he deftly began fingerpicking one of the most gorgeous and intricate melodies Colton had ever heard.

“What is that?”

Duane smiled faintly. “Just making it up.” He played for a few more moments before handing the guitar back to Colton. “That is one sweet axe, roomie. Once we get you moved in, lemme make some adjustments to the neck, get your intonation dialed in purty.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“Let’s haul your stuff inside ’fore someone takes a notion to swipe it.”

They strolled to Colton’s truck together.

“Anyhow, Dee-Wayne, I’m the least of your concerns with the ladies. I’d be much more worried about them getting jealous of that hair.”

Duane chortled and clapped Colton on the shoulder, tossing his mane theatrically. “I do got that salon shine, don’t I, brother?”

They spent the remnants of the daylight moving Colton in before supping on a bachelors’ meal of scrambled eggs and a couple bricks of ramen seasoned liberally with Cholula. Later, they went out in the scraggy backyard with its mange of grass to build a bonfire of wood scraps, windfall sticks, and pine cones in the rust-laced sawn-off oil drum that served as a firepit. The temperature plummeted the moment the sun dipped below the horizon, and the warmth felt delicious on their skin.

Colton poked at the fire with a stick, sending up a shower of sparks. “You’re from England, Arkansas? Like the country?”

“You know it, guvnuh.” Duane did his approximation of an English accent—no Sir Laurence Olivier, he.

“How much like England England is it?”

“Well, ain’t been yet to compare. But I’ll venture to say: not much.”

“I’m from Venice, Kentucky. It’s spelled like Venice in Italy even though it’s pronounced vuh-neese.”

“Any time there’s a city in the South named after a European city, you got a better chance of getting the pronunciation right if you pronounce it any other way than the European city.”

“Pretty much.”

“Running dry there?”

“Might could use a fill-up.”

Duane pulled another Corona longneck from the cooler by his feet and handed it to Colton, who cracked it open. Then Duane slumped back in his chair, hands behind his head, and gazed off at the illuminated towers and neon of the Nashville skyline, just visible above the treetops. “Been here a year. Sight never gets old. Best part about this house.”

“You mean it ain’t what you said about how the basement floods every time it rains?” Colton started to lean back in his white plastic chair but quickly caught himself as the legs buckled.

Duane chuckled good-naturedly, and then his face returned to an uncharacteristically (or so it seemed to Colton) somber and contemplative cast. “All them lights. Every light a star. City of dreams, brother,” he murmured in an awestruck tone. “Been imagining myself here since my papaw taught me how to play an E chord when I was nine. How ’bout you?” Duane plucked a joint from his jacket pocket and sparked it up in one practiced motion, taking a long drag before offering it to Colton.

Colton waved him off. “My dream’s a little newer. But I been hustling to catch up. Hell, I’ve written probably fifteen songs in the last month.”

Duane exhaled a cloud of smoke and coughed. “Play me one.”

Colton hesitated for a few moments. Finally: “Guess I better start getting used to it, huh? One sec.” Colton went back into the house and retrieved his guitar. Duane hit pause on the Larry Jon Wilson CD in the Emerson boombox sitting on an upside-down plastic bucket. He stuck his pinkies in his mouth and gave a piercing whistle. “We now welcome to the Opry stage… Mr. Colton Gentry!” He clapped and cupped his hand to his mouth and mimicked the haaaaaaa of crowd noise.

Colton ducked his head and grinned. He mock-bowed. “Uh, okay. Thanks for coming out tonight, folks. I’m gonna play y’all one of my newer songs. It’s called ‘Honeysuckle Summer.’ I wrote it about someone after I got my heart broke. Here goes.” Of all the songs he could have played, he didn’t know why he picked that one. But he did. As soon as he began playing and singing, his heartache, loneliness, and anxiety over his new life vanished momentarily into the darkness like the sparks from the fire. A sense of pure purpose—one that Colton hadn’t realized he’d been missing—filled the void.

Duane looked on in rapt, stoned wonder, and when Colton finished, he leapt to his feet and erupted in raucous hoots, applause, and whistles. “I said got-damn son! Now that’s a song. Lord almighty. You’re putting that on your first album. Done deal.”

“Aw, I don’t know, man. Still a little raw for me. Can’t believe I even had the balls to play it for you.”

Colton put away his guitar and sat again, and they drank and listened to the crickets and Townes Van Zandt and Vince Gill. Every so often Duane would look over at Colton and offer some variation of That song, man. Damn.

Colton had gotten a warm, pleasant buzz on when he turned to Duane and asked, nodding at the skyline, “What you think, man? We got a shot?”

Duane looked at Colton for a couple of seconds and then looked back at the city with a knowing, serene smile. “We’ll make it,” he said quietly. “They say Nashville’s a ten-year town. But we’ll pay our dues and work our asses off and make it. Two of those lights are for us. I’m gonna get me a tricked-out, restored seventies Bronco. Buy up a little piece of Arkansas by the lake and spend time there fishing or duck hunting when I’m not on tour or doing session work. I’m gonna do it all with—” He set down his beer, raised his hands and waggled his fingers. “How about you?”

“I’d like to buy my folks a nicer place than what we had when I was growing up. It was fine, but I want to say thanks to them for raising me.” He paused. “And while I’m doing it, I hope my girl from high school sees me making good.”

Duane cracked up. “That’s the main . . .