A door slams somewhere in the cabin, the barking stops, and a young woman can be seen out the windows who looks a great deal like the young man the day before.

She’s dressed in an insulated vest, a long-sleeved shirt, jeans and hiking boots.

She walks along the gently sloping packed earth covered in dead pine needles that makes up the front area of the cabin with what looks like a Burmese mountain dog and what is clearly a mutt, both unleashed.

“My daughter,” Lyla explains, taking up a mug of something that’s steaming and entering the daybed as she had the day before, to sit cross-legged on it. “Should we begin?”

Seattle

Lyla:

What Tim did, with “Life in the Fast Lane,” was not good.

I understood his intention, even then, and even then, I agreed with him.

But it wasn’t the right way to go about doing it.

Preacher felt betrayed.

That was their safe space. Onstage. That was where they were always in harmony, quite literally.

Tim ripping that away from Preacher, not only at that time, which was far from optimal, but at any time, it’s just…

[Pause]

The way Preacher saw it.

It was just simply unforgiveable.

In Tim’s defense, he not only didn’t know what was going on with Preacher, he didn’t know his story.

Even with that said, Tim had known Preacher by that time for nearly a decade.

He had spent a lot of time with him.

He had made music with him.

So, he might not know the story, but he knew there was one.

And it wasn’t a good one.

More than that, Preacher was about being up front about everything.

If you had something to say, say it.

Right to his face.

I know this sounds contradictory seeing as it was clear to everyone that Preacher was not being up front about something. He was keeping something buried.

But that was the first time he’d ever been that way.

And that was…

[Pause, then a sad sigh]

What it was.

My mother and father fought viciously before Mom took us away.

Or I should say, my father got viciously angry.

Because of that, bearing witness to it at a very early age, I avoided conflict.

And I never raised my voice.

I can still hear my father shouting at my mother. The words were ugly and damaging, but as a child, it was the timbre of his voice that truly frightened me.

It is highly likely this was conditioned in me due to the noises I’d hear after. Noises of him hurting her physically.

But regardless, because of that, no matter how angry I was, I didn’t lash out with a raised voice. There was rarely any drama to my anger.

Which might have been a problem.