Chapter 1
It happened, okay? Sometimes I caught myself acting out earnest Grammy Award acceptance speeches, too.
But I was hugging a bulging thirty-three-gallon garbage bag and I could suddenly see what I looked like hunched in my window seat, clutching my oversized go bag and dancing like no one was watching, as the country song goes.
Except they were. Watching. Just trying not to, obviously.
The other passengers on the bus were huddled into their own body heat, studying their phones, napping, surfing the bus’s movements, their heads bobbing as the bus hit another pothole.
They all had Christmas shopping bags in their laps and the proper, calculated disregard of their fellow man that public transportation demanded.
“What’s your deal?” The guy had leaned toward me, smiling a little. He pulled the Bluetooth earmuff off his ear.
“My deal?”
He was going to have to be far more specific.
“You in a play or something?” he asked. “Your … costume?”
The guy didn’t know how close to the surface my every emotion was. “I beg your Parton?”
“Dolly Parton,” the guy agreed, pleased with himself.
He gestured a gloved hand, but generally, as though he didn’t know where to start pointing.
With my hair, already backcombed and pinned into victory rolls for the show tonight, or my fringed-arm black leather jacket, much too thin and short for a white-cold Chicago winter day.
At my silver toe–capped queen of the rodeo boots, probably, better onstage than on icy sidewalks.
Or if he was one for details, maybe he’d picked out the faded picnic-basket gingham of my shirt showing at the collar of the sweater I had to borrow from Alex.
It’s complicated. I’ll tell you who Alex is later.
My deal was none of this guy’s business, but okay, here we go: I’d had bad roommates before and villainous boyfriends for sure—but until now, never at the same time, in the same person.
Never had a guy take off, oh, hey, with the rent money—and now here’s your girl, dead of winter in Chicago, evicted the week before Christmas and, trying to get that sorted, missing a shift at the music shop, strike three, and now unemployed, too.
My deal, and you are welcome to it. And none of it my fault.
Well, I guess the first two strikes at the shop were on me.
I looked away from the guy across the bus aisle just in time to catch the vintage neon of McPhee’s Tavern sweeping past. I reached for the stop request—admittedly, a beat too slow.
The driver only glanced at me in her rearview and kept going, so I jumped up to make a big, party-sized nuisance of myself, swinging my bag over my shoulder and apologizing my way through some puffer coats to the back exit.
The driver still hadn’t hit the brakes. She’d caught a green light and sailed through the intersection.
“Can you stop before we hit Wisconsin, please?”
She’d remembered how to brake, hallelujah, and was pulling to the curb. The bus came to a stop and the driver hit the hydraulics, a little passive-aggressively, I thought, to kneel the bus down. As soon as the light over the exit lit up, I pushed through, chin high. All dignity, that’s me.
The bag caught in the doors and all the other passengers would be paying full, roadside-crash attention now, wouldn’t they? A familiar electric shame burned under my skin.
Outside, the wind had teeth. The garbage bag was torn, sagging in the snow, starting to topple. The bus doors folded closed, a final judgment handed down, and I was left breathing transit exhaust, all my worldly possessions spilling to the frozen street.
All the worldly possessions I’d been allowed to keep. I reached to scrape it all back, cringing at the sight of the blue-black vines tattooed down to my left-hand knuckles grasping at my secondhand clothes. Grasping, needing.
I’d already abandoned my self-respect, begging the landlord, Cam, for access to the apartment.
He’d granted five minutes, like one of those money-grab games, except the big door prize in this case was my own crap.
I’d already tossed the place for the rent money, of course, as soon as I realized Joey had packed a bag for his sister’s after our fight without paying Cam.
I’d ransacked all Joey’s usual hidey-holes: backs of low drawers, tops of high shelves.
The empty Brussels sprouts box in the freezer.
I’d really been counting on those Brussels sprouts.
So with my five frantic minutes back in the apartment, I’d had to prioritize, nabbing up the sequined Western dresses I needed for the stage before Cam got any ideas and my square-toed harness boots, the Fryes, which were nonnegotiable for their own value to me as well as for what I stowed inside them.
Beyond that, I’d only managed the basics, plus a few concert T-shirts I couldn’t live without.
At the last desperate second, I’d grabbed three balled-up pairs of Joey’s thick wool socks—the least he owed me, after this week.
Freaking Joey.
What was his deal? That was the better question.
We’d been together three years and had fought plenty of times, mostly musician-to-musician stuff about who got which opportunities and how I never let his band open for mine, even though that was Squad Goal’s founding rule.
