It had been so long since Ray toured the East Coast. Some venues disappeared, along with promoters, record stores and radio stations. He remembered Halifax when you could arrive with two boxes of CDs and leave feeling like an entrepreneur. He remembered driving New Brunswick at night, CBC fading in and out, and wondering how many Irving signs he could count in an hour.

Now going back. Halifax. Moncton. Fredericton. Charlottetown. Saint John. Smaller places he had to look up on the map. Each confirmation produced the same little electrical charge. Someone still remembered. Or perhaps they didn’t remember and were willing to take a chance. He was happy with either explanation. He began remembering. A woman in Nova Scotia brought him her son’s cd after a show. A soundman who insisted Neil Young had once slept on his couch. A Cape Breton piano with three notes that sounded like somebody closing a screen door. A promoter who paid the cash from a cookie tin. A man in New Brunswick who drove through a snowstorm because he’d heard one of Ray’s songs on college radio in 1989.

But he wasn’t returning as the musician who had left. His hands were older. His sacrum developed sciatica. He accumulated songs, losses, marriages, funerals, arguments, books, mistakes, reconciliations and several thousand hotel key codes. He played differently now. Less interested in proving anything. More willing to let silence remain in the room without immediately sending other sounds to arrest it.

He wondered whether the East Coast had changed as much as he had. Of course it had. Everybody talks about returning to a place as though the place has been waiting patiently beside the highway. Nothing waits. The bartender gets married. The child who came with her parents is now forty-three. Someone dies. Someone moves to Alberta. Someone buys the building and turns it into expensive apartments with names like The Ritz.

Still, the roads would be there. The ocean certainly would. Raymond began practicing songs he hadn’t played in years. Some resisted. Others returned instantly, dogs hearing the family car. One evening he found an old set list from his last Maritime tour folded inside a guitar case. Beside one song he’d written:

NEVER PLAY THIS AGAIN.

He couldn’t remember why. Naturally he began practicing it. The song was better than he remembered. A month before departure he started assembling the new show. Old songs beside new ones. Instrumentals beside stories. Pieces written by the young man who had once toured the East Coast and pieces written by the older man returning there. For a moment it seemed they were two different musicians. Then he played a chord he’d been playing since he was twenty-five.

There it was. Same chord. Different hands. That was when Ray understood what returning really meant. You don’t go back to see whether the place remembers you. You go back to discover what remains when neither of you is the same. And if you’re lucky, somewhere, somebody opens a door, and for ninety minutes all the years between visits disappear into sound.