Last Ride to Graceland Read online

  Outstanding praise for Kim Wright

  LAST RIDE TO GRACELAND

  “Kim Wright takes us on a mother-daughter road trip with a twist, moving both through time and across the South as a young woman retraces her mother’s route to find herself . . . Cory Ainsworth is the best kind of road trip partner—scrappy, smart, and wry.”

  —Joshilyn Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of The Opposite of Everyone

  “The twists and turns kept me captivated from start to finish. If you love Elvis lore, you’ll love this book!”

  —Mary Alice Monroe, New York Times bestselling author of A Lowcountry Wedding

  “Vividly imagined, Last Ride to Graceland is a gorgeous southern novel that captures those twists in a life where comic blends to tragic, and fate and luck collide. Wright is an exceptional writer, and her newest book is more than a simple road trip. It’s a canny exploration of the dark, seductive legacy our mothers leave us.”

  —Dawn Tripp, author of Georgia

  “Kim Wright has written a clever, charming, hilarious romp through the quintessential South. Last Ride to Graceland is the story of two women looking for redemption and finding it in the most unexpected, meaningful ways . . . [It is] a novel that makes us laugh one moment and weep the next. It is a study in contrasts and parallels and the way two lives can tell the same story. I didn’t expect to fall apart while reading these pages, or to bump up against so many familiar longings. But I did, and I love this novel all the more because of it.”

  —Ariel Lawhon, author of Flight of Dreams

  “Talk about the ultimate road trip: blues musician Corey Ainsworth hits the road in Elvis’s car on a winding journey through the Deep South and her own family history. It’s a little bit Elizabethtown, a little bit Walk the Line. I’m so glad I got to come along for the ride.”

  —Anne Bogel, “Modern Mrs. Darcy”

  THE CANTERBURY SISTERS

  “With originality galore, Wright has crafted a wonderfully ­entertaining tale with flair . . . readers looking for something different need look no further.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “Wright offers a modern-day tale imbued with Canterbury’s enduring lore.”

  —Booklist

  “[Wright] gives us another warm and engaging novel.”

  —The Charlotte Observer

  “Che de Marin is a terrific traveling companion for more than 300 pages.”

  —Star News Media

  “One woman’s mid-life crisis turns into a hilarious and touching adventure in Kim Wright’s latest heartwarming tale. A book for anyone who needs reminding that sometimes the journey to find answers is more important than the destination.”

  —Colleen Oakley, author of Before I Go

  THE UNEXPECTED WALTZ

  “A joyful novel about regaining your midlife groove.”

  —People

  “Wright . . . expertly guides us through a moving, layered, and lyrical exploration of transformation.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Captures our fear of the unknown and the tender joys of coming into one’s own.”

  —Booklist

  “A moving tale of a middle-aged widow learning to spread her wings and live again. . . . It feels genuine, as new beginnings and second chances aren’t always perfect and fairy-tale like, even if outward appearances suggest otherwise. With strong characterization and a cast of intriguing secondary characters, the story dances its way through all the right steps.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “Kim Wright’s charming novel chronicles one woman’s second chance at happiness and an opportunity to find her authentic self. The writing is pitch perfect—this is a winner!”

  —Elin Hilderbrand, New York Times bestselling author of Winter Stroll

  “An insightful novel about the unexpected places where we stumble upon second chances. Kim Wright writes with wisdom and grace.”

  —Sarah Pekkanen, internationally bestselling author of Things You Won’t Say

  LOVE IN MID AIR

  “Wright hits it out of the park in her debut, an engaging account of a woman contemplating divorce. . . . Delivers fresh perspective and sympathetic characters few writers can match.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Astute and engrossing. . . . This debut is a treat!”

  —People

  “An intense, thoughtful novel about love and friendship, or the lack thereof, in a marriage.”

  —Booklist

  “A breath of fresh air. It’s a candid, often painfully funny look at modern love and friendship, with some surprising twists and turns along the way. A book to savor—and then share with your best friend.”

  —Susan Wiggs, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Starlight on Willow Lake

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  To my father, Harry Wright, who taught me to believe in the territory ahead.

  It was like he came along and whispered some dream in everybody’s ear, and somehow we all dreamed it.

  —Bruce Springsteen

  PART ONE

  Beaufort, South Carolina

  CORY

  May 30, 2015

  I was a premature baby who weighed nine pounds and nine ounces. Yeah, I know. Impossible. But you have to understand that this particular kind of medical miracle is common in the rural South. Jesus still looks down from billboards around here and people still care what their neighbors think. We pray and we salute . . . and most of all, we lie. It’s why we have so many good writers per capita, and so many bad writers too, because all of us learned how to bend the truth before we could even half talk.

  This may sound bad, until you consider that most people only lie to protect something they love, like their family or their dignity or their reputation. A sense of decorum can be a good thing. In fact, the world doesn’t have enough of it. I remember my grandmother crying when she took me to a touring show of Fiddler on the Roof in Savannah, wiping her eyes when they sang “Tradition,” and saying, “That’s my life, Cory Beth, that’s me up and down. Except for the part where they’re Jewish.”