We didn’t share the stage, even with boyfriends.
Especially with boyfriends.
Dating another musician should be an Olympic sport, the high beam of balancing competing egos. I’d really thought Joey and I had figured out how to keep things rock ’n’ roll, but it turns out we were country down to the dirt on our boots.
Overhead, a plane landing at O’Hare sliced through the frozen air.
I threw the trash bag onto my back again, tucked my chin into the collar of my jacket, and threw myself against the gale.
He was a dead man, Joey Hartnett. As soon as I laid eyes on him again.
I would, too. The country music scene in Chicago was very tight.
He’d been gone almost two weeks now—a long time, really, without any apology texts.
But then my cell had died, and I couldn’t find the charger.
Had he taken it? Playing dirty? I’d swung between raw anger and beginning to worry he’d never reached Heather’s house.
But then I’d spotted him down the street from the pub last week.
Sneaking around. Slithering back? If he’d meant to come throw himself at my feet, I guess he’d chickened the heck out. He didn’t show.
Maybe he’d still try. I imagined him with grocery store daisies in his hand, arriving while I was onstage, triumphant in my spangles, shooting off sparks. I’d show him: See? You were no big loss.
My turntable, though? My vinyl? Among the things I hadn’t been able to reclaim from the apartment was a Dolly Parton album that couldn’t be had for love or money.
Well, for money, I guess. A lot of it.
At least the night Cam had put the new lock on the door had been a Wednesday, a show night. I’d had my guitar, my sweet Peggy Lee, with me. All the cords and mics I kept for the band, all the sound equipment, was safe at McPhee’s. Everything else was just stuff.
My stuff, though. I had a good eye for the best bargains at your mom’s garage sale and for hidden gems in secondhand stores. For the treasures that other people could afford to cast off.
But in the end, those thrift-store curtains we’d never hemmed had been ripped down from the bedroom windows, left in two puddles on the floor, exposing all our ratty belongings for what they were, in sharp, forensic detail. Our room had looked like a crime scene from one of those TV shows.
You know the ones I mean. Twisted bedsheets of an unmade bed, looking sordid.
We’d been together three years, and this was how it ended? Well, Cam could have those sheets. And those curtains, too. He could have it all. I had a lot of practice slipping the hold of one life and stepping forward into the next. That life with Joey was behind me now.
Ahead of me, the warm glow of McPhee’s. I was still backtracking through the featureless wind tunnel this stretch of Milwaukee Avenue had become, condos, more condos, and high-end storefronts, dollars signs in everyone’s eyes.
All the corner stores, taquerias, or Polish bakeries had sold up, all the stuff that made Chicago great, that made neighborhoods like ours livable.
Gone. There was this one real estate broker who’d made a career of strip-mining the city, a block at a time.
She’d been after McPhee’s—the prime corner lot the building sat on—for a good long time.
I was curled against the wind, attention on the slippery sidewalks, just trying not to keep sliding down the slippery slope of what had become my life.
One dumb fight, a single missed appointment, one missing rent payment.
What really stung, if I was honest, what really made my bacon sizzle, was knowing that I was twenty-six and still the sort of person who could be kneecapped by something so small.
That I could have the rug pulled out and stumble bad—not just a hiccup, right?
A real clatter downward, bruised elbows and ego—
At the mouth of the alley next to McPhee’s, my boot swept a patch of smooth ice and I went down, hard.
I got carefully to my feet and, crooning curses, raked my things back into the bag, again, this time with fingers beginning to burn with cold. My voice bounced like a tennis ball off the bricks of the alley, echoing off the dead end until I realized—
I was not alone.
I fell silent. In the shadow of the dumpster at the pub’s back entrance, an old Dominick’s grocery cart was piled high with found objects, flattened cardboard, plastic shopping bags tied together. Behind this meager windbreak was a bundle of rags, someone barely hanging on.
All the fire from before, from the scene with Cam, from the bus, fell away.
I stood at the opening of the alley, my own bag at my feet.
Would I even know her if she ended up here? I remembered her as a redhead, but I wasn’t sure. It had been a long time.
I peered closer. The rags in the alley shifted, and I caught sight of a dirty gray beard.
Wisps of my white breath whipped into the wind. Something inside me loosened. A fist of dread, unclenched, to make way for a wave of relief. Sweet relief, whether I deserved it or not, that today was not the day.
And Joey thought he could damage me? By running off?
My deal was that I was already good and ruined, long before he’d come along.
If you wanted to destroy this cowgirl, you couldn’t just go. You had to go big, baby. You had to go sky-high.