Chapter 22 Florence
“Sorry.” Andrew flips a switch, illuminating the kitchen island, and him standing behind it, appearing as unexpectedly as he did during my therapy session. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
He’s wearing the same gray uniform and black hoodie, though now his sleeves are down over his wrists. I wonder if he had to prove he could enter a room silently to get this job.
I swing the guitar onto the couch beside me. “I don’t scare that easy.”
“I thought you might want something to eat,” he explains. “You barely had any dinner.”
“What, they keeping track of that, too?”
Andrew shakes his head. “Just a chef trying to please his customer.”
“I’m not a customer. And you’re not really a chef.”
“I’ve cooked every meal you’ve had since you arrived.”
“Just admit that they hired you more for your muscle than your skills in the kitchen.”
Andrew opens his mouth to protest, then smiles instead. “Fair enough.” He holds his hands up like I’ve beaten him.
I move toward the kitchen and sit at one of the barstools across from him.
“Candy?” he offers.
I nod, feeling like a little kid. The light is dim enough that maybe Andrew can’t see the wrinkles framing my mouth, the sun damage freckling my cheeks. I think about the celebrities who died young, beautiful, their faces still pristine: James Dean, River Phoenix. Kurt. Scott.
It’s already too late for me to go like that.
The not-really-a-chef procures a bowl of Swedish Fish. I dig in.
“I like your ink.” Andrew’s gaze runs up and down my bare arms as he reaches into the bowl and pulls out a handful of red fish, popping them one by one into his mouth.
“I don’t think your boss approves.”
“My boss?”
“Eeeevelyn.”
Andrew laughs at the way I say her name. “Yeah, she’s not exactly punk rock.”
“She make you cover that up?” I nod at his forearm. Andrew pulls up his sleeve, revealing the Never Settle tattoo. I reach out, running my fingers over my own words. The letters are slightly smudged, like ink is forever bleeding beneath his skin.
“Not really appropriate,” he says.
“The tat, or what it says?”
Or the way I touched you?
“The tattoo.” He leans forward, his arms flat against the cold kitchen counter. “Though I don’t think Evelyn would get the reference.”
Maybe if she’d looked me up online when I told her to, she would.
“You know, the label hated that song? They wanted it off the album.” I twist my hair around my fingers.
“You’re kidding.”
“Yeah, they thought I sounded ungrateful.”
“That was kind of the point.”
“I know.”
“Obviously you know,” Andrew says, but he doesn’t sound sheepish, the way some fans do when they tell you what your songs meant to them, as though the lyrics were about their lives rather than mine.
I never minded when fans took my words and made them theirs.
It was everyone else I took issue with. Cover bands making money off singing my songs, the record label selling rights so some strangely gentle version could play in the background of a car commercial.
I didn’t realize just how much I was giving away when I signed my first contract.
In another context, Andrew would offer me a drink right about now.
Maybe something stronger. But here, he says, “You must be freezing,” and walks around the island to pull a creamy blanket off the back of the chair where Evelyn sits during therapy.
He places the blanket around my shoulders, so soft I think it must be cashmere, then does that thing guys do to have an excuse to touch you, rubbing his hands up and down my upper arms.
“Better?” he asks.
“Better,” I answer, though I wasn’t actually cold. My husband used to say I ran hot.
Instead of returning to the other side of the kitchen island, he sits on the stool beside me. “You gonna keep working on that song?”
“What song?”
“The one you were writing.” He nods toward the couch, toward my guitar.
“I already forgot it,” I say, though it’s not true.
He hums a few bars.
“I was just dicking around,” I say dismissively.
“It sounded pretty good to me.”
“You’d be in the minority.” No one’s wanted new music from me in a long time. Not that I’ve finished a song in years.
“No way.” Andrew shakes his head. “Your fans would love to hear from you.”
That’s not what Callie says. Not what the record company says. Not what my former bandmates say.
“I’d love to hear from you,” Andrew says softly.
His words hover in the air between us for a beat before he stands again, this time grabbing my guitar and strumming it absently. “Ask me why I’m mad,” he says.
“What?” I say dumbly.
“That’s how the song started, right? Ask me why I’m mad.”
“Something like that.”
Andrew picks at the guitar strings.
“You play?”
“Not like you play.”
