Chapter 18 Not Long Ago
Not Long Ago
Kaden put his phone down and took his earbuds out. “I hope it’s okay I came up early. I need to finish packing before Cindi gets here.”
Honestly, it was not okay. Paloma wanted nothing more than to pace around her house, without her son and his girlfriend in earshot, so she could yell at herself for agreeing to do a show produced by her ex.
An ex who was relentless about achieving her business goals at the expense of everything else.
An ex who was willing to put aside the fact that Paloma had broken her heart into a billion pieces in order to get what she wanted, for the Artemis and herself.
An ex who’d somehow read Paloma’s mind and knew how much she wanted to perform her own music again after laying low in Stone Beach for so, so long.
An ex whose smile could still turn her bones to melted butter and send her libido skyrocketing.
Paloma pushed all of her angst down deep, far away from her son. “You’re living here for another forty-eight hours,” she told Kaden. “You don’t need permission to come home.”
“It looked like you might have plans. I saw all that chicken salad in the fridge and wondered if you had houseguests or something.” As she put her guitar away, he added, “I ate some of it. Hope that’s okay, too.”
She reentered the living room. “Show me what you’re planning to get rid of. I want to make sure you’re not throwing out a family heirloom.”
The state of Kaden’s bedroom was somewhere between an intolerable mess and a FEMA-worthy disaster.
Plastic bins half filled with winter clothes, comic books, LEGO collectibles, and random boy crap took up most of the floor space.
His bureau drawers were hanging out, and his closet door was propped open by a pile of long, skinny sneakers and various boots.
While one wall was bare, the others still sported posters of Star Wars, Iron Man, and Sleeping Bear Dunes National Park.
“Packing is going well, I see,” Paloma deadpanned.
“Don’t worry, I have all day tomorrow.” He carefully stepped over a cardboard box marked “PlayStation shit” to reach the closet.
“These, I wouldn’t wear again even if they still fit,” he said, removing several button-down shirts and pairs of khakis that had been standard dress for his many years of high school orchestra concerts where he dutifully stood in the percussion section behind the ensemble, bored out of his mind between snare cues, itching to ditch the Sousa marches and get back to wailing his way through a Nirvana set.
Next, he handed her a couple of well-worn parkas. “I won’t need these or the gloves or snow boots in LA.”
“Want me to save them for when you visit at Christmas?”
“Good idea.”
Paloma was secretly glad to hear that he still intended to come home. Once he got used to the California warmth and sunshine, and lack of maternal supervision, she was afraid he’d change his mind.
He motioned toward the shelves on one wall packed with baseball trophies and plaques from band competitions and honor societies. “I don’t want to take these, but I don’t want you to get rid of them, either. I worked hard for them.”
“Yes, you did,” she said, a thousand images of her son’s childhood and adolescence flipping through her mind.
“Just don’t leave them out when you turn this into a guest room. People will think your son was a nerd who peaked in high school.”
“Okay. Box them up, and I’ll store them in the basement.”
Kaden pointed at the desk. “There’s a bunch of computer cables and gaming mice we can toss, and some dead iPods, too. The Apple Store won’t give you any money for them now that they’re discontinued, but they might be able to recycle them.”
Paloma’s stomach dipped. “Do you have my iPod? The one I used to use?”
He picked his way over to the desk and rifled through the box. “Here you go.”
“I wish this still worked,” she said softly.
“All of those songs are on your laptop and an external drive, and I have everything uploaded to my cloud account, too. You can listen to any of them anytime you want. You don’t need that relic anymore.”
She cradled the device in her palm. Locked away in its impenetrable innards were thousands of songs that Jace had carefully curated for her during their relationship with an attention to detail that bordered on obsessive.
After New York, this was the one relic Paloma hung on to.
Although most of the material made her dreadfully sad post-breakup, she couldn’t bear to part with it, even if it was only a hunk of dead hardware.
She slipped the iPod into her back pocket. “Anything else?”
“I have some dorm furniture and junk from my apartment we’ll take to Goodwill tomorrow. We’ll buy everything new once we find a place. Dad said he’ll take us to IKEA.”
“Got it,” she said, trying not to grind her molars at the thought of how much she’d spent on all the household items he needed during his four years at University of Michigan, only to have them cast aside and replaced by new and shiny things from Nolan in LA.
She tried not to think that she was one of those replaceable things, too.
