Chapter 6 #2
Josh didn't say anything for a second. He was too busy with the strangeness of it — a person having already seen the thing you were bracing to bravely confess, and having decided, quietly, months back, to just cover for you and never once make you say it.
His father would've called that a weakness to go find and press on. Marcus apparently called it Tuesday.
Josh laughed, wet and startled, into his neck.
And lay there in a spare provisional apartment with the rain coming down, wrapped up in a man who'd clocked the size of his hunger months ago and never once made him say it — and for the first time since he'd stepped off a Greyhound with a keyboard in a garbage bag, Josh Keller felt like he'd landed somewhere. Not a gig. Not a room. Somewhere.
What followed was the best stretch of Josh's whole adult life, and it lasted a little over two weeks.
They didn't announce it. Retta knew inside a day — Retta knew everything inside a day — and said not one word, just started leaving two coffees on the bar in the afternoons instead of one, and once, catching Josh coming down the stairs from Marcus's place at ten in the morning with his shirt on inside out, said only, "Mm.
There he is," and looked so quietly, fiercely pleased that Josh had to go stand in the walk-in for a minute to get his face right.
Nes clocked it and said nothing either, but he started calling tunes that let Josh and the piano carry — gifts of space, an old man's blessing handed over in bass notes.
And in between the sets there was Marcus's apartment, and the rain, and the turntable working through a thousand records while a man who'd let nobody into his provisional life let Josh leave a toothbrush, and then a spare shirt, and then, one Sunday, a small green thing in a pot on the windowsill that Marcus pretended to resent and watered every single day.
Josh bought the nine-dollar patch kit and fixed the leaky mattress and then more or less stopped sleeping on it.
He'd never been happy like this — easy-happy, unclenched, a man not braced for the next thing.
He should have known better. His father could've told him. That's the exact moment the bill comes.
***
The card came on a Thursday, after the early set.
It was a good night — they were all good nights now, Josh was playing better than he'd ever played, whatever was happening between him and Marcus pouring straight out through his hands — and he'd just come off the stage still buzzing when a man he didn't know caught his elbow at the end of the bar.
Expensive, easy, out of place on Frenchmen the way money is always a little out of place around music that's actually good.
Linen jacket. A watch that cost more than Josh's year.
"That was the best thing I've heard in this town in a long time," the man said, and he had the kind of voice that was used to being believed. "And I hear a lot of things in this town, it's my job to. You're not from here."
"Ohio. Guilty."
"You're wasted on a hundred-seat room, is what you are.
" The man put a card down on the bar and slid it two inches toward Josh with one finger, unhurried, the gesture of a man who'd done it a thousand times and watched it work a thousand times.
"I put people together. Players, bands, tours — the real thing, not this.
" A glance around the warm shabby room that wrote off Perdido in a quarter-second.
"There's a whole career standing between you and where you are right now, and I'm the guy who moves people across it. Call me."
Josh looked at the card. Didn't pick it up.
"I'm happy where I am," he said.
The man smiled like that was cute. "Sure you are.
You're also broke — no, don't, I can always tell, it's the other half of the job.
" He tapped the card once more. "Happy and broke is a phase, kid.
It's got a shelf life. Call me before it turns.
" He paused, one last unbothered glance around the room.
"And a word, since you seem like a nice person — don't tie your boat to something that's already taking on water.
This block got sold out from under a lot of pretty little rooms. Be a shame to watch a real talent go down with one.
" He was already moving off, into the last of the crowd.
"You can change your whole life with one phone call.
Most people never get the number. You've got the number. "
And then he was gone, and the card was sitting there on the zinc, cream-colored, heavy stock, and Josh stood looking at it with his heart doing something ugly and complicated that had his father's voice all through it — one shot, one demo, one callback, and the whole business is a con and everybody in it's a mark — and under the bitterness, worse, the other thing, the thing he'd carried down on the bus: the wanting.
The actual raw wanting of the exact life his dad never got, dangled off one finger by a man in a linen jacket.
He should throw it out. He knew he should throw it out.
And the part that curdled in his stomach was that the man in the linen jacket hadn't been wrong about the room.
Josh had heard Marcus on that phone through a cheap door.
He knew the block was sold, knew October was a Hail Mary, knew the boat really was taking on water.
Which meant the card in his pocket wasn't only a temptation.
It might, some cold morning, turn out to be a life raft.
And hating that didn't make it any less true.
He picked it up and put it in his pocket.
He told himself it didn't mean anything.
A card was a card; the guy probably handed out fifty a week and kept whichever ones called back.
He wasn't going to call. He was happy. He had a room and a man and a patched mattress he didn't even sleep on anymore — he had the actual thing, the landed thing, the somewhere.
But his father's voice was loud tonight — the number, Joshua, most people never get the number — and the wanting was loud right underneath it, the raw wanting of the life his dad died without, and the two of them braided together into a sound Josh couldn't quite set back down.
The card in his pocket didn't feel like a card.
It felt like a door somebody had propped open in a house he'd just barely finished moving into.
Across the room, Marcus was cashing out the register, his hands moving through the bills in those little runs they did when he forgot to stop them, and he glanced up and caught Josh's eye and something in his own face went soft in the way it only did now, only since the rain, only for Josh — and Josh grinned back at him, the good one, the deployed one, the one he'd promised himself he'd never aim at this man again.
"Everything okay?" Marcus called down the bar.
"Yeah," Josh said, the card a small cold weight against his hip. "Everything's great."
It was the first time he'd lied to him.