Dirty Little Secret

“Oh, Lord,” said the girl standing behind them.

Sam looked around at her like he was noticing her for the first time. “And this is Charlotte Cunningham,” he told me.

She was a tomboy, a fierce one. She wore high-top Chucks and baggy cut-off jeans that came down to her knees so there wasn’t even anything Daisy Duke about them, with her drumsticks protruding from one back pocket. Her plain black tank was tight, showing off her cute figure and toned drummer’s arms, but she covered up her cl**vage as best she could with her long hair, parted in the middle and placed in front of each shoulder. Her hair was medium brown and had a little wave in it—not curly enough to be stylish and not straight enough to be flat-ironed, like that was how it came out of the shower and she hadn’t bothered to have it cut since February.

She wore no makeup, which arguably she didn’t need because her skin was porcelain and perfect, her eyes an arresting blue-green. But the fact that she was a chick my age without makeup made her look aggressively plain. I got the impression she was trying to give off the same vibe as me—leave me alone—only she was coming at it from the opposite direction. I cared very much how I put my look together. I suspected she did, too, but the look itself was supposed to say that she didn’t give it any thought at all.

I was about to step forward with my hand out to this girl. I stopped myself when she said flatly, “Hi,” and then turned a pouty face to Sam. “I thought you wanted to make a big push to get a gig on Broadway while all the industry bigwigs are in town for the festival.”

“I”—Sam’s eyes slid to me—“do.”

“And suddenly you invite somebody else?” she insisted.

He grinned at her. “This is just for tonight, to see how it works out.” When she continued to scowl at him, he set down his guitar case, wrapped both arms around her, and pulled her into his chest. “Now, Charlotte. You’re the beauty of this operation. I’m the brains. Let me do the thinking.”

“Wow, if you’re the brains, we are in trouble.” She pushed him away. Both of them were laughing. Ace stared across the garage and huffed out an exaggerated sigh.

Sam scooped up his guitar again. Turning as one unit, he and Charlotte headed for the stairs down to the street. With no other choice, Ace and I fell in behind them. Charlotte asked Sam in a lower tone, “How’s your dad?”

“Sober.” Sam held up his hand with his fingers spread.

“Five days!” Charlotte exclaimed. “That’s great.”

I’d been thinking again how calculating Sam was, and how careful I needed to be not to lose my heart to him when he only wanted me for his band. But listening to him and Charlotte talk, I got the feeling there was a lot more depth to him. He obviously had real problems with his dad, if his friends knew about them, too. And I could tell from the concern in Charlotte’s voice and the way her eyes never left his face as they entered the stairwell how much she cared about him—even if the relationship was, as I suspected, one-sided.

I nodded toward her as I asked Ace, “How do y’all know Sam?”

“We went to the same high school,” Ace said. “Sam and I played football together.”

I refrained from saying, That explains a lot. It explained why Sam and Ace had chests like trucks. It also explained why Charlotte was trying so hard to stake her claim on Sam now that a new girl had arrived. I hadn’t even known Sam a full day, and I was already getting myself tangled up in his drama. I reminded myself that none of this was worth my college education.

But as Ace and I emerged behind Sam and Charlotte onto the street, I changed my mind. A singer wailed one of my all-time favorite country songs from the stage in the first restaurant we passed. Before her voice had faded, the voice of the singer in the next bar competed with it for my attention and affection. I loved that song, too. I loved the music and I loved Nashville. I was walking down the street toward my first gig on my own, without my parents controlling my every move. If my granddad found out what I’d been up to tonight, I’d be in big trouble whether I went ahead with the gig or not. Might as well.

“How about you?” Ace asked, startling me out of my thoughts. I’d gotten so lost in the neon lights on the dark, crowded street that I’d almost forgotten he walked beside me. “How’d you meet Sam?” he asked.

“At the mall today. I played in a trio with him and his father.”

“No way,” Ace said. “Were there groupies? A lot of times girls from school follow him around. Pisses his dad off.”

