Chapter 40
CHAPTER
FORTY
“No. No, nope,” Adam said right out loud as he peered at the email he just received. “This cannot be happening.” He grabbed his phone and jumped to his feet.
There was only one more concert in only two more days. Today was Saturday—not even a business day—and there was no way Adam could replace the lighting that he’d been renting by Monday night. Industrial and commercial rentals like that weren’t even open on the weekend.
He tapped to dial Donna, the woman who just sent him the cancellation email, and he tipped his head back toward the ceiling. “Dear God,” he said. “This cannot be happening.”
It had taken him forever to find the lights in the first place, and he’d had to go all the way to Jackson Hole to do it.
“I know what you’re going to say,” Donna said when she answered.
“We just need them for Monday night,” Adam said. “We have a contract.”
“Our roof caved in on the warehouse,” she said. “We have to relocate today, when we’re not even open. There is no way that I can get anyone to bring you the lights, set them up, and run them on Monday.”
“Then I’ll come pick them up,” Adam said.
She sighed heavily while Adam’s heartbeat blitzed through his body while his mind tried to find a solution that would satisfy them both. “I’ve seen your guys work the lights,” he said. “We know what to do.”
“It is against state regulations to have someone who is not a licensed electrician run our lights,” she said, and she sounded exhausted and tired and stressed—all of the same things Adam was. “This is as bad for me as it is you.”
“Is it?” Adam challenged, letting his temper rise. “We have two-point-seven million people signed up to watch Monday’s concert. I can’t show it to them in the dark.”
She sniffled, and Adam’s heart went out to her.
“Just give me one guy,” he said. “I will come help you move out today.” He grabbed his keys and headed for the mudroom.
“I can bring a whole bunch of people to help you move out today. We’ll get you guys all situated, and I just need your two guys on Monday night. Four hours.”
“Adam,” she said, her voice full of weariness.
“Donna,” he said calmly as he got behind the wheel, “I have to have those lights. You know you’re the only commercial lighting business within five hundred miles of Coral Canyon. Trust me, I have tried to get them somewhere else before I found you. I need them. I will do anything to get them.
“So tell me how many people you need me to bring and help you move all your stuff. I will bring your guys home with me. They can stay in my house. I’ve got a big place—six bedrooms—and I’m the only one here. I’ll feed them and take care of them. I need them until Monday at midnight, as we agreed.”
Pure desperation coated every word, and Adam found that he could not breathe properly. He’d forgotten to open the garage door, and he moved to do that. “Please,” he begged when Donna didn’t immediately shoot him down. “I’m an hour from Coral Canyon, and I can recruit other people.”
His phone rang, and Otis’s name sat there. “One of them is calling right now,” he said, his mind singular on this one problem that absolutely must fix before Adam did anything else.
He swiped Otis’s call away, because he could mobilize the entire Young family once he knew he should.
“I’m not going to say no to help,” Donna said. “But it’s a mess here. We have to pick through all the debris, and there’s snow and ice and water everywhere. I don’t even know if your lights will be functioning once I get them out of the warehouse.”
Adam swallowed, this problem much larger than he’d originally imagined. “All we can do is try,” he said. “I’ll bring some muscle, and we’ll help.”
Donna did not confirm that she would allow him to have her people and the lights. But Adam had to do what he could. “I’ll be there in an hour,” he said. “Don’t do all the work without me.”
Donna laughed bitterly and said, “See you soon,” before she hung up.
Adam exhaled, tapped to turn on his Bluetooth, and pulled out of his driveway. Thankfully, it had not snowed for a couple of days, and the roads would be clear and dry all the way to Jackson.
He quickly tapped to call Tex, because the oldest brother in the Young family seemed to have the most connections and the most sway.
Though he’d heard Harry tell stories about Mav and how, as the hinge brother, he was the one who no one wanted to let down.
But Tex was in the band, and this was definitely a band issue.
He waited impatiently as the phone rang, and Tex didn’t answer. He tried Trace next, surprised when a woman answered his phone with, “This is Trace Young’s phone.”
“It’s Adam,” he heard Trace gripe.
“It is Adam,” he said. “Is this Everly?”
“Yes,” she said. “What’s going on?”
Adam didn’t want to admit that he had a problem with Monday’s concert, but he had called, and he saw no way around it.
“Our lights for Monday’s concert just got canceled,” he said.
“I have to go to Jackson Hole to help them dig their equipment out of a wrecked roof and the snow and ice that caved it in. Is there any way I can get people to come help? It’s an hour drive and disgusting work. ”
After that, scuffling came through the line, along with the crying, mewling sound of a baby. Ev started to shush it, and Trace said, “Our lights got canceled?”
“In an email,” Adam clipped out. “I called Donna, and she told me that the roof had been caved in by snow and ice. She’s not even sure the lights will work, but she’s dedicating her entire staff to cleaning the warehouse out, and she canceled our equipment.”
“That’s not good,” Trace said.
“I told her I was on my way to help her clean up, and that I would bring as many people as I could.” Adam came to a stop at a stop sign and pinched his eyes closed. “That was a stupid thing to promise her, wasn’t it? I mean, it’s a Saturday.”
Trace said, “I don’t know what people have going on.” He heard someone say something on his end of the line, and then Trace exhaled heavily. “Joey’s moving today, isn’t she?”
Adam swore right out loud, because, yes, his beautiful girlfriend was moving today—and a quick glance at the clock told him he should’ve been at her grandparents’ condo an hour ago.
He couldn’t believe he’d forgotten about it; he’d orchestrated all of it. Pure foolishness drove through him, lanced with regret and guilt.
