The Welder and the Sound Guy

I never wanted to go to a folk festival, not really, but the town was three hours from anywhere and Diane had been talking about it for a month like it was a pill she needed to swallow, so on the last Friday in August I loaded the truck and we drove out to New Mexico with the windows down and not much said between us. I'm Roland, I'm forty-four, I weld pipe for a living, and my wife Diane is forty-one and edits manuscripts from our kitchen table, and if you want the short version of our marriage it's this: we get along fine, we laugh at the same dumb shows, and somewhere in the last few years we stopped saying anything that mattered to each other. I figured a dusty field full of fiddles and warm beer might shake something loose. I figured wrong about a lot of things that weekend.

The festival was the kind where the stages are plywood on hay bales and the portapotties outnumber the trees. The main stage had a real soundboard though, a big one, with a guy sitting behind it in a canvas hat, and when we wandered up close to the mixing area during the second act of the afternoon Diane stopped walking like she'd hit a glass door. I noticed it before I understood it, the way you notice a change in temperature before you find the draft. Her whole face did something I hadn't seen it do in years, not at her mother's funeral, not when we talked about the house we lost in the foreclosure she never wanted to talk about. It went young. That's the only way I can put it. She was forty-one years old in boots she'd bought that spring and her face went twenty-five in about a second and a half.

I looked where she was looking and saw the guy at the board, tall, gray coming in at the temples, hands moving over the faders like he was playing the crowd instead of the band. I didn't know him. But I knew the name, because I'd known it for sixteen years the way you know a name that got said once in a hotel room and never said again. Chas. She told me about him exactly one time, early on, when I asked if I was the first man she'd ever loved and she was honest enough not to lie to me. She said there had been a summer, a festival circuit summer, a man who ran sound for the main stage, and it had been serious and it had ended because she took a job in Denver and he didn't believe in doors that closed behind you.

She said his name was Chas Abernathy and then she said she didn't want to talk about it, and in sixteen years of marriage we never talked about it again, and I built a whole quiet little wall around that sentence and lived behind it.

Now she was looking at the wall like it was tissue paper.

"Roland," she said, and then nothing after that, just my name, like she needed to check the floor was still there.

"That's him," I said. It wasn't a question. "That's Chas."

She nodded, small, and her hand came up off her side, and here's the part I still can't shake. She didn't tell the hand to go up. I watched it happen. It lifted halfway, an open palm, this involuntary little wave that never made it all the way, and I stood there in the dust watching my wife's body answer a man I'd never met from across forty feet of crowd, and the years between them, the marriage, me, the house, all of it just shrank down to nothing, like the sixteen years were a curtain somebody had blown aside with a fan. The guy at the board looked up. Maybe he felt it, maybe it was dumb luck, but he looked right at her and took off the canvas hat and grinned, a big easy grin that started in his whole face, and he pointed at her with two fingers and mouthed something I couldn't hear over the band.

Diane laughed. Out loud. I hadn't heard that particular laugh since before we were married, I didn't even know I'd been keeping track of it, but I recognized it the way you recognize a song from a car you used to own.

* * *

I did the thing I figured a decent husband would do, which was buy beers. Three of them, cold-ish, from the trailer at the edge of the field, and I carried them back balanced along my forearm the way you carry three beers, and I said, "You want to go say hi," in a voice I tried to make sound like a suggestion and probably sounded like I was handing over a knife and asking to be cut.

She looked at me and her eyes said stop, plain as a sign on a door, don't do this, Roland, turn around, walk me toward the merch tables, let this pass. But her legs didn't get the message. Her legs were already carrying her forward toward the soundboard, past the barrier rope the volunteer kid held up for her without asking, and I followed with three sweating beers and a stomach full of ball bearings.

"Roland, I don't," she started, walking.

"I know," I said. "Come on anyway."

"God, okay, fine, we're just saying hi, right, we're just." She didn't finish it. Her voice had that thing in it, that upward hitch, and I hadn't heard that hitch in sixteen years either and hearing it now made me want to put the beers down and sit in the dust.

Chas met us at the low fence in front of the board. Up close he was forty-five or near it, sun-leathered at the corners of his eyes, forearms of a man who hauls cable for a living, and when he saw Diane coming his grin changed. It wasn't the friendly grin anymore. It was the grin of a man who has just been handed something he thought was gone for good, and I watched my wife walk into that grin like a swimmer walking into a lake she used to live in.

"Di," he said.

"Hi, Chas." Her voice came out about half size.

He hugged her. I could claim it was nothing, a festival hug, the kind you give a person you met at a conference, but I was standing right there with three beers and it was not that. His hand spread flat on her back and hers went up around his neck and they held on maybe three seconds too long, three seconds in which the band played a chorus and the crowd cheered something and my wife closed her eyes over that man's shoulder, and I stood there holding a beer that was meant for him and felt the field tilt a little under my boots.

Then he stepped back, kept her hands a moment, looked her over head to boots and said, "You look exactly the same, which is criminal, how is that legal," and she swatted his arm and laughed that laugh again and I cleared my throat and said, "Roland, her husband," because somebody had to say it and I could tell nobody else was going to.

Chas took the beer and shook my hand and his grip was easy and warm and he said, "Roland, good to meet you, man, this woman," and he shook his head at Diane like she was a song he used to know all the words to, "this woman ran the best festival office I ever worked with, she ran the whole damn summer, ask anybody."