“Not today,” Sam said, turning around, my first clue that he’d been listening to us. “It’s the weekend after Memorial Day. They’re probably still at the beach. Oh, man, it smells like a strip club.”

Ace laughed, but I thought that was a weird thing to say. Sam was pretty desperate to change the subject. Then I caught a big whiff of the air being forced out of the next bar and onto the street: stale cigarette smoke and air freshener. I tried to breathe more shallowly.

Charlotte turned to Sam. “And how do you know what a strip club smells like?” Her tone was light and teasing with a hint of ugly jealousy somewhere at the bottom, like a dirty film nobody ever scrubbed off the strip club floor.

Sam said simply, “I had a gig.”

“In a strip club?” Charlotte shrieked.

“I’d forgotten about that,” Ace said, and chuckled. “He was the pride of the ninth-grade football team.”

“How old were you?” I asked Sam, trying not to sound like a shocked church lady, but ninth grade?

“Fourteen,” he said. “Fourteen when I started, and then fifteen. It was my longest gig to date.”

“How could your parents let you do that?” Charlotte pressed him.

I thought: They weren’t paying attention. Like my parents. In my case, my parents were gone. In his case, maybe something had happened to his mom—I was afraid something had, since he hadn’t mentioned her—and his dad was drunk.

“Oh, it was my dad’s gig,” Sam said.

I couldn’t hide my shock anymore. “And your dad took you into the strip club with him?”

Sam spread his hands. “It was a gig!” As if that explained everything.

“The strippers were very nice to him,” Ace offered.

I looked to Sam for confirmation. He nodded at me. “They brought me Cokes. One of them wanted me to go out with her daughter.”

“Ew!” Charlotte shrieked.

“Strippers aren’t ew,” he scolded her. “It’s just another way to make a living.” But he turned around and winked at me, like he’d enjoyed the strippers more than he wanted to let on to Charlotte. And like I understood something about him that she didn’t.

“How was the band before us?” he asked Ace.

Ace shrugged. “It’s never a good sign for a band when they ask a waitress to take the lead for a couple of songs. I don’t think we’re following a whole lot.”

“Depends on how good the waitress was,” Sam said.

“She wasn’t as good as you,” Charlotte said. Sam grinned at her and chucked her gently on the chin. I wanted to throw up.

“That’s positive, right?” Charlotte insisted. “We’ll look great in comparison.”

“It could be bad,” Sam said. “Nobody’s softened up the crowd for us.”

We walked past the one District club I’d been in before—Boot Ilicious, which pointedly flashed a cowboy boot in the middle of its sign, between the “Boot” and the “Ilicious.” It was an eighteen-and-up club Toby had taken me to a couple of weekends in May, right after my birthday. He’d bitched at me before because I wouldn’t go out of my way to find a fake ID. Once inside, he was skilled at acquiring drinks without a wristband. This would have impressed me at the beginning of the school year, but now it seemed immature and lame.

Which didn’t explain why I felt so relieved that we weren’t turning in at Boot Ilicious, or why I held my head down as we passed, hoping he wouldn’t recognize me if he happened to be hanging in the doorway. Toby had made me feel like my talent was something to be embarrassed by. Worse, I half believed him. For some reason, I was concerned about what he thought of me even though I hated him—just as I’d been disappointed to learn I wasn’t the only fiddle player Elvis wanted in his back pocket.

Leaving the club behind, we reached the intersection with Broadway. We were on the lower, less crowded end of the street, so it wasn’t far to the river, with the Titans football stadium on the other side. I leaned around Ace to look up the hill. The sidewalks along Broadway were packed with tourists, country music overflowed onto the street, and neon signs flashed in the shape of cowboy hats and boots and guitars all the way up the sidewalk. The real action was near the top of the hill, in the three or four bars famous for hosting acts that got discovered by record company executives who wandered into the audience, scouting their next star. I felt better just gazing at it—redeemed, like a girl in a country song who stuck to her guns and made it big, despite the stories her boyfriend told her about herself.