“Well, no one plays like I play.”
Andrew grins. “That’s true.”
I feel like an old rocker reminiscing about the glory days, all sinew and faded tattoos while he insists that he used to sell out stadiums. Suddenly, I wish we were talking about something, anything else.
“Tell me something awful about Evelyn.”
“Huh?” Andrew’s handsome face falters.
“Come on, you must have some dirt on her, working here. Like, tell me her hair is a wig or she’s got a hump beneath all that cashmere and crisp cotton. Tell me something so that next time I sit down across from her I can think about it.”
Andrew brushes one pointer finger over the other, like tsk, tsk, tsk. “That’s not very nice.”
“I’m not very nice, haven’t you heard?”
He rolls his brown eyes. “Joni Jewell is a hack. I mean, come on, what’s less original than I’m gonna go after the bitch who stole my man?”
“When you say it like that, it sounds like a country song.”
Andrew starts crooning, “Woman done stole my man.” He exaggerates his slight Southern accent so much it makes me laugh.
“Come on,” I beg, “tell me something about Evelyn that proves she isn’t as perfect as she pretends to be.”
“I really shouldn’t.”
“You probably shouldn’t be talking to me in the middle of the night, either,” I point out.
Andrew raises an eyebrow. “Fine,” he says, as though I’m dragging the information out of him and he can’t resist me any longer. I grin. “She’s going through a divorce. Super messy. Her husband’s trying to take everything.”
“You’re not supposed to make me feel sorry for her!” I moan. “Is her ex trying to take her money? Her kids?” I shrug off the blanket Andrew spread over my shoulders.
“Nah, her son’s grown up so there’s no custody battle or anything like that,” Andrew assures me.
“But they’re in business together, so it’s still complicated and awkward while they both try to treat patients without running into each other.
Sometimes I think that’s why they came up with this individual cottage thing.
” Andrew waves his hands to indicate the room around us.
“Anyway, Evelyn wants to keep the profits to herself.”
“Wow, so she’s the bad guy?”
Andrew shrugs. “She’s not the good guy.”
I relax into a slouch. No one’s trying to take a kid from their mom. It’s just Evelyn henpecking her husband with rules and regulations, getting off on bossing him around like she does me.
“Have you always been a chef-slash-bodyguard?” I ask. Fans like when you’re as interested in their lives as they are in yours.
Andrew shakes his head, but I can see that he’s pleased to have a chance to talk about himself. “I used to be a waiter-slash-songwriter.”
“What happened?”
“Turns out waiter-slash-songwriter isn’t very lucrative when no one’s interested in what you have to say.”
“I used to be a waitress-slash-songwriter.”
It’s a lie, but it feels true. It’s what I’d intended to be when I left home. I thought I’d get some shitty job to finance a shitty life until I hit it big. But instead I met some guy and slept in his bed and ate his food until I met some other guy, and then another.
Even after I hit it big, I met another guy, and then another. By the time I met my husband, I had a bad reputation, though he never believed what they said about me.
“What makes a waiter-slash-songwriter qualified to be a chef-slash-bodyguard?”
“That’s a long story,” Andrew says. “And not a particularly interesting one.”
“You got somewhere to be?” I gesture at the empty room.
“Bed,” Andrew says. It almost sounds like an invitation, but then he places the guitar in my lap, his hands hovering above my hips for a beat before he stuffs them into the pockets of his drab gray uniform. “Finish that song. Stay up all night if you have to.”
I shake my head. “I never finish anything anymore.” What am I doing, admitting that to a stranger?
“This time could be different,” he says, lingering beside me. “Lemme know if you get hungry.”
“I’m always hungry,” I answer, and Andrew grins like it’s a good thing. I can’t remember the last time anyone looked at me like anything about me was any good.
Mom said that as a baby, I sucked her dry, till her nipples cracked and bled. They made me feed my daughter formula; for the first few days of her life, I was too sick to feed her myself. By the time I was well, she’d gotten used to the bottle, refused to latch onto me.
I walk to the stereo and find the grunge station again, landing on more Nirvana.
Maybe the real reason Kurt killed himself was because he knew, deep down, that he wouldn’t be able to keep writing music as good as what he’d written before.
I take a deep breath. I can still smell Andrew’s shampoo in the air.