Chapter 30 Florence
“What does she want from me?” I ask, crunching on SweeTarts, so hard I think my teeth may crack. It’s after midnight and I’m starving. Andrew’s healthy salad and one mini Snickers, followed by yet another bland and unsatisfying dinner, wasn’t near enough to fill me up.
Does anything satisfy you? the chorus of musicians asks.
My husband used to cook for me. Real food: pasta, roast chicken, pancakes. He didn’t mind when I ate off his plate. I think I haven’t been full since he left.
“She’s a therapist.” Andrew shrugs. He picks out the flavors I don’t like—the greens and the yellows—and eats them himself. “She wants you to tell her about your life.”
No, I think, she doesn’t. She wants me to reveal a hidden, dark secret that will explain everything: My uncle molested me in the closet when I was ten, or my father died in front of me when I was six.
Without some childhood trauma, Evelyn’s probing questions imply there’s no excuse for my behavior, my failures, my mothering—no excuse for me.
“I already told her, there’s nothing about me she can’t find out online. Or if she wants a deeper dive, some Us Weekly reporter published an unauthorized biography in the early aughts. It’s out of print, but I’m sure she could find it on or something.”
I read it, actually. The guy interviewed girls who’d claimed they’d been in grade school with me, a boy who said I gave him a hand job in the ninth grade behind the gym, some old man who claimed I bought drugs from him when I was thirteen.
I didn’t recognize any of the stories, but Callie said there was no point denying it.
I crunch an orange candy, so sour my tongue tingles, just the way I like. “Usually other people’s stories fill the silences.”
We’re sitting at the kitchen counter, our barstools angled so we’re facing each other. Andrew’s legs are so long and the stools are so close together that his right thigh is perched loosely between mine. He’s acting like it’s casual, but I know he sat that way on purpose.
“What do you mean?” Andrew asks, reminding me that he wasn’t hired for his expertise so much as for his muscle. I have more experience at rehab than he does.
“You know, group therapy. Other places, you go around in a circle and people talk about their abusive parents, the teachers who went too far, the people who broke their hearts.”
“What did you talk about when it was your turn?”
I couldn’t tell them about my decent enough childhood (absent father, overbearing mother, nothing really all that wrong), the success I found young (though not as young as I wanted), the boy I fell in love with and married, the baby we made together.
Unlike everyone else—the addicts with their tough childhoods, their genetic predisposition to addiction, the traumas they built up over the years—I have only myself to blame for what I lost.
“I mostly kept quiet.”
“You?” Andrew scoffs, and I give him a playful shove.
“It’s true!” I insist. “I never felt like I belonged there.”
“No one feels like they belong in rehab. That’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Like, people denying they need to be there and all that? People thinking they’re the exception to the twelve steps; it’s okay for them to drink and get high and whatever else.”
I shake my head, seeing the shaggy platinum tips of my hair in my peripheral vision. “I don’t mean it like that.”
“So what do you mean?”
I take a breath, tasting the artificial flavors my mother would disapprove of if she were here: Tsk, tsk, tsk.
I can smell Andrew, the maleness of him.
I haven’t lived with a man since my husband.
For so long, after he was gone, I didn’t want to wash anything.
I liked walking into the bathroom and still smelling him: his cologne, some forgotten T-shirt on the floor, his sweat on the pillowcase.
For years afterward, I wore the same cologne, used the same soap and shampoo he had, but it all smelled different on me.
“I mean, I never felt, you know, entitled to be there. Like everyone else there was a member of a club I hadn’t earned the right to join.”
“You say that as if you wanted to join.”
“I didn’t like how it felt to be left out.
I felt like a fake or something. An imposter.
” Just like I did at the fancy parties when our second album went gold, or when I went back to Yonkers to visit my mom, or walking down the aisle on my wedding day, or bringing my kid home from the hospital.
I felt like this wasn’t meant for me, like there was someone else out there, some expert, who knew how to navigate the world better than I did.
“I guess I’ve been an imposter all my life. ”
Andrew cocks his head to the side like a puppy. “Sounds like a song.” He reaches one of his long arms out to grab my guitar from the chair where Evelyn sits during therapy. He strums it and croons, “Imposter all my life.”
“I was just talking,” I say. “Not writing.”
“You’re writing music every time you open your mouth.”
It’s been a long time since anyone spoke to me that way—like I’m an artist. Even fans, when I meet them now, they’re looking for a good time, not poetry.
I pull my notebook from the waistband of my leggings. I’ve gotten used to the feel of the spiral binding against my skin, like my waist is a hiding place for my darkest secret: I’m still trying, and failing, to write.
“I haven’t finished anything in a long time,” I confess. “See? All these beginnings, but no endings.”
“These are some good beginnings,” Andrew says, thumbing through the pages.
“I know,” I say, and Andrew grins, a lock of his tawny hair falling over his forehead. I don’t believe in false modesty or fishing for compliments.
“I know you know.” Andrew slides my notebook onto the kitchen counter and fits my guitar into my lap, the backs of his hands lingering against my thighs.
He puts my left hand on the neck, and moves my right hand over the strings.
He’s so much taller than I am, but his hands aren’t actually that much larger. My fingers are long, my palms wide.
Like a man’s, my husband used to say. Like Jimi Hendrix, like Jimmy Page. He made it sound good, like I was born to be a rock star.
“Sing it back to me.” Andrew speaks softly, like we’re lying in bed together. Goose bumps rise on my skin, and a pleasant shiver runs through me. “I’ve been an imposter all my life.”
“Imposter all my life,” I echo. I close my eyes. The fire in the fireplace is dying, burned down to embers, but still giving off heat. Or maybe the warmth I’m feeling isn’t from the fire at all but from this man, so close to me that I can feel his breath when he exhales.
In crowded rooms of celebration,
In circles of strangers’ consternation,
In the house where I grew up,
On the stage where I blew up,
Across the threshold where he carried me,
Alone with my baby.
You know I think that maybe
I won’t even belong in the grave where they’ll bury me.
I sing the words with a scratch in my throat, raw and aching. My husband used to say that music should hurt.
I swallow. “Another good beginning.”
“A great beginning,” Andrew counters. “Keep going.”
He makes it sound simple. I let the guitar slide between my legs—between our legs—and down to the floor.
Andrew hands me my notebook and recites the words back to me so I can write them down.
“This time will be different,” he promises. “This time, you’re going to finish it.”
“How do you know?” I ask, the words catching in my throat.
“This time you have me. Tonight you wrote one verse. Tomorrow night, we’ll do one more.”
“What’ll you give me if I finish a whole song?” I ask, licking my lips.
Andrew winks. “I’ll make it worth your while.”
“You’re going to have to do better than Swedish Fish and SweeTarts.”
“Don’t worry,” Andrew promises. “I know what you want.”
Of course he doesn’t, but I smile, letting him think he does.