The light changed, and we stepped into the crosswalk. Sam was looking up Broadway, too, with his eye on that far corner.

As we crossed the street, I thought I spied the bar where we were headed, only two storefronts down—not a bad gig. But we kept walking right past it, past abandoned and crumbling historic facades, to a building that stood by itself because the buildings all around it had been torn down. A couple of people sat on the sills of the plate glass windows in front, smoking. At least we knew smoking wasn’t allowed inside, and that there were some customers. Two, to be exact. An enormous muscled bouncer stood in the doorway of the building, checking the IDs of some guys wanting in.

Beyond that, the block diminished into businesses that were closed at night, then a slummy area of deserted shells, ending in a huge construction project that wouldn’t be finished for years. I turned around and looked behind us. A few pedestrians peeled off Broadway and ventured down this side street. Very few. The lights of Broadway seemed far away.

If the location bothered Charlotte, she didn’t let on. She still talked animatedly with Sam like he was the only friend she’d ever had. She probably didn’t even notice her surroundings because her eyes had stayed glued to him since we’d left his truck.

“Careful,” Sam told her, pointing out a hypodermic needle lying in the weeds next to the sidewalk.

“Do you want me to carry you?” Ace joked to me.

Honestly, I was tempted to say yes. “No, thanks,” I said instead. “I feel safe with my needle-proof cowgirl boots on.” As I followed Sam through the door, I held my head high in an effort to fake the bouncer out and make him think I belonged here. Nothing would be more embarrassing than to be the one singled out as not looking old enough, especially after Sam had made such a big deal about it. The bouncer didn’t pull me out of our little line or ask me for ID, though. I stepped across the threshold.

The music blasting over the speakers, filler between the live bands, was another country song I loved, but that was the end of my reasons to feel comfortable here. I’d been with my parents to the Station Inn, the most important bluegrass concert hall, which had looked so nasty that I’d been afraid to touch anything. This place made the Station Inn look like the Grand Ole Opry.

The walls were filled with framed and signed photographs of country stars from decades past—names I knew because I’d walked the edges of the biz for years, but these stars weren’t famous enough for someone to impersonate them at the mall. Instead of posing carefully for publicity photos, they closed their eyes and opened their mouths like they were singing their hearts out in front of an audience. The implication was that they’d been photographed here at this very bar, but the photos could have been downloaded off the Internet for all I knew. I didn’t think so, though. Every facet of the frames and every curve of the little 45-speed records strung from the ceiling was coated with a layer of filth like the place hadn’t been dusted since Elvis died. The dim lights and spotlights in blue, green, and pink didn’t quite disguise the dust.

Despite the bar looking deserted on the outside and unsanitary on the inside, quite a few customers pushed past each other to the bar or the restrooms. Sam held up his guitar case like the prow of a ship that broke through the ice pack in the arctic. I hugged my fiddle case. As we wound through the crowd, middle-aged tourists and Vandy frat boys glanced up and down my body, curious what a fiddle player in a rockabilly band looked like up close.

The entrance was a short ramp from street level to the level of the room. At the end of the ramp, Sam stepped three feet up to the tiny stage and pulled me up after him. After being surrounded by people taller than me like I was down in a hole, it was a relief to be saved from the throng. From this vantage point I saw that there were actually two small stages, one to the left of the entrance and one to the right, both of them backed up against the windows onto the street. Charlotte’s drum set took up one stage, and Sam and I balanced on the other, with Ace climbing up behind us. He and Sam both opened their guitar cases in the corner.

I could also tell from up here that the building had two levels. The back was elevated so those customers could get a better view of the band. They were already lining up against the guardrail that separated the upper section from the lower one, staking out a good vantage point for viewing the band—for viewing us, I realized in a sudden moment of disorientation and pure joy.

After plugging his guitar into an amp and setting it in a stand, Sam pulled out his phone and thumbed the screen. He stepped closer to me and spoke in my ear so I could hear him over the music. My skin buzzed with the sensation of his breath on my skin. “Do you have your phone with you?” he asked.