  So imagine yourself in a version of Fiddler on the Roof where the traditions involve tying up rice in little pink net packets before you throw them at the bride, hiding the dark meat at the bottom of the chicken salad so the ladies in the prayer circle won’t think you’re trash, sending birthday gifts to people you can’t stand because they sent you one back in 1997 and now neither one of you knows how to break the cycle. That’s right. Imagine yourself in a very polite insane asylum. Then you’ll have some sense of how I grew up.

  Beaufort, South Carolina, is the Old South. Not like Atlanta with its hip-hop or Charlotte with its banks or Florida with Walt Disney and all those serial killers. That’s a whole different world. That’s the part of the South that more or less won the war, and people forget that the rest of us exist. We’re just a place they drive through on their way to somewhere else. When they’re forced to stop for something—gas or firecrackers or barbecue or watermelons—they get back into their cars and shake their heads and say, “Can you believe that?” They think we’re slow. But we’re not really slow. We just take longer to get there. We meander and backtrack
and beat around the bush, which I guess you think is what I’m doing now.

  But I do have a point and here it comes: saying that I was born seven months and four days after my parents got married is just one way to figure the math. Another way is to say I was born seven months and nine days after my mama left Graceland, driving home in some madcap rush because she suddenly realized out of nowhere that she’d made a mistake. Maybe she shouldn’t have gone on the road as a backup singer, shouldn’t have dyed her hair and lined her eyes and chased the bright lights of rock and roll. Maybe she should’ve stayed home and married the local boy, the one who loved her so bad he asked her to marry him on the very night they both graduated from Leland Howey High. She couldn’t see then that her true destiny was standing right in front of her. She was eighteen and had something to prove.

  So Laura Berry left Beaufort, and when the door slammed behind her, it slammed right on Bradley Ainsworth’s heart. She toured and he waited, tinkering his life away in the family concrete business until that day . . . that day in the late summer of 1977, when it was so hot that the air shimmered and he looked up, thinking at first it was the sweat in his eyes that deceived him. But no, there she truly was, Laura, the love of his life, walking toward him across the lawn. The makeup was wiped off her face. The boots were gone and the leather jacket too, and her hair was pulled back, plain as truth, and her arms were stretched out before her like some kind of sleepwalker. She was sorry, she told him. So very sorry. She’d seen the world and she’d seen enough. She’d left Memphis and driven straight through the night, crying and praying and drinking truck stop coffee just to keep her going. All she knew was she had to get home. Would he still have her? Was it too late?

  In answer, he picked her up and swung her around. Swung her in a big circle, and when she tried to apologize again, he told her to hush, that their year apart had never happened. She was his girl, always had been, and there was no need to talk about it any other way. They’d get married the very next day, with her daddy in the pulpit and the whole town in the pews, and then the rest of their lives would come spooling out like silk, one sweet thing following another, just like they’d planned.

  Seven months and four days later, there I was. So big and strong that everyone always claimed I lifted my head and looked right at Laura and Bradley in the delivery room as if to say, “­Really? You’re both sure? This is the story we’ve decided to go with?”

  Bradley Ainsworth is a good man. He nursed my mother when breast cancer took her, way too young, and he did all the things a father is supposed to do. I can still see him pushing the chalk machine that lined the soccer field at the elementary school, eating the Girl Scout cookies I was too shy to sell, scowling at my dates and asking why they thought they were good enough to take his baby to the dance. He lives simple and true. He votes Republican and sits on the session of the First Presbyterian Church of Beaufort, and I’d never want to hurt him, but math is math and the facts are the facts and the truth can only stay hidden for so long, even in the South. I’ve known it all my life and it’s time to do something about it. Most of the people I could hurt are dead, save for Bradley, and who knows, the truth might set him free too—just a little bit. Deep down he’s got to know it, as good as I do, so we may as well both take a deep breath and say it out loud.

  Elvis Presley is my real daddy.

  I’m not just pulling all this out of my ass. It’s not just the undeniable biological fact that my mama must have already been knocked up when she went tearing from Memphis to Beaufort, driving wild-assed through the night and plotting how to foist another man’s baby onto her gullible high school sweetheart. And it’s not just the fact I’ve always known, deep in my gut, that I was raised by the wrong family and in the wrong place. The fact that I always knew there was something in me that was meant for greater things, or the fact that I can sing.

  And I can, you know, like an angel and like a devil too.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself again. Telling the end before I tell the beginning. The real proof of my identity started revealing itself yesterday afternoon, when I went into the bar to get my check.