He followed her as she walked toward the kitchen. “How was the gig tonight?”
“I’d barely call it a gig,” Paloma said, getting a sparkling water out of the fridge. “The usual uninterested crowd, the usual drunk guys trying to drown me out.”
He shook his head, accepting the Coke Zero that Paloma handed to him. “I don’t know why you bother. They pay you shit.”
“It keeps my chops up.”
“What for?” he asked with a light laugh. “You planning a world tour with Tony and Kevin?”
“Actually, I’ve been asked to be part of a benefit in Detroit this fall.”
“Oh, that’s cool,” he said with a good-natured nod.
“And I need to talk to you about it,” she said, using her tone of voice that meant business, and maybe some bad news.
“Oh, okay,” Kaden said, arranging himself against the arm of the couch so he could prop his skinny, sock-clad feet on the table. “What’s up?”
Sitting at the other end of the couch, she looked at her son, his dark brows framing the green eyes she’d bequeathed to him and his sharp jaw shaded with a couple days’ worth of scruff à la his dad.
She wished she could summon a time machine and change how she’d mothered him over the last couple of decades so she wouldn’t have to explain so much in so little time.
“You know how I used to live in Detroit before I moved here when I was pregnant with you?”
“Yeah, so I could have a boring life.”
“A better life.”
“Call it what you want, Mom. Nothing happens up here. Never did, and never will, not even during tourist season. No wonder Dad didn’t want to move here to be with us.”
“Is that what he’s told you?” Paloma asked, wondering what else Nolan had been telling him about her motives.
“He always says what you’ve always said.
The two of you were in bands in Detroit and crossed paths, you got together for a hot minute, you both wanted to have a kid but neither of you wanted a long-term relationship, he had a job in California and you wanted to live in a small town…
blah-de-blah-de-blah. Why are you bringing this up? ”
“The truth is, I was in a relationship with someone else when I got pregnant.”
“Oh?”
“A woman.”
“Oh!” Kaden said, his deep voice lifting in surprise. “So obviously, she knew she wasn’t the father.”
“She didn’t even know I was pregnant. I left her before she found out.”
“Okay…so?”
Paloma exhaled. “We’d been together for several years. She was my business manager, too.”
“You had a business manager?” Kaden asked, a mixture of disbelief and suspicion in his voice. “Why? You told me you just played a few clubs in Detroit and Ann Arbor.”
Paloma pressed her lips together. “I actually had a pretty high-profile career from the late nineties to 2001.”
She saw the wheels turning in his head. “The year I was born.”
“Yes.”
“How high profile?”
“Headlining national tours. Some international dates. Glastonbury Festival. TV appearances.”
She saw the confusion creep across his face. “And you gave all that up because of me?”
“No, K,” she said gently. “I wasn’t giving up anything I wanted to keep.
I had never wanted that kind of nonstop pressure, and, for a lot of reasons, my girlfriend and I weren’t on the same page about my music career or our non-musical life, for that matter.
What I did know was that I wanted you. I wanted to be a much better parent than my parents had been, and I wanted you to be surrounded by people who cared about you: Aunt Bobbie and Uncle Bud, the friends we’ve made through school, and all the other folks up here. ”
“And Dad,” he added pointedly.
“Yes, of course—your father, too. I wanted you to feel loved and safe. That was all I wanted.”
“Are you telling me all this because I’m moving?” he asked with a note of amused confusion. “Is this some sort of empty-nester love dump?”
“Ugh, sorry. I’m giving you a long-winded explanation for why I needed to talk to you about this benefit in Detroit. Have you heard the song ‘Heart Fire,’ maybe on Netflix or TikTok?”
“Cindi’s obsessed with that song.” From what she’d observed over the three years they’d been dating, Kaden’s girlfriend Cindi was obsessed with a lot of things: lifestyle influencers, Friends reruns, poke bowls, baby goat videos.
She was also obsessed with Kaden in a caring, mutually beneficial way that made Paloma feel better about the two of them moving across the country together. “Why?” Kaden asked, his eyes narrowed.
“Well, ‘Heart Fire’ is my song.”
“You mean you wrote it for Paloma Doralle?”
“I mean, I’m not P. D. Smith. I’m Paloma Doralle.”
Kaden stared at her momentarily before muttering, “Cindi called it. I am such an idiot.”
Now it was Paloma’s turn to be surprised. “What do you mean?”