But I couldn’t help a little flight of fancy, the memory of his hands on me. I put one hand up to cup my breast and thought of the way he’d touched me. The most endearing thing about him had been the way he seemed bowled over by me, like he’d never met a girl so sexy and beautiful. Was it good to treasure the memory of a few perfect hours together? Or would I have been better off never meeting him?
I wasn’t getting married, but I was as bad off as that girl Sheila at the bar last night, marrying David and thinking of Sam while she stared at the ceiling.
There was definitely a country song about this.
I pried my hand away from the phone and galloped back downstairs to my granddad. We had just launched “Wildwood Flower” when he said, “Phone’s ringing. Y’all can’t bear to stay away from each other?”
“Nope.” It was probably Charlotte again. It definitely wasn’t Sam. Even if it was Sam, I wasn’t excited about talking to him. Yet strangely, I made it up the stairs in record time. The number wasn’t labeled. Not Sam. “Fuck,” I said, then clicked the phone on. “Hello?”
“Hello, Bailey. It’s Ace.”
I sighed heavily, directly into the phone so he would hear it, and didn’t say anything.
After the silence stretched on, he added, “Hightower. The bass player. From last night?”
“Hello, Ace,” I said, letting him know from my tone that I understood why he was calling, and it wasn’t going to work. But even as I unleashed that sarcastic barb, my voice faltered. I thought I heard Sam singing, like he was serenading me. I walked over to my windows. Nothing was beneath them but grass dappled with sun and shade.
“Listen,” Ace said. “Sam asked me to convince you to play with us again tonight. We’re all so sorry about what Charlotte said to you. She and Sam dated before, but it was nothing serious. Just a week. She’s not quite over him, I think—”
“You think?” I interjected.
Ace went on as if I hadn’t interrupted. “—and she wanted me to drive back to the parking deck last night and find you with him. I knew I shouldn’t have done it, but I did it, and I’m sorry.”
I couldn’t concentrate on a snappy comeback. I still thought I heard Sam, and he was drowning out Ace’s apology. It was like talking to Julie every night for the past year, asking her to repeat herself again and again over the din of the entourage surrounding her. “Where are you?”
He paused between it’s-none-of-your-business and what-would-it-hurt-to-tell-her. “Broadway.”
“Sam’s singing on Broadway?” I exclaimed. He’d finally gotten the gig he wanted! And he hadn’t needed me after all. My heart raced with elation and pain together.
“Oh,” Ace said. He realized that I could hear Sam, and he should have walked to Georgia to make this call. “Well, he’s busking.”
“What?” I exclaimed. Lots of musicians hung out between the clubs on Broadway, playing whatever instrument they had with their cases open for passersby to throw bills into. Usually these people looked only marginally better groomed than the man who had almost grabbed me last night. “Why is Sam busking?”
“He does this a lot,” Ace admitted. “If he doesn’t have a gig, he makes one.”
This I had to see. And hear. “I’m coming down there.” As my words popped out, I was inching closer to giving in to Sam’s demand that I play with his band. At the very least, I was giving away how far I’d fallen for him. But no matter what, I was not going to miss the spectacle of Sam busking.
“You can’t come down here.” Ace almost sounded like he was having an emotion, and it was desperation. “You saw how he was last night. He needs to be focused when he sings. Fights with girls mess that up.”
Nice. Way to make me feel special. “I’ll be secret,” I said. “I won’t let him see me.”
“You’re hard to miss,” Ace said. “No. I shouldn’t have told you where he is. He’s already mad at me, Bailey. Come on.”
“See you there.”
My granddad must have assumed that a second date with Sam was inevitable. He accepted it without complaint. I slid my fiddle from the seat of my rocking chair, buckled it into its case, and took it with me, hoping that it looked natural. When my granddad eyed me suspiciously, I told him I wasn’t sure what Sam and I were going to do that night, but we might jam together. It was true.