  I work at a place named Bruiser’s. I don’t know why. I don’t mean I don’t know why I work there, because they pay me and the musical performance opportunities in a town the size of Beaufort are limited. What I mean is, I don’t know why they call it Bruiser’s. It makes it sound like a biker bar, like some sort of dive where fights break out, and it’s actually a sweet little café located right on the inlet waterway. I play out on the deck and they serve peel-and-eat shrimp by the bucket. I cover Jimmy Buffett, Joni Mitchell, Chris Isaak, maybe even a little Van Morrison. Some of my own stuff now and then, although the owner doesn’t like it when I do. People start going to the bathroom or calling for their checks.

  Anybody who works at Bruiser’s can eat free before their shift starts, and nearly all of us take advantage of the owner Gerry’s uncharacteristic generosity on this particular point, even though we know good and well that we’re just eating whatever didn’t move the night before. The servers sit with the other servers, and cooks sit with cooks, and the talent for the night sits at a separate table, which I imagine would be fine if you were a band, but can be a little lonely for a solo act like me. I bring a book. I don’t always read it but I keep it in the car, just for Thursday and Friday afternoons, so I can pretend to be busy as I sit there, peeling my shrimp, squeezing my lemons, watching the sun go down across the bay. It feels like high school, which pretty much everything does, in the end. So it’s yesterday and I’m almost finished when I look up to see Gerry coming toward me carrying a beer, which is all foamy because the line starts to spit when it’s near dead, and a message.

  “Your daddy called for you,” Gerry says.

  “Does he want me to call him back?”

  “Nah. He just said tell you to ship him his waders.”

  “His waders? I don’t know how to ship him his waders. I don’t even know what a sentence like that means.”

  Gerry’s brow wrinkles. “Wait a minute. I wrote it down.”

  He goes back into the restaurant, sipping the foam as he walks. I play at Bruiser’s every weekend during the season, which is probably why Bradley knew to leave a message for me here. I push my plate away and consider the table of servers clustered on the level below me. College kids, mostly, either up from the design school in Savannah or down from the College of Charleston. They have that old-money, new-clothes look and they like the idea of slumming it, a dozen of them sharing a rental on the waterway, sleeping on the beach all day and serving at night. Slumming’s fun when it’s temporary, when you know you can go home to your real life at some point. Kids like this come to the lowcountry every summer, drifting in and out with the tide, and I used to sleep with one or two of the boys every season. They were young and pretty and there for the taking, just like a pile of yesterday’s shrimp, and I was younger and prettier then too.

  Julie Mackey was my roommate through most of my twenties and she used to get a new tattoo every Memorial Day to mark the start of the season. She called the summer boys “the buffet.” “Let’s cruise the buffet,” she’d say in the middle of May, when the bars and lifeguard stands started hiring and we’d walk through town, checking out what this particular season had in store. “Looks like I’m going to need an extra big plate this year,” Julie would sometimes say. She sang for this down-and-dirty cover band and could growl out a song just like Janis Joplin. That same sort of grit in her voice, in her life. “Looks like I’m going to be going back for seconds,” she’d say on summers when the buffet looked especially bountiful, and whenever Julie talked like that, you always got the feeling she was getting ready to toss aside a cigarette, even though I never knew the girl to smoke.

  Julie’s married now. Got a couple of kids, and I don’t know what she did with the tattoos, with that stoned-looking sea turtle on her shoulder or the merman on her br
east. Her growl has tamed down to a purr and I see her sometimes—this town’s the size that you see everyone sometimes—but she never seems embarrassed to run into me. We probably both should be a little embarrassed—she by what she once was, me by what I still am. It’s a fine thing to run wild in your twenties, even okay to hang on to that life as you round thirty, but now . . . to be thirty-seven and still working the buffet? Not so good. My eyes slide past the server boys and toward the bay where the sailboats bob and the light’s gone all pink and purple.

  So Bradley’s trying to get in touch with me. He wants me to ship him his waders, whatever the hell that means.

  I’ve had some financial embarrassment as of late. My ­iPhone contract’s been canceled. It’s temporary, just until the first of the month, or maybe just until the first of the month after that, but I guess Bradley must have called me and gotten some message about how his daughter is a coming-up-on-forty loser who lives in a trailer and plays waterfront bars and sleeps with the wrong men. Frat kids, transients, bassists with a coke problem, salesmen with a wife problem, an associate pastor who’s begun to doubt that God is listening. Those are my boys. I don’t know if AT&T would say all that on a recording, but they’re probably thinking it, and besides, Bradley knows well enough that his baby girl’s teetering on the precipice of becoming white trash. I’m the reason he hasn’t run for the school board, even though everybody keeps telling him he should.

  It’s mysterious. Bradley went down to Clearwater to fish over the Memorial Day weekend, and if he forgot his waders, as he evidently did, why wouldn’t he go into some Dick’s Sporting Goods or Bass Pro Shop down there and pick up a set? Mailing them to Florida, assuming I can even find the damn things, is going to cost a fortune. But then again, Bradley has big feet. Size fourteens, the feet of a basketball player. I plop my own on a chair and study them. Size fives, with high arches and short toes. Small as a child’s.