EPILOGUE
Scott parked and cut the engine, and both he and his passenger took their helmets off.
No, indeed not a woman — it was a man with a haughty pretty-boy face and an expensive haircut.
George let out a breath of air in a low whistle.
Now he was curious. He leaned on the railing and kept his eyes on Scott, who glanced up at him.
He pulled his neck gaiter down and appeared to ask the pretty boy to hang on a second, then bounded up the stairs.
“Hey, man,” Scott said, unzipping his leather jacket and shrugging it off so he could hang it on the railing.
“Hey there,” George said amiably. “You said friend, I thought lady friend. What’s the story?”
Scott gave him a sheepish smile, then fluffed his hair up with his fingers.
He looked nervous in a way he usually didn’t, like he was worried about George disapproving of him.
Scott did seem to worry about that sometimes, which George was both flattered and bemused by.
He thought Scott was a great guy and had never given him cause to believe otherwise.
He figured it had something to do with his own status as an elder statesman of indie music; Scott mostly scoffed at authority, but the authority he respected he was very vulnerable to.
A lot of musicians were like that — ego right there at the surface, behind a bravado the width of an eggshell.
As a lover of music, George understood this and sympathized with it.
Three decades in A how he moved his hands when he talked and his hips when he walked, the expressive way he tilted his head, how he kept batting his eyelashes at Scott.
As they went down to the ground floor, Scott’s domain which led out to the back patio, George decided to wingman a little. “Scott did some of the millwork down here, too,” he said as they walked into the parlor, and pointed at the fireplace. “The mantle there.”
“Damn,” Carver said, sounding impressed. He went over to a long bookshelf at the back of the room and started unashamedly examining the spines. “Since when do you know how to do this shit?” he said over his shoulder to Scott.
Scott had his hands in his pockets and looked shy.
“None of these designs are that hard, and it took a lot of practice,” he said.
“I fucked up so many pieces of wood at first. I had no intuition for joinery at all. Honestly, I still don’t quite get it, most of this stuff is glued together under the paint.
George is the one with the, like, spatial intelligence. He saves my ass all the time.”
“He’s great with the designs, though,” George said. “You know, knowing what would look good in a room and picturing it in his head and then figuring out how to make it real. I just tell him he has to measure fifteen times and cut once.”
Scott laughed. “Remember when I brought you that piece of moulding and it was like five inches too long?” He turned to Carver. “He was like, ‘How the fuck did this happen? I don’t understand how you arrived at this conclusion.’ Like he was worried about me.”
“The boy can’t count,” George admitted, and both Carver and Scott laughed. “But that’s okay. He’s got other talents.”
“I’m honestly really impressed,” Carver said, coming back over to them. “This place looks great.”
“Thank you, thank you,” George said. “We’ve been going slowly… one thing at a time, then we try to live with it for a few weeks before we do anything else, in case we fucked something up. And we fucked a lot of things up at first. But I do think it’s coming together nicely.”
Carver looked around the room, examining Scott’s crates of vinyls, speaker system, wall-mounted guitars, and his large framed print of Clarence Clemons kissing Bruce Springsteen.
George looked at the latter and wondered how he didn’t realize sooner that Scott was for dudes.
To be fair, hanging right next to this was an impressionistic painting of a naked woman.
Scott’s phone rang, and he got it out of his pocket. “It’s the tow truck,” he said, heading for the back door. “I told them to pull into the alley so I can bring my stuff in through the back, then I’ll have them tow it to the garage.”
“Check the temperature on that pork while you’re out there,” George called after him, and Scott waved in assent.