“I forgot she was moving today,” he said.
“I’m going to pretend like you didn’t say that,” Trace said. “And no one but me and you ever needs to know that it came out of your mouth, or that it even happened.”
Adam bashed the palm of his hand against the steering wheel. “I’ll head there first,” he said.
“I’m out at Reggie’s,” he said. “With him and Kassie and the baby, but I can put it on the family text for anyone who’s willing to go to Jackson after they’re done with Joey. I don’t really know who Otis coordinated with to help her.”
“He didn’t,” Adam said miserably. “I did it all.”
“Oh, well, there you go,” Trace said, as if Adam hadn’t just made the biggest mistake of his life.
“I gotta go,” Adam said.
“Yeah, I bet you do. Good luck, brother.” Trace ended the call, and Adam got on the Apple Highway leading down into Coral Canyon.
He wasn’t sure who to call first—Joey or her daddy—and he finally decided that Otis would probably answer over his daughter. He’d called while Adam had been on the phone with Donna, so it was easy to tap on the screen in his car and get a call connected back to Otis.
“There you are,” Otis said, and Adam couldn’t tell if he was upset or not.
“Where are you?”
“Over at Joey’s new place already.”
Adam ground his teeth together, feeling like the stupidest man alive. “I had a huge problem come up this morning,” he said. “And I left late. I’m on the way now.” He swallowed hard. “Trace is going to send something out on the family text for all of you guys that will explain the situation.”
He held on as he took a curve in the highway a little bit too fast. “How’s Joey doing?” he asked.
“I think she’s had better days,” Otis said almost under his breath. “Oh, here’s the text from Trace.” A long pause came through the line as Otis read it, and he said, “You have got to be kidding.”
“I’m not kidding,” Adam said. “And I need to get to Jackson Hole as soon as possible.”
“Well, you don’t need to come here, then,” he said.
Adam laughed mirthlessly. “Oh, I think I need to come there,” he said. “All I can do is hope that Joey won’t skewer me alive when I arrive.”
“I said it was fine,” Joey said, but she hadn’t looked at him for more than two seconds since Adam had arrived in her basement apartment. He had coordinated with her uncles Mav, Luke, and Blaze, as they had the biggest trucks and a lot of the furniture that they had donated to Joey.
By the time he’d arrived at her place, everything had been moved in, and Georgia and Aunt Abby and Aunt Dani were unpacking her kitchen. In fact, they were almost done with that.
He was supposed to bring her pink bean bag with him to put in her bedroom, and he stared at the empty corner where it should have gone.
“Maybe you can come with me,” he said.
She sighed and rolled her eyes as she turned back to him. She cocked one hip and glared. “Adam, this is an emergency. You need to go now.”
“I don’t want you to be mad at me,” he said.
“Well, I’m already mad.” She threw up her hands in frustration. “And I have a right to be mad, because you coordinated the whole move and then you didn’t show up, and everyone was asking me all these questions, like I knew what was going on—and I didn’t.”
“I know.” Adam hung his head, though he’d left his cowboy hat at home and could not hide behind the brim. “This is one of those things I can’t control,” he said.
“I understand that you can’t control a roof caving in,” Joey said. “I understand that the lights are incredibly important to the concert. What I don’t understand is how one-track your mind is, and that you let this one thing, this work thing, overcome everything else you had going on in your life.”
“I know,” Adam said. “In that moment, there was only that one thing, and I needed to fix it.”
“Sometimes you can’t fix things.”
Adam had never felt so low. He couldn’t believe he’d let down an angel here on earth. He moved over to Joey and reached for her hand, barely letting his fingers brush hers. “I am so sorry,” he said. “The moment I am back in town, I will be here. I want you to walk me through the whole thing.”
He had only seen this apartment online, and she had been so excited to show it to him. He really had coordinated her entire move for her and not told her any of the details, and then he had left her out to dry.
He watched her as she studied the floor at their feet. “I can bring dinner back,” he offered.
“And what if you can’t?” she asked. “What if you’re stuck in Jackson Hole for the weekend? Have you ever been in a warehouse where the roof has collapsed due to the weight of ice and snow?”
Adam pressed his teeth together, because no, he had not.
“I know a bunch of my uncles are going to go with you. You should just go.” Her voice sounded tiny and afraid, and Adam hated it with every fiber of his being. “Just go take care of it, and when it’s done, you can text me.”
Adam didn’t want to text her. He wanted to call, and he wanted to bring dinner, and he wanted to show up on her doorstep at any hour and have her answer it and be happy to see him.
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
Joey nodded and said, “I know you are.”
Someone knocked on her closed bedroom door, and then it opened. “Oh, you are in here.” Otis glanced over to Adam and then back to his daughter. “We need you out here in the kitchen. Little bit of an emergency.”
“What can it possibly be now?” Joey asked in a tired, disgusted tone.
Adam turned and watched her brush past her father. Otis watched her hurry down the hall, and then he turned back to Adam. “You guys okay?”
Adam’s jaw felt wired shut; it was so tight, it ached. He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said.
He went down the hall too, where four women were now cleaning up a shattered jar of spaghetti sauce. Joey wept as she worked, and Adam knew that was because she had canned that spaghetti sauce herself this past fall, and she loved it.
As he left her apartment without saying goodbye to her, he vowed to himself that he would buy every can and jar of spaghetti sauce in the entire country, if only he could make her smile.
“You’ll be lucky if she takes you back,” Adam muttered to himself as he got behind the wheel and entered the address for the lighting company into his GPS. She hadn’t exactly broken up with him, but as Adam drove away from the blue house with the dug-up front yard, it certainly felt like she had.