Chapter 9
With the incentive of a talent manager in the audience, I made sure the second set was a barn burner.
With Marisa gone, I had no trouble keeping control—and within that control, I could let my voice out to play a little, extending a note here, bending and embroidering there.
I worked every corner of the stage. The light reflecting off the sparkle of my dress seemed to hypnotize the audience into willing submission.
They gazed up at me, but they’d all gone somewhere else, remembering the first time they heard this song, who they danced with, who they loved or wanted to love them.
Remembering sweet times or how things ended, or wondering where the dang years went. We sent them through time, to the moon.
I hadn’t told the girls about Bern, but they picked up on my energy, and the connection between us sizzled and zapped. We were tight, together, and the crowd was there with us, jumping in on choruses and singing for the rafters.
Audiences loved a chorus.
After the final note, I looked behind me to find Suzy panting at her drums with her kitty ears askew.
Rooster, leaning on her bass, had a mild, self-satisfied smile.
Lourey rested her guitar on her hip and laughed.
Sweaty strands of her dark hair had pulled from her braids and clung to her neck.
“That was okay, wasn’t it?” Shanny said, more to herself than any of us.
Broken strings hung from her fiddle. “That was okay.”
It was more than that and people rushed up to tell us—Rooster’s boyfriend, some friends of Lourey’s, a few new fans. The tip jar filled up.
After the crowd cleared a bit, we began packing up our equipment. Lourey cornered me with her back to the room again. “So? Who was that all for? That roller-coaster ride?”
Bern had already slipped out, nodding to me over the crowd. The promise of his attention felt fragile, too delicate even to bring up with—
Joey hadn’t showed, I realized.
“Ah,” I said. “My mother. Had a few things to prove.”
The girls exchanged glances. “I didn’t know you had one of those.” Lourey said.
“It’s a dad I never had,” I said.
Suzy’s eyes shifted past me to Alex, resetting the back bar.
“I have a question,” Shanny spoke up, rattling the tips. “Anyone know how Benjamin Franklin got in the jar?”
“A hundred dollars?” Rooster yelped.
They all turned to me.
“You guys have time for a burger?”
Suzy raised her hand.
“Or whatever meatless substitute you’ll accept,” I said.
She lowered it. Shanny looked around anxiously. “I can’t stay too late. The kids…”
“And I have work in the morning,” Suzy said.
The encore of every show were the excuses—the kids, the job, the boyfriend, the whatever Lourey did when she wasn’t grinding her ax on my teeth. But tonight, they were all curious enough to stay.
Beers offered and accepted, we set up camp around a table near the stage. We had friends pulling up chairs and people stopping by as we feasted on attention and then burgers. Ned was back on duty but he messed up most of our orders, and my burger was dry. Alex was going to have to talk with him.
Finally, Trey ruffled Rooster’s hair and peeled off home and Alex announced last call. The last of the regs shuffled out. Alex locked the door behind them and went to help the guys close the kitchen.
“All right,” Lourey said. “Spill.”
“A manager,” I said. “A talent manager was here. He’s interested in us.”
“What?” Rooster stood up and then sat back down, the skirt of her dress flaring out like a parachute. “And you waited to tell us until after the show?”
“If she’d told us before, I would have puked,” Shanny said.
“Instead, you rose to the occasion,” I said.
“Well, what does it mean?” Rooster said.
What did it mean? It meant everything. “It means—”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Lourey said flatly. “If all we’re playing is Patsy Cline hits. Wanda Jackson songs. ‘My Darling Clementine’ and ‘Home on the Range.’ You can’t get a recording deal covering ‘Jolene.’”
“You leave Dolly out of this,” I said.
“We don’t even do covers of newer stuff,” Suzy said. “Brandi Carlile, Maren Morris, Brittney Spencer…”
“Molly Tuttle,” Shanny said. She was always pushing toward bluegrass. The fiddle.
“Sierra Ferrell,” Rooster said.
“Doll Devine doesn’t give a lick about new,” Lourey interrupted in an exaggerated version of my twang before they were just naming all their favorites.
She dropped the accent to continue. “It’s all heartbreak and three cigarettes in an ashtray with you, Patsy or nothing. What about contemporary life?”
“You done with your dissertation?” I asked. “Classic country translates to contemporary life. Love, heartbreak, loneliness, all it takes is three chords and the truth—”
Lourey groaned. “When did you last encounter the truth?”
Shanny winced. “Harsh.”
Lourey leaned over the table at me. “That manager isn’t looking for a Patsy Cline cover band. I’ve been saying we need to write our own stuff all along. And if we’d done it, we could have been ready.”
“We could get ready,” Suzy said. “But … it would mean more rehearsal time.”
An uncomfortable silence fell upon the group.
“I can’t get any more child care,” Shanny said. “Anyway, I don’t think I know how to write a song.”
“Lourey apparently does,” I said. “So no problem there.”