"It was one summer," Diane said, but she was glowing when she said it, glowing, and I thought, sixteen years, and she kept that summer in a drawer this whole time and it still lights up.

The band kicked into something loud and Chas glanced back at the board and said his set was about to start, the headliner, the big one, and he'd love to catch up, and he looked at Diane when he said it and she looked at the ground, and I said, "Sure, we're here all weekend," because what else does a man say, and he said there was a little area behind the booth where crew people hang out, cooler of beer, shade, way better than standing in the field, come back around ten when the headliner's on, and Diane said, "We'll think about it," which is what she says when she's already decided, and we both know it.

We walked away and found a spot on the hill and sat down and she drank her beer fast, looking at the stage but not at it, and after a while she said, "You're mad."

"I'm not mad," I said, and that was true, which surprised me, because what I was sat lower than mad, some cold wondering thing, "I just never knew his face before. I had you at twenty-five. He had you at twenty-five. That's all I learned today."

She didn't say anything to that, and the band played on, and I watched her fingers going around the rim of her cup, around and around, and I knew she was going to tell me something before this weekend was over, something she'd kept behind that wall for sixteen years, and God help me, some mean little part of me wanted to hear it.

We sat through two more bands on the hill and she barely said a word, and I used the time to work out what I was feeling, which turned out to be a strange thing, because I wasn't jealous exactly, or I was jealous but the jealous was sitting on top of something else, something that looked a lot like curiosity, and that embarrassed me more than the jealous did. The sun went down behind the hills and the dust turned gold and then gray, and the headliner started around ten, a blues band out of Philadelphia, and the crowd pushed forward toward the stage, and Diane stood up and brushed off her jeans and said, "Well," and I said, "Yeah," and we walked back through the crowd toward the sound booth, past the food tents and the generator humming behind the fence, and there was Chas's assistant, some kid of maybe twenty-four with a headset, who waved us around the side of the booth without even asking who we were, so Chas had told him, and that meant Chas had been thinking about us too, about her, and I filed that away.

The area behind the booth was exactly what he'd promised, a plywood shade structure with folding chairs and cable bundles coiled along the walls and a cooler of beer sitting in a puddle of its own meltwater, and Chas was back there alone, faders on autopilot, the headliner rolling through the board behind him, and he had a chair set out for Diane, actually set out, angled toward his, and I saw that and thought, well, there it is. He handed us beers and we talked about nothing for a while, the heat, the road, the portapotties, which Chas said outnumbered the trees three to one and he'd counted, and Diane laughed at that, really laughed, and I realized I hadn't heard that particular laugh, that full unguarded laugh, since I didn't even know when, and it went through me like a cold draft through a wall, because I live with this woman, I have lived with her for sixteen years, and here she was being funniest and loosest and most herself for a man she hadn't seen since she was twenty-five.

The kid with the headset came in and said the bass solo was coming up and the board needed him, and Chas said he'd be right there, and the kid looked at me and at Diane and said the mix was fine, it could ride, and Chas said, "It can ride, go," and the kid went, and then it was the three of us and the band playing loud through the canvas, a bass line rolling through the plywood under our feet, and Chas leaned back in his chair and looked at Diane and said, "So, Denver. What happened in Denver."

"Nothing happened in Denver," she said. "I took a job."

"You took a job and you never answered a letter."

"I answered the first letter."

"And then you stopped, Di. You stopped like a faucet."

She looked at her beer. The bass player started his solo and the crowd out front roared, a wall of sound coming through the canvas, and nobody in the whole festival could hear us, and I understood that Chas had picked this moment on purpose, the one moment of the whole weekend when nobody could hear anything, and I sat there with my beer and did not say a word, because I had decided something on the walk over, some cold clear thing, that I was going to sit still and listen, that if my wife had a drawer full of summer she was finally going to open it, and I would rather hear it than not hear it, even if it burned.

"He wrote me this long letter about how I was making a mistake," she said, to the beer, not to me. "About how doors that close behind you stay closed, he never believed in that, he thought every door was a door if you pushed hard enough. And I'd already signed the lease, Roland, I'd already told my mother, I'd built the whole leaving thing out of momentum and I didn't want anybody telling me it was a mistake, so I just, I stopped writing. That's it. That's the whole crime."

"That's not the whole crime," Chas said, and he said it gently, which surprised me, I had him filed as a loud man, "the whole crime is you never told me why. Not in the letter, not in sixteen years apparently, judging by the husband's face."

And then they both looked at me, and I will never forget that, that they both looked at me at the same time, my wife and the man my wife loved when she was twenty-five, and I took a drink and said, "Don't mind me."

"I always mind you," Diane said, and that was for me, soft, and then she turned back to Chas and the band hit the end of the solo and the crowd noise swallowed everything and she started talking into that noise, fast, like it was easier to say when nobody could possibly hear, and I caught most of it anyway, sitting two feet from her. She told him about the job offer that came in April, before the festival even started, how the Denver paper had called her, how she'd sat on the offer for three weeks because she didn't want it, how she finally took it because taking it was easier than saying out loud that a summer of festival tents and warm beer and a man who smelled like cable dust was not a life she could build anything on, and how sorry she had been every single day since, and how she had never once, not once in sixteen years, driven past a stage being built in a parking lot without pulling over.

"I didn't know that," Chas said.

"You weren't supposed to know that. Nobody was supposed to know that."

"Why are you telling me now?"