Preferring not to park in a dark parking deck by myself, even though it was still daylight, I trolled the upper part of the hill near Broadway for a space. It wasn’t long before I spotted Sam’s old truck in a pay lot. Behind it sat not Ace’s minivan from last night but a brand-new SUV with the Hightower car dealership insignia on the back. I stopped behind that.
With my fiddle case in one hand and my purse slung over my shoulder, I stepped out of my car in high heels, stylish shorts, and a crazy blouse layered with necklaces. Broadway was exposed to the slanting sun, and my usual Goth-wear was heavy for this heat. But if wearing shorts took some of my power away, I hoped the killer heels gave it back.
As I reached the corner and scanned Broadway down the hill, I headed for the biggest crowd. I could picture Sam drawing a crowd all alone with his guitar. As I moved closer, I didn’t hear him playing or singing, yet nobody in the crowd was moving on down the sidewalk like they’d heard enough. They were staying put. I could picture Sam convincing people to stay put.
I tried to push through to reach him and show him I wanted to play with him before he started his next song. That would smooth over everything we’d said to each other the night before. I wouldn’t give in and join his band. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t start a relationship with him, either, if he asked. That was crazy. But we could play on Broadway every Sunday afternoon for a while, until Julie got famous and somebody recognized me as her sister. Before that happened, I would get my fix of playing with him. We would do fine if we could just play together and never had to speak.
But before I could find a hole in the crowd, the strains of his mellow acoustic guitar glided above the heads of the crowd. I would have thought from the intro and the chord progression that he was attempting Alan Jackson’s “Remember When,” which was in G, but he was in C.
The next second he was singing “Remember When” after all. He’d smartly taken the key up half a scale because his voice was higher than Alan Jackson’s. One thing I had to give Sam: he knew his own voice and how to box his weight.
While his voice urged me forward, the lyrics of the song gave me pause. The narrator was a teenager, losing his virginity with the girl he loved. I backed through the second row and then the third, my hand going sweaty on the handle of my fiddle case.
In the next verses, he and the girl got married. Their parents died. They fought. There was supposed to be a guitar solo here with a gradual modulation from the key of G to the key of A, which in Sam’s version went from C to D. The original song was full of expressive violins, and he could have used me here. But he didn’t have me. To his credit, he didn’t try to replicate that slow solo but marched quickly through the chords to land at his destination, never losing his audience, and resumed his lyrics. In these verses, he and his wife had children and mellowed out. They grew older and their children moved away, but they vowed never to have any regrets about their lives coming to an end because they were so in love.
At this point tears stung my eyes. For once I hadn’t been concentrating on Sam’s notes and whether he was in key. I’d been listening to his words. The people all around me had, too. Middle-aged women’s eyes filled with tears. Men put their arms around their wives’ shoulders, all for a song so vague that it applied to everyone—everyone in a joyful relationship, that is—because even the happiest couple experienced sadness as time passed. And all this was sung by an eighteen-year-old who couldn’t possibly know what he was talking about, and who was treating this public street and free audience as practice. Yet I was moved, and so were they.
I wanted to listen to the rest of his performance, but I couldn’t stay there in the crowd. His song ended and only a handful of people moved away down the street. The rest would leave eventually, though. The bodies in front of me would shift, and he would see me. I didn’t want that anymore.
I ducked into the nearest bar, which doubled as a restaurant during the day and didn’t start ID’ing until later. I ordered an iced tea—I meant to pay for it, but the bartender nodded to my fiddle case and told me there was no charge. He must have been a down-and-out bluegrass reject himself. Then I headed up the stairs to the open-air balcony, empty in the late afternoon. Sliding into a seat at a table overlooking the sidewalk one story below, I watched Sam. His cowboy hat was gone. His plaid shirt and cowboy boots, gone. He wore a T-shirt and shorts like an eighteen-year-old headed for the mall, dressed to be himself.
He never looked up at me. But on his third song since I’d sat down, I noticed someone leaning in the shade of a nearby building, waving. It was Ace, saluting me. I put my finger over my lips.