“You don’t have to be hostile,” Lourey said.
“We’ll just get our Lisa Frank unicorn notebooks out from middle school and mine them for bad poetry, I guess?” I was definitely being a jerk now. They didn’t even know how much of a jerk. A coward.
“I’ve never written poetry,” Shanny said, “that you’ll ever know about.”
“We could try, though,” Rooster said. “Right?”
She was a fine one to talk, attached at the hip to Trey.
Conjoined twins. We loved him, but he cut into our time with her.
I had noticed Rooster and Shanny were starting to back each other up more, protecting their time.
We were already blocked in by Shanny’s family demands, by Suzy’s job, a real career none of us fully understood.
And even Lourey had been talking about a trip she wanted to take.
For a moment I felt the cracks beneath us threaten. It wouldn’t last forever.
“We could try,” I said without conviction.
In the end, with arguments and consultations of their phone calendars, we sorted out an emergency session to gather ideas, mid-morning on Saturday at Shanny’s house while her in-laws were in town and could spend time with her daughters.
We all shuffled up to the front door and I locked up behind them, still not sure it would work. I had never written a song, either. Not a full song. And the idea of writing something real, lyrics I would have to stand in front of the world and sing—
I watched the band skidding across the ice to their cars in their Chuck Taylors and boots, laughing, celebratory, hopeful.
Alex came out of the kitchen. “Floors?”
“Floors,” I said. That was the deal. The floors in exchange for the stage, the storage. The apartment, I guess. I didn’t mind. My whole body was still humming at a high wattage. I wouldn’t be able to sleep.
“So?” I asked. “What was Marisa bothering you about?”
“I don’t know. I was too busy.” He looked around the pub, but everything was in order.
I wasn’t sure that was the entire truth. “Should you get home, Alex?”
“I should get home,” he said, as though he’d just thought of it.
Ned emerged from the kitchen, one of our to-go containers in his hands, the ugly gray Earth-friendly kind I forced Alex to buy.
“Late order?” I asked.
“These food delivery apps are going to put us out of business,” he complained in a thin, needling voice. “They canceled after I’d already started cooking.”
He seemed nervous—and rightly so, I thought.
I glanced at Pascal, who had probably had to cover for Ned tonight, along with Alex.
He was looking at his sneakers. I waited for Alex to say something about Ned’s dereliction of duty, but he was unlikely to come up with the words on his own. I’d have to let it go for now.
Alex and the guys headed out, and when I heard the dead bolt turn, I stood up, stretched, and started turning the chairs upside down on the tables, the highlight reel from the show replaying in my head.
The crowd reactions, the applause, the praise of what Bern had said.
The sting. I couldn’t wait to talk it all over with—
Joey.
All the exhilaration of the show, of Bern’s number in my pocket, collapsed. What was Joey’s deal, actually? Ned had been so sure he’d come tonight, and I wanted to spare any hope. But I was a little sick of wondering.
I went to the bar and picked up the phone. I had learned Joey’s sister’s number over the last week, almost but not dialing it several times. And now I almost but didn’t dial again.
It was three in the morning. You couldn’t call a normie house in the suburbs on tavern hours.
Someone knocked at the door as I hung up.
“We’re closed,” I yelled.
I could see the dark outline of someone peering through the circular window of the pub’s front door. Alex had missed the lock on the vestibule, I guess, and now I would have to get it, or by morning, it would be an outhouse.
The dude at the door started pounding with a fist.
Drunks, man. But, hey, at least it wouldn’t be a junkie, suddenly revealed to be my mother. This was a new feeling, knowing where she was. Knowing exactly who she’d turned out to be.
At the door, the guy rattled the door handle.
“Closed, sir,” I said firmly, adding a few versions in Polish and Spanish, just in case. “Move along.”
There was a pause, the dark outline of him disappearing. Then came a crash as the guy ran at the door and threw his full weight at the dead bolt.
“Get out of here before I call the cops,” I yelled, my raw voice pitched high and squirrelly.
The back door, hanging broken. The wind hadn’t done that. I scrambled for the phone again, dialing nine, one—
A bang as the vestibule door swung closed. I looked up, and the porthole window was again a full circle.
What the hell was that?
My hand shook as I hung up again. Was he gone? I didn’t trust it.
I flipped the inside lights off and crept over to the door in the dark. The vestibule was empty, and the street, too, except for a late-night rideshare heading up Milwaukee Avenue, too fast. Minutes ticked by as I made sure I was alone.
When I was finally convinced, I turned the dead bolt, reached out and locked the vestibule quick-quick, and then bolted myself back inside, panting like I’d sprinted the block.
I crossed back to the stage, grabbed my guitar by her neck, and got the hell out of there.
I didn’t know if I’d be able to sleep after a day like this, the exalted ups, the low downs, but there was no way to find out but drag my spangled ass upstairs to bed.