She turned to him.
“Kyle, would you do that number we discussed?” she asked.
He smiled, and nodded, then turned to the band leader and asked him to cease any accompaniment.
That departure from the norm for such clubs had not been scripted, so the members of the band seemed confused.
“I feel a special leading tonight,” he said. “All I need is my guitar.”
The band leader nodded understandingly, and gave him the sign of the cross.
“Praise God, brother, and thank you,” Kyle said.
And he began to sing “Amazing Grace” as Carla had never heard it sung before. Carla found herself staring at him, hardly blinking.
On the final stanza, Darcy Reuther joined in with Kyle.
“‘When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun,’“ they sang as though they had been doing duets together for a very long time, “‘we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we’d first begun.’“
Carla could not move, not even to join in with the applause.
And then Darcy Reuther noticed that she was in the audience.
“We have a special patron tonight,” she said, “someone who is a country music legend and, now, an Oscar-winning actress.”
She pointed in Carla’s direction.
“Carla Gearhart is here tonight. Won’t you come up onstage, my dear friend?”
She did not want to do anything but leave, but she was caught literally in the spotlight and, in order to be gracious, she had to accept Darcy’s invitation.
After having met many male performers during ten years as a singer, while she was making hundreds of appearances in the main metropolitan areas of the United States as well as small country locations, Carla should not have been nervous to stand next to Kyle, to have him whisper into her ear that he had been a fan for a long time, to look briefly into his eyes.
“Carla, you didn’t really plan on this,” Darcy Reuther observed, “so I can’t ask you to sing anything tonight.”
As she said that, everyone in the small audience seemed to start shouting, “Sing, Carla, sing!”
She was at her best when she had had plenty of time to rehearse and so the idea of singing with no preparation played havoc with her normal confidence on stage.
“I have no idea what I could do tonight,” she muttered, partly to the audience, partly to Darcy.
Kyle whispered, “What about ‘Were You There?’ You sing the first stanza. I’ll do the second. Darcy can take the third. And the three of us can sing the fourth together.”
As an afterthought, he asked, “Do you know it?”
“Yes…I do,” she told him nervously.
“Let’s go ahead then, okay?”
“Sure.”
He kissed her on the cheek.
Carla had not sung that hymn in years but, somehow, she had never forgotten the words, the tempo, anything about it.
“‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?’“ she began. “‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.’“
And she felt better about her unexpected performance in that little club than others that she had spent long hours rehearsing in order to face tens of thousands of people in a single stadium or arena.
Kyle and Darcy could do nothing but stand amazed, Carla seemingly at the top of her form during those few minutes.
Now it was Kyle’s turn.
“‘When through the woods and forest glades I wander,
and hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees…’“ he sang with great skill, imbuing that less familiar stanza with a power that seemed to shake the ceiling and the walls of the club.
Next, Darcy stepped into the spotlight.
“Something special is happening tonight,” she said. “I have heard the greatest female voice in the history of country-and-western, and I have heard the greatest young man’s voice in ages, and I must step aside. The spotlight is theirs tonight.”
More applause, louder, sustained.
“I have to ask Carla Gearhart and Kyle Rivers to sing the remaining stanzas while I sit down and enjoy them as you all are doing,” Darcy continued. “This is not a church, this club, but that’s okay, for I feel the Holy Spirit here just the same, and I think He is saying, ‘Let Carla and Kyle be a blessing to everyone!’“
The next day, Carla and Kyle went on their first date, beginning a relationship that they would come to pray would last a lifetime, and beyond.
Carla had never met anyone like Kyle before.
The men she had known were veterans of show business and life itself. She could never think of them in the same way as she was beginning to think of Kyle.
Strong…
He was strong physically, but there was a strength of the spirit that she found appealing as well, which did not translate into arrogance.
She talked with him about this during their fourth date, a simple one that involved dinner, a movie and a walk through one of Nashville’s parks.
“You are just so solid,” she told him.
“I work out a lot,” he replied.
Chuckling, Carla said, “That much is obvious.”
They were holding hands as they walked, enjoying the cool evening after an especially humid day.
“It’s something else,” she explained.
“Tell me…” he encouraged her, pointing to a bench where they could sit down.
“I have known men who never seemed to look me straight in the eye. You could tell that their minds were someplace else or that they felt insecure.”
“Or, maybe, it seemed that they were always planning something, always thinking of an angle.”
“That’s about it, Kyle. How did you know?”
This was one aspect of his personality that Carla had not decided whether she liked or hated. He seemed prone to honest answers at any given moment. She could not help wondering how much of what he told her along such lines was not wisdom but simple judgments that were inherently superficial.
But this time he had a good reason to say what he did.
“I’ve dated some women who were the same type,” he told her. “Pretty infuriating at times.”
“Is calculating a better word?” Carla ventured.
“Well, yes. There was no way I could trust them.”
“How about me?” she asked.
He sucked in his breath as he exclaimed, “Oh, brother!” then looked rather sheepish seconds later.
“Is it that bad?” Carla asked.
“It isn’t. But you aren’t perfect.”
She had never had any illusions. If anything, she tended to dwell too much on