Chapter 20
ASHER
When I arrived at the community arts center, Leah was coming out of the storage room with a stack of folding chairs in her arms.
I was still twenty-five minutes early. The lobby was already packed with people there for the student showcase, and Marisol was on the phone while simultaneously trying to coax a dead mic cable back to life.
The schedule on the wall had been crossed out and rewritten in red pen three times, and the volunteer originally assigned to handle setup was marked absent.
Leah saw me and didn’t put the chairs down. “You’re early.”
“Looks like good timing.” I lifted the top four from her arms. “Where do these go?”
She tilted her head toward the small theater. “Last two rows. Leave an aisle down the middle.”
Marisol handed me a roll of black gaffer tape and asked me to secure a section of cable that had lifted off the stage-left floor; then she sent me to the back room to bring out two monitor speakers. I did what she asked and hung my jacket on the hook behind the backstage door.
During sound check, a boy named Noah recognized me. He was maybe sixteen, holding an old acoustic guitar that was slightly too large for him, his fingers moving restlessly up and down the neck.
“Are you really Asher Vale?” he asked.
“I am.”
“Are you staying to watch?”
I glanced at Leah, who was on the other side of the stage checking a list. “If the teacher allows it.”
She didn’t smile at that answer. She just told Noah, “Get your cable plugged in. Last sound check.”
Word got out anyway. Before the show started, two parents who’d brought their kids asked if I could sing one of my old hits, and one of them already had his phone out, saying three minutes was all it would take to get the showcase more attention online.
“Tonight isn’t my show,” I said. “They’ve been preparing for six weeks.”
I stayed in the wings and checked the tuning on every guitar before it went onstage. Right before his slot, Noah said his fingers had locked up and he was certain to fumble the opening. He’d been scheduled to play solo and was asking to pull out.
“Tell me what you need,” I said.
“I don’t know.”
“Then start with this: which part scares you most?”
He said it was the first four measures—no drums, nothing to cover the sound of the audience. I picked up a spare guitar and offered to sit behind the curtain and play a simple chord underneath him until he found his footing in the first verse, then stop.
I set the spare guitar behind the curtain and waited for Noah to nod. When the lights came up I was sitting where the audience couldn’t see me. His first line came out tight. By the second he’d found the beat. After the fourth measure I stopped, and Noah finished the rest of the song on his own.
When he came offstage, the first thing he did wasn’t look for me—he went straight to Leah and asked whether his second verse had been too fast. Leah told him to say which line felt most like his rehearsal version.
Noah thought for a few seconds, hummed the chorus again, and the tension finally dropped from his shoulders.
I stood nearby coiling cable and didn’t answer for him.
Leah was on the other side of the stage. Her gaze crossed the equipment in the wings and landed on me. After the next student walked out, she handed me a connector cable that needed to be put away.
“Coil it properly. Don’t kink it,” she said.
“You got it.”
After the showcase ended, we spent forty minutes seeing students out, breaking down the chairs, and inventorying the equipment. Once the last parent had left, Evan came in through the back door dragging a worn cardboard box.
“Last one,” he said. “I mean it this time.”
There were no master recordings in the box, no songs whose royalties needed recalculating.
Just rehearsal tapes we’d made before anyone knew our names, pre-show sound checks, and a few unfinished duet recordings.
Evan had already gone through the labels; today we only needed to decide which private recordings each of us wanted to keep and which could be thrown out.
We sat on the storage room floor with an old tape player between us. Leah read the labels aloud, I wiped the dust off the cassette cases, and Evan occasionally noted the recording year.
The third tape had only a scrawled date on it.
The player hissed with static first, then came the sound of a twenty-something version of me counting off.
Young Leah sang the first line wrong, laughed until she couldn’t continue, and I lost the tempo right along with her.
We started over three times and never made it through a complete take.
It was a failed song. The melody shifted too abruptly in the chorus, and the lyrics read like we were imitating whatever bands were popular that year.
But the two of us on that tape were happy—broke enough to calculate the gas money home, and still convinced that as long as we were writing together, we couldn’t really lose anything.
Near the end of the recording, the younger version of me said from somewhere in the background, “When someone’s willing to listen, I’ll make sure they know these lyrics are yours.”
The storage room went quiet. The player’s spindle kept turning in the silence. Every other time I’d heard something like that promise, I’d felt the urge to explain that I’d meant it when I said it. This time I didn’t open my mouth.
“Do you want to keep this one?” I asked Leah.
She looked at the clear plastic case. “Do you?”
“I want to hold onto the memory. But there’s only one copy, and there’s no reason to make another.” I slid the tape across to her. “Keep it with you. If you ever want to throw it away, you don’t have to tell me.”
She didn’t answer right away. Eventually she set the tape in the small box on her right.
Evan finished labeling everything before six and put the blank and damaged tapes into the cardboard box. “I’ll take these and have them destroyed. Whatever’s left is up to you two.” He picked up the box. “Unplug the player before you lock up.”
That left the two of us alone in the storage room. I could have left then. The box was empty, and the reason for inviting me was gone. But Leah looked at my guitar case leaning against the wall.
“You brought a song?” she asked.
“I brought a guitar. The song is in my head.”
“Is it the one you mentioned at the café?”
“Yeah.”
She leaned against the edge of the table. “Can I hear it?”
It was the first time she’d ever asked about something new I’d written. The song was under three minutes. I sat in one of the folding chairs we’d just put away and played it through, and only looked up after the last chord faded.
Leah was quiet for a moment. “It sounds like you.”
“I hope so.”
“You cut a lot of it?”
“Nine times.”
The corner of her mouth moved. “You can tell.”
I smiled and put the guitar back in the case.
By the time we locked up the community arts center, it was dark.
I walked her back to her building; the sea wind was colder than last week.
We didn’t talk about the song on the way—we argued instead about which bakery in town had turned perfectly good bread into dessert.
At her building, Leah didn’t go straight inside.
“Thank you for today,” she said.
“I just moved chairs.”
“You did more than that.”
I didn’t ask what she meant. She stepped forward, and I put my arm around her waist. This kiss wasn’t like the first tentative one at the pier.
Leah pressed close, her fingers slipping inside my jacket collar, the warmth of her body coming through the layers of fabric.
I kissed the corner of her mouth and her jaw and heard her breathing change; thirteen years of knowing her made me feel as if I knew exactly how she’d move next.
Leah pressed against my shoulder, her voice quiet. “Not upstairs yet.”
“Okay.”
I let her go. She straightened the collar my hands had shifted, her fingers still not quite steady.
“Good night, Leah.”
“Good night.”
I walked back to the place I was staying. Ten minutes later, my phone lit up.
Leah had sent a message: Next time, we don’t need a recording, a lawyer, or Evan as an excuse.
I read it until the screen went dark. After that I didn’t open my calendar, and I didn’t ask what she wanted me to bring.