Chapter 1 #2
She picks up on the second ring. “Hey, Rockstar.”
My body tightens. The way she says “Rockstar” soft and low, is such a fucking turn-on. She knows it too.
“Jojo,” I say, my nickname for her. She giggles.
“How was the show?” she asks.
Her voice is warm, but tired in a good way, like when she’s been working at Whimsicality with her hands all day and her body is ready to stop. I can hear running water in the background, the faucet in the back room where she rinses the buckets and scrubs down the cutting station.
“Half-empty.”
“Liam.”
“Half-full. Whichever one you want.”
She laughs, and the sound fills the room in a way the crowd couldn’t fill the venue. I close my eyes and picture her behind the counter at the shop, her green apron still on, reading glasses pushed up into her hair, a pencil tucked behind her ear that she’ll forget about until she goes to bed.
“I’m closing up,” she says. “I’ve got a wedding order due Saturday and two sympathy arrangements for the morning, so I’m trying to get ahead. I just finished cleaning out the cooler. We lost a whole bucket of ranunculus. They went soft overnight.”
“That’s a lot of money in dead flowers.”
“Don’t remind me. I already did the math, and it ruined my afternoon.”
I can hear her moving through the shop, the soft click of lights going off one by one.
I know this routine. She goes from the back room toward the front, past the cooler, past the register, past the rack of colored wrapping paper she’s so proud of because no other florist in town offers purple and gold.
By the time she reaches the front door, the only light left is the streetlamp pressing through the window glass and the bells on the door going still.
“Noah brought the babies by this afternoon,” she says.
My chest tightens. Not pain, but a close neighbor, a pressure that sits above my heart and doesn’t let go. Noah’s our son. Grown, married, a father of three. There’s a piece of his growing up I wasn’t here for, and I’ve been paying that back ever since.
“All three?”
“All three. He had them in the triple stroller, the big one that barely fits through the door. Junie fell asleep the second they got inside. Maverick grabbed a stem of baby’s breath off the counter and wouldn’t let go of it. And Jace just stared at us like we’re aliens.”
“I missed it. I miss them. You. Paige,” I say.
Josie doesn’t fill the silence. She lets it breathe, which is one of the reasons I’ve loved this woman for most of my life. She doesn’t rush to cover the gaps. She trusts me to sit in them.
“They change so fast at this age,” she says after a while. “Every time I see them, they look different. Jace has your eyes, Liam. I swear he looked right at me today and I saw you.”
I press my thumb and forefinger against my closed eyelids. Noah is twenty-nine. I’m pushing fifty, and I’m lying in a tour bus bunk in a city I won’t remember by Thursday, playing shows in rooms that keep getting smaller on me.
“Mira brought up a legacy tour,” I say.
“And?”
“I said no.”
“Why?”
I open my eyes. “Because the word legacy means they’ve already decided where to put you. It means a shelf.”
“Or it means people still want to hear you play.”
“In a package. With four other bands that peaked more than fifteen years ago.”
Josie’s quiet for a moment. “What else is on the table?”
“Some producer in NYC. Mira says she wants to pitch me a project.”
“What kind of project?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Liam.”
“I know.”
“You could at least hear what she has to say.”
“I could, but we also don’t need the money, Jojo. You have a thriving business. We have all the rental properties. I could retire.”
“Will you?”
I listen to the bus engine idling beneath me. The vibration travels through the mattress and into my shoulder blades, a low tremor that never quite stops.
“I’ll think about it.” I don’t say which part of my ramble I’ll think about.
“That’s your way of saying no while leaving yourself a door.”
“You know me too well, Jojo.”
“A lifetime,” she says. “Go to sleep. I love you.”
“I love you. I’ll be home soon.”
She hangs up, and I hold the phone against my chest for a few seconds before I set it down.
I lie in the dark. The bus shifts as Paulie puts the bus into drive. In a few minutes we’ll pull out of this lot and drive overnight to the next city and the next room and the next crowd that will or won’t fill it.
The word “legacy” keeps circling back. It’s persistent, and makes me restless, and I can’t settle.
I’m a husband, father, and grandfather. I play guitar in a band that once sold-out arenas two nights running.
Tonight, we drew five thousand in a nine-thousand-seat theater in a city I’m already forgetting, and my drummer could barely walk off the stage, and my guitarist was somewhere else the moment the last note rang, and a woman with a leather portfolio wants to package us with bands carrying the same diagnosis.
And somewhere in Beaumont, my son is pushing around a triple-seated stroller with my two grandsons and granddaughter. He probably smiled each block he walked between his mom’s flower shop and his house.
The bus lurches forward. I close my eyes and feel the distance between where I am and where my life actually lives, and I don’t have a name for the feeling except that it weighs more than it did last year.