Chapter 11 Houston
HOUSTON
Sagebrush in the morning is quiet enough to hear the air conditioner. I unlock the front, let Lou in first, and flip the breakers for the live room. Dust lifts and settles. She sets her tote on the couch and looks around like she’s measuring the space for a new idea.
“I like it better in daylight,” she says.
“Me too.” I check the red light over the door, then the talkback. “We can start in A. B still hums.”
We lay out the day. Two hours to sketch a demo. An hour to listen to old takes. Lunch, if we remember it. She flips her sketchbook open and sketches the room. I boot the rig and patch the mics that always behave.
The front door opens without a knock. “Who forgot to invite me?” a voice sings.
I turn. “Mom?”
Talia Turner sweeps in like she owns the place, which she could if she wanted. Long blond curls, warm brown eyes, short and full-figured in a bright dress that shows she knows she still looks good. Bangles clink. Her smile is the same one that got us out of bad contracts and into better rooms.
I’m surprised she’s here. Between her home in Los Angeles and her home in Vegas, she usually picks the beach over the desert.
“You didn’t think I’d miss my boys when I was passing through, now did you?” she says, kissing my cheek, then holding Lou at arm’s length to look her over. “And you must be Lou. Honey, look at you. You’ve got the hunger in your eyes.”
Lou laughs, startled. “That obvious?”
“To me.” Mom winks. “I’m Talia. I cuss a little. I hug a lot. My boys tell me I’m too much, and that’s just fine by me.”
“Hi,” Lou says, a little smile on her lips, and her shoulders drop a notch.
Mom sets her purse on the piano and looks around. “This place raised you. You remember sleeping on those rugs?”
“I remember Salem snoring,” I say.
She laughs and spins once, checks the boards like she can hear the ghosts. “I brought coffee and kolaches in the car. Go get them, baby.”
I jog out, grab two boxes and a carrier, and come back to the sound of Mom telling Lou about her first tour.
“I thought I wanted chaos,” she says. “Then I had three little men and decided the road could survive without me for a few years. Studio gigs paid. No one threw bottles. By the time Knox was old enough for the first hair on his chin, Troy was on the way, so I was glad I’d settled down.
I could get home for dinner and make sure homework got done. ”
“You did more than that,” I say.
“I did exactly that. We kept the lights on. You boys kept the music going. Now we’re all here again, which makes me think the universe likes symmetry.”
Lou touches her locket. “Yeah, maybe it does.”
Mom sees it. Of course she does. “What have you got there?”
“It’s the only thing I had when I was found,” Lou says. “Back of it says Navarro.” She shrugs. “So, that’s my last name.”
Mom’s face softens. “Baby.” Then she snaps her fingers like a bandleader. “You want to work? Go dig. The archival logs are in the back office. Session sheets, marker scribbles, receipts, my gross gum in envelopes. You’ll find something that sparks.”
Lou blinks. “Can I really?”
“You better,” Mom says. “Inspiration grows best in dusty folders.”
Lou disappears down the hall with a half smile. Mom watches her go and nods like a coach. “She’s got it.”
“Got what?”
“The look. Steady hands. Ear already on. Don’t ruin it by talking too much.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say, and sit at the piano. The wood is a little out. The felt smells the same. I play a scale, then a chord that lives in my hands whether I want it to or not.
I think about the locket, the unknown faces, the way Lou said the word found, when speaking about herself. A melody shows up like it’s been waiting by the door. I catch it and move slow so I don’t scare it off.
Three notes, then five. A climb that isn’t dramatic, a turn that lands where it started with something new inside it. I play it twice, then reach for a better voicing, then pick up the guitar to see if it holds in a different skin. It does.
“Pretty,” Mom says, perched on the amp like Betty Boop at a mic check.
“Locket.”
“Call it Lost and Found,” she says, then waves it off. “Forget it. Don’t let me name your art.”