He pushed off from his resting place and headed for the spectators. I hoped he wouldn’t call Sam’s attention to his admirer with a deck seat. Ace skirted the edge of the crowd and disappeared under the building where I was sitting. A few minutes later he reappeared with his own tea, coming toward me across the second floor of the restaurant.
He slid into the seat facing me, surprisingly nimble for a huge guy, not even swaying the ice in my drink as he tucked his knees under the table. He didn’t disturb me, either. We watched Sam cycle through another impeccable performance of an old favorite, then look up at the crowd in astonishment at their applause, like he’d forgotten all about them.
“I feel better if I come with him,” Ace said quietly. “He ought to be able to take care of himself. But sometimes he forgets where he is and what he’s doing. A sociopath would kill him over the couple of hundred dollars in that guitar case right now.”
I nodded. “Is that why you want to be in the band? Because he wants you to be?” I was fishing for information about myself more than Ace. I knew I couldn’t be in Sam’s band, but I desperately wanted to be. And after Charlotte’s warnings, I wondered whether this was an idea that Sam had put in my head, a conclusion I never would have reached if he hadn’t kissed me.
Ace poured a packet of fake sweetener in his tea and stirred it with his straw. “Like I told you last night, Sam and I played football together.” I recognized this phrase as boy code for We are very close friends. “I used to play bass for my brother’s R & B band, but after he moved to Chicago, I put it away until I happened to mention some of my past gigs to Sam at football practice. He got all excited and wouldn’t leave me alone until I agreed to jam with him. And we sounded great together. Sam would sound great with anybody, really, but he made me feel like I was holding my own. It was this really strange mix of James Brown and John Denver, but we made it work, you know?”
I nodded. Just like I could make it work when some crazy old lady wanted me to play Reba McEntire.
“Sam and I played with anybody who wanted to start a band in high school,” Ace said, “but most guys aren’t serious about it. They want to be in a band so they can impress the ladies, but they don’t want to practice, and the band lasts a week. Then Sam started dating Charlotte.”
He took a sip of his tea. It was just a pause in his story, and after swallowing he would go on with the story of Sam dating Charlotte. But he drank and drank, the seconds stretched on, and most of his tea was gone in one pull.
He dabbed his lips almost daintily with his cloth napkin and went on as if he hadn’t strangely stopped. “They didn’t date long. Ever since, we periodically have these knock-down, drag-outs about whether Sam decided we should all form a band because he was dating Charlotte, or whether he sought Charlotte out and started dating her so that she would join his band. I don’t know the answer to that myself.”
“It sounds like you’ve given it a lot of thought,” I pointed out.
Ace’s face wasn’t expressive—he was the opposite of Sam in that regard—but now that I knew him a little, I could tell from the slightest tightening of his jaw that he was upset. “Charlotte asks me about it all the time. She comes up with a new theory, a new angle, and wants to discuss it with me. You’re not helping.”
Without meaning to, I sat back in my chair. I didn’t like being blamed for this. Whatever problems the band had, they’d definitely had them before I showed up last night. I’d only brought them to a head.
“Sorry,” he said, holding up his hands in a show of truce. “It’s not your fault. Anyway, they were still dating when Sam came to me with this idea of a band. I did not want to be in a band with Sam and his girlfriend.”
“Because he’s had fifty-two girlfriends this year,” I guessed.
“Oh,” Ace said, shoulders sagging. “Charlotte said that to you.”
With my stony silence, I told him yes.
“It hasn’t been fifty-two,” he said carefully. “That would be one per week. Don’t get me wrong. There have been a lot. Maybe more like twenty-six.”
“Now you’re just rubbing it in,” I said, hinting that it would be okay if he shut up about this now.
He eyed me uneasily, thrown off by my protest, and unsure where to take this argument from here. He said awkwardly, “Well, so, and, Charlotte was girlfriend number twenty or thereabouts, so he was pretty far along in this pattern. I knew they were going to break up in a week or two, and then I’d be in a band with Sam and his ex-girlfriend.”