Chapter 20 Not Long Ago
Not Long Ago
Paloma sat on her deck with her Strat on her lap and a glass of pinot grigio on the table, staring out across the lake.
The sun cast a fiery glaze over the waves and onto the gray shingles on the back of her house.
She’d finished the last of the chicken salad for dinner, but it wasn’t sitting well. She wondered if it was cursed.
She took an ample sip of wine and strummed through a melody that had been itching in the back of her mind for several days.
She was paid to invest her creativity into her songwriting gig to the point that she’d finish a day of contract work feeling like a husk.
Since she was between assignments, it would have made sense for her to do anything else: watch a cooking show, visit the winery up the road to breathe in the spiky scent of the grape leaves and chat up the owner over a rosé slushie, or even play Scrabble with Bobbie and Bud.
But during this liminal time between her argument with her son and when his flight landed in Los Angeles, it was as if her electric guitar had called to her.
It was a lot like when the Morries had given her the Stratocaster as a sixteenth birthday present: Whenever Paloma couldn’t figure out her feelings, she’d plug in and go.
She couldn’t believe that once again, she was forced to choose between Jace and Kaden.
Why was it that whenever she considered strutting back on stage in a miniskirt with a playlist of Paloma Doralle songs, she imagined him judging her for all the wrong decisions she’d made as a mother?
And when she reminded herself that she had Kaden’s best interests at heart when she left show business, why could she hear Jace telling her that she was smothering her talent?
Why did the two of them continue to cancel each other out?
Her guitar buzzed against her pelvis as she strummed, singing a fragment of a lyric she wanted to get to the next stage of development:
I hit a tripwire, and my heart exploded.
You roll in with rifles loaded.
Put ’em down, girl, and have a seat
Cuz I have a lot of explaining to do.
She swiped her notebook off the table and scribbled her lyrics and chords, knowing that if she didn’t document them, they’d be gone forever.
She repeated the lyric, substituting boy for girl in case it was going to be a better fit for her family dilemma instead of her romantic angst. Looking at the horizon line, she decided it would be about romance.
Children were supposed to grow up and move away and clash with their parents, but if there was love in the relationship, they’d usually find a way back home at some point.
There was a lot more potential for failure with a lover, hoping all could be forgiven by saying the right thing or singing the right song.
She wouldn’t be in this mess if Jace hadn’t been so…
Jace. Driven. Slyly funny and charming. Turning Paloma’s unspoken longing to be more than the star of Stone Beach into a hero’s journey back to the spotlight.
That was brilliant and manipulative, and so seductive.
Was Paloma right to think there might be a mutual glimmer of attraction between them still?
Or was she being snowed over again, like all those times when they’d decided to ignore their problems instead of bringing them out into the open and solving them?
After a while, she realized she was played out and put the Strat away.
She turned her attention to her handwritten list of the tasks to get ready for the benefit.
After their argument the night before, she begrudgingly agreed with Kaden: She had to follow through on her commitment, and with that in mind, she had a lot to do in the next three months to prepare.
Some tasks were pretty easy: booking a soundproof practice room at the local high school where she could work up the louder songs in her repertory without aggravating her neighbors; identifying an outfit that made her look as awesome as possible without tipping over into ridiculousness; finding a stylist who could bring her hair back to presentability after two decades of do-it-yourself dye jobs and trims while she was incognito.
The other tasks were more involved. First and foremost was to finalize her set.
As the closing act, she was expected to play three of her own songs then lead the rest of the bands in an all-hands jam as a tribute to the Artemis, using a tune that anyone who’d played in Detroit for any length of time would know well enough to sing or play along.
Jace offered her the opportunity to select that final song with one caveat: no Tom Strager.
No shade to him, but selecting one of his well-known songs would be too simple, too reductive, too stereotypical.
Besides, Jerome had told Jace the rights would be too expensive to secure for the documentary.
She couldn’t get over the fact that Jerome was a respected documentarian.
The three months she knew him back in 1997, he was completely insufferable and utterly unwilling to chip in for gas and food, even though he was coasting off his dad’s executive salary from Ford, to the point where she and Jace used to refer to him as His Ass-Holiness.
Once it was public that Paloma had joined the lineup, she’d have to schedule an interview with him and maybe ask him to pay her the twenty dollars he still owed her.
Next on the list: hiring a rhythm section that could help her recapture her trademark rough-around-the-edges sound.
At the Cherry Mill, Kevin had covered the bass part on his synth since there wasn’t a decent bassist within twenty miles of Stone Beach who didn’t have a curfew, so she had no local favorites.
Given what Jace had told her about the post–New York fallout, Mary would probably laugh in her face.
Still, Paloma worried that if she didn’t give her the right of first refusal, she’d go back to bad-mouthing her yet again, and she didn’t want to undermine the benefit from the get-go.
Hopefully Mary would decline anyway, seeing that she was never one to forget a grudge.
Paloma would have to ask Jace if she had any backup recommendations.
And on drums? As with Mary, Colin ought to be asked first, but Paloma couldn’t find his contact information anywhere, and his social media trail went cold after 2002. She considered checking police records but figured Jace might have suggestions here, too.
Besides, she knew which drummer she wanted to sit in with her, but he wasn’t taking her calls.
Yesterday, Kaden had stayed in his room with the door shut, unwilling to answer when she knocked and asked that they clear the air before he flew out.
Cindi arrived mid-morning and, following an awkward hello, lured him out to ship boxes and run errands ahead of their cross-country move.
Paloma’s offer to take them to dinner went unanswered, and they didn’t come back until after she’d fallen asleep.
Earlier that morning, the three of them had driven to the Traverse City airport in sullen silence.
When Paloma went to hug Kaden goodbye, he turned and entered the terminal without looking back.
She returned to Stone Beach alone, mad at herself and miserable.
She checked the time. Kaden and Cindi should have landed at LAX a while ago, yet he hadn’t called or texted to let her know they were safely on the ground and on their way to his father’s as he’d done after every other flight.
She emptied her wineglass and was on her way inside for a refill when her FaceTime chime rang.
“You could have given me a heads-up before you let Kaden in on our big little lie,” Nolan snapped before she could say hello.
Since relocating from Detroit in 2001, Nolan had become one of those Californian men who had enough self-discipline and money to be scrupulous about diet and exercise, and he was even more sharply handsome at sixty than he had been in his late thirties.
His silver-spangled, close-cropped hair and beard were never unkempt, and his horn-rims were never smudged.
Being a twice-divorced music supervisor who surfed on a daily basis definitely agreed with him.
Over the years they’d worked hard to stay on the same page when it came to parenting decisions.
As Kaden had gotten older, their interactions had gone from talking daily about all the glorious things their child was discovering to texting when necessary about the logistics of long-distance parenting: setting visitation schedules, confirming tuition payments, strategizing when Kaden was having trouble in school, sharing suggestions for Mother’s and Father’s Day presents.
By the scowl on Nolan’s face, it was clear this was not going to be a friendly chat.
She plopped into her office chair. “I didn’t plan it out; it just happened. And by the way, I texted you yesterday and this morning to call me.”
“I was on location until I went to the airport this afternoon,” he said.
“We didn’t get home until a few minutes ago.
” Paloma could see he was in his den, given the framed movie posters and the gold records on the walls he’d moved from his studio office during the Covid lockdown. “You didn’t tell me it was important.”
“I said, We really need to talk about Kaden! With an exclamation point.”
“Fine; my bad. You wanted to talk, and we’re talking now.”
Paloma was about to make a crack about how the women she dated would have called her right away, but didn’t. “How’s he doing? Is he still mad at me?”