I stand and patch a ribbon on the guitar, then a small diaphragm on the piano so the hammer noise stays polite. The old preamp in the rack still has a sweet spot two clicks past noon. I set it there.
Mom hums along to nothing and somehow finds the key anyway. That’s her gift. One of many. I arm two tracks and step into the live room to test the bleed.
Lou returns with a box of paper and a stack of old Polaroids. She sets them on the piano and looks at my hands. “What’s that?”
“Something new.”
She hums like she’s answering a question I didn’t ask. Not words. A line over mine that fits too well to be random. I stop and look at her. She blushes and shakes her head.
“That was good. Keep going.”
She hums it again. I play under it, shifting my left hand to give her more room. She follows without thinking, then stops, startled by herself. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” I hit record. “Again.”
She does it, softer now, eyes on the locket like she’s reading from it. I add a second guitar voice to sit under both our lines and let the loop spin.
“You sing?” I ask.
She laughs. “No.”
Mom gives me the smallest nod behind her. I hear the chord change she means, and I take it. Lou hums the turn back with a little smile like she knew I would.
We play the loop. I stack a soft drum pattern with brushes, nothing that would scare the melody. The room holds its breath in the way rooms do when a song is being careful.
Lou hums one more answer and then covers her mouth with her hand like she’s broken a rule. “That’s all I’ve got.”
“It’s enough.” I save the session and type Locket in the name before Mom can see it and pitch something worse.
Lou flips through session logs. “Your mom’s notes are wild. ‘Turn it down, you fools’ is written four times. And underlined.”
“She was talking to Salem.”
“He liked loud,” Mom says.
“Likes,” I say, and she waves a hand.
“Likes.”
Lou runs her finger down a column. “This one says ‘two in the morning, the boys fell asleep here, leave them.’”
Mom sighs, fond. “We slept on this floor between takes. We woke up with lines in our faces from the rug.”
Lou sets a photo on the piano. It’s all of us in the live room, small and tired and proud. Mom behind the board, hair bigger, eyes the same. I look like a kid trying to stand like a man.
“Here.” Mom pulls a stack of cue sheets from a drawer. “You can steal my shorthand. TT means take. SB is sound better. HF is have fun, which I had to write because you all forget.”
Lou grins and copies the key into her notebook. “HF. Got it.”
I print the loop to a new track and bounce a rough stem so I can push it to my phone later. She hands me three Polaroids. “Use these for the room tone. Joking. But look.”
They’re of the same corner ten years apart. Different amps. Same scuff on the baseboard. It steadies me. Feels like home over time.
“I’m going to grab coffee,” Lou says. “You want anything?”
I grunt. “Black.”
“Cream and sugar,” Mom says. “And something sweet if the day loves me.”
“Got it,” Lou says. She takes her tote and is out the door with a wave.
The room settles differently without her. I lean back on the bench. “What do you think?”
“About her?” Mom grins. “I invited her to crawl through paper like a raccoon. That’s approval in my house.”
“I mean, us spending time with Troy’s ex.” I keep my voice even.
Mom snorts. “Baby, after all the men I went through, I’m sure some of them were brothers. I’m not here to preach about shoulds. I spent a lot of time on my knees in this life, so I can’t tell other people what to do about that kind of thing.” She pats my cheek when I blush. “Don’t faint.”
“I’m not fainting.” My cheeks are burning like lava, but I’m not fainting.
Her laughter dies down. “No one leaves a happy home, Houston. If she’s with you boys now and not with him, that’s probably on him somehow.
You know how Troy is. I love my boys, but after what he pulled with the family business, that tells me what he thinks of his family and what kind of person he truly is.
He made his choices. I can’t say I feel a lick of judgment when it comes to you three and Lou. ”
“I feel responsible.”
“You are responsible. For your work. For how you treat people. For not drinking your lunch. You are not responsible for your brother being a fool.”
“Even if the press says otherwise?”
“Let the press write fan fiction. That’s all they do anyway,” she says. “Deliver something good. That’s the only answer that pays.”
The guilt finally subsides. Mom is a wild woman with the morals of a pirate, but I trust her judgment. “Okay.”
She squeezes my hand. “Encourage her. Don’t push. Leave the door open. When she hums, record it. When she draws, get out of the way. You boys are loud. She doesn’t need volume. She needs air.”
“She doesn’t want to sing.”
“She doesn’t want to be watched while she sings,” Mom corrects. “Not yet anyway.”
The door opens. Lou returns with a tray balanced on one hand and a paper bag in the other. “Cream and sugar,” she says, handing Mom a cup. “Black for you.” She passes me mine and sets a cinnamon roll on a napkin for the room.
“Good girl,” Mom says, already peeling a spiral.
Lou slides back onto the bench beside me. Her thigh touches mine and then doesn’t; she adjusts so she has her own space. Smart. I start the loop so she can hear what we caught. She hums that line under her breath without meaning to and then catches herself again.
“You’re allowed.”
She smiles without teeth. “Okay.”
“I’m going to go flirt with the copier and find the chili recipe I left in the desk in ninety-nine,” Mom announces, and floats down the hall, fanning herself with a session sheet.
“I love your mom,” Lou says.
“Funny. Me too.”
Lou takes out her phone and opens a notes app. We go over some details for the album, and then she asks for a title.
“Not yet. The songs will tell us the title.”
She nods, satisfied by that answer. She looks at the piano, then at me. “Show me your left hand again.”
I play the chorus we don’t have words for. She hums one measure and stops, thinking.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing. It just fits.”
“It fits because you make it fit.”
She shakes her head and reaches for her coffee. “Don’t romanticize me. Too much pressure.”
“Noted.”
We get a verse. We get a bridge that will probably die by afternoon and we’re both okay with that. We get a beat that’s more heartbeat than drum loop. We save often because we’re not fools.
“Give me one clean hum. We’ll call it a guide, not a vocal.”
“Okay,” she says, and steps to the ribbon.
I lower it to her height and ask if she wants the lights down.
She nods. I dim the room and hit record.
She hums the line once, breath steady, pitch true.
I name the track and lock it so I can’t mess it up later.
She exhales like she just did something reckless and survived.
Mom returns with a cracked folder and triumph. “Found it,” she says. “Also found my old laminates and a photo of Salem with hair down to his shoulders.”
“He’ll pay to destroy it.”
“Too bad,” she says, tucking it back like a card shark.
Lou checks the clock. “I can stay till two. Then I need to send emails and work on a thousand other things.”
“Two is perfect. Quincy wants a demo tonight.”
We run the song twice more. Lou’s hum locks tighter each pass. I color a harmony under her line that makes her look at me like I’ve complimented her without words. I have. She hears it. She might not know music formally, but some part of her brain does.
Before she goes, I jot a lyric scrap in the margins. Found, silver, names unknown, face in a locket, home is a person not a room. She reads it and taps the word home.
“That one,” she says.
I circle it. Mom nods from the doorway like we just picked a nail for a picture. Small choices. That’s how a song stops floating.
At one fifty, Lou closes her sketchbook and tucks her pencil into the wire. “I’m going to the suite to build a grid and not doomscroll.”
“So, just some light doomscrolling then?”
“Of course. You need anything?”
“Just send me your file,” I say.
She stands, and I do too. “Thank your mom for me. For letting me dig. It helped my creativity.”
“I will.”
She hesitates, then touches my arm. “That melody’s good. Don’t lose it.”
“I won’t.”
She heads out. Mom watches her go from the hall and comes back in with the cinnamon roll plate and a grin. “I like her. She’s not soft. She’s kind.”
“She’s both.”
“Good,” Mom says. “Now hug me and get back to work.”
I do. Her perfume is the same as it was when I was ten and needed to know the world could be steady. I step back, sit, and press record. Music is the thing that makes the world make sense, and right now, I need that more than I knew.