Dirty Little Secret

And that made Elvis sound like a train wreck. The people at the table closest to us, teenagers munching soft pretzels, got up suddenly and took their trays to the other side of the food court.

Between verses, Elvis slid close to me with a tight smile and whispered in my ear, “We’re in D.”

In the middle of my solo line, I pulled my fiddle away from my chin to say, “And I’m in D-sharp.” I tucked my fiddle under my chin again and resumed my soaring fiddle line, taking extra care to make it a Grand Ole Opry–worthy performance, only gratingly off-key. As Elvis and Mr. Crabtree continued their accompaniment on their guitars a half step too low, every nerve in my body vibrated with the need to tune down.

I tried to get my mind off it by gazing out at the audience, such as it was. A few customers remained at tables at the far edge of the food court, involved in their own conversations, not even glancing at us across the atrium. Maybe they were so tone-deaf that they hadn’t noticed anything wrong. More likely they were just here to shop for new shades, man, and our performance meant nothing to them, our drama less than nothing.

My heartbeat slowed to normal. I’d returned to the mind-set that had helped me survive the past year, in which I acknowledged how little I mattered and how little anybody cared. When the tortuous song ended and Elvis stepped close to tower over me again, I faced him with a smug expression, batting my eyelashes sarcastically, ready for anything.

“You’re going to get us both fired,” he growled under his breath.

“Only if we keep accidentally getting our wires crossed,” I said in an innocent tone to go with my chiffon scarf and my ponytail. “That won’t happen, because you’re going to apologize to me.”

His lips parted. His eyebrows shot up. Suddenly, despite Ms. Lottie’s makeup, he looked nothing like Elvis. He was an older man I’d just met. I knew zero about his real life, his motivations, or how far I’d pushed him.

He seethed, “I will report you.”

“I don’t f**king care,” I lied. It was important that I said f**k because he’d used it first. I had to show him I wasn’t scared of him. But I was beginning to be. I was such a wuss that I couldn’t even hold his angry gaze. My eyes darted to Mr. Crabtree to make sure he hadn’t heard me say the F-word in the middle of the mall.

Mr. Crabtree still smiled out at the food court. “How about ‘Love Me Tender’ next?” he asked, turning to Elvis. “Such a pretty tune.”

Sure, a pretty tune, I supposed. The scales and arpeggios progressed from major one to major five like a thousand other rockabilly ballads. The song stood out solely because the rote major four in the middle had been replaced with the rogue madness of a major two. And Mr. Crabtree couldn’t even hear it. After years of work as a musician, losing his hearing must have been a nightmare for him. He hardly seemed to notice. Maybe the change had been so gradual, the letdown so gentle, that he’d landed in a soft place, and his memory of one, two, five, and one was as good as the real thing. It was only when the rug was jerked out from under you that you fell on your ass.

After that, Elvis and I both stood down. I didn’t screw up another song for him. He didn’t say another word to me, but the tension between us was frightening. I felt more awake than I had for a whole year, and not in a good way. Before, my school day and an unhappy night at home had seemed like I was trapped in a losing battle. I was outnumbered and unarmed. Now I was still outnumbered—the whole world was against me—but I’d discovered I could use music as a weapon. I could at least have the satisfaction of giving one attacker a bloody nose before the pack of them cut me down.

My shift ended at six. When I drove back to my granddad’s house, he had dinner waiting for me, and we made small talk over the pot roast. At my parents’ house I would have stayed sullenly silent, just in case they’d forgotten how I felt about them, but my granddad was only trying to help.

“How was work?” he asked. He’d stressed to me when he got me the mall job that I couldn’t blow it off. A professional musician knew playing music was a job and viewed it seriously. In referring to my afternoon at the mall as “work,” he was warning me against treating the job as I’d treated everything else in the past year: like shit.

“So much fun.” I was lying like a dog. “Thanks again for getting me this gig, Granddad. And, oh—Ernest Crabtree was in my band today.”

My granddad’s eyes widened through folds of old skin. “How did he do? He’s gotten deaf as a doornail.”

“He did great!” We laughed about poor Mr. Crabtree, and then I steered the topic away from work. The thought of Elvis made bile rise in my throat.

I washed the dishes, then sat down with my granddad to watch Antiques Roadshow on PBS. This was the life of a girl doomed to spend the summer between high school and college living with her grandfather. After it was over, he got out his guitar, I opened my fiddle, and we played together for a few hours. Our music wasn’t electric, like performing onstage with Julie, or such a part of me that I hardly noticed, like practicing by myself, but a relaxing way to pass the time, like lying on my back in a warm lake, staring up at the sky.

At ten, the phone interrupted us: an actual phone plugged into the wall in the kitchen, because my granddad didn’t see the need for a cell. I could tell from his “Heeeeey, sugar pie, how’s Minneapolis?” echoing around the old house that he was talking to my mom. My parents were with Julie on the final and most important leg of her pre-album tour before they came back to Nashville next week for the debut of her first single.

“What?” my granddad asked. “Trouble? No, she’s been an angel.”

I settled my fiddle under my chin and played softly enough that I wouldn’t disturb my granddad but loudly enough that I couldn’t hear what he said.

“Bailey,” he called over my tune. “Come talk to your mom.”

I could feel an ugly expression tighten my face as I packed up my violin and closed the case. In the kitchen I took the receiver my granddad held out to me and leaned against the 1960s wallpaper printed with dancing forks and spoons. “Hello.”

“Hey, sweetie,” my mom said. “Behaving yourself?”

“Yes, ma’am, I’m five years old and I’m behaving myself.”

“If you feel you’re being treated that way, maybe you should ask yourself why.” My mother’s voice thinned out, pitching into the same guilt trips and threats she’d laid on me for a year. I wasn’t listening anymore. I didn’t need to. I knew what she’d say because I’d heard it a million times, and because, nauseatingly, I was exactly like her.

I’d inherited her high-strung anxiety about success, along with my dad’s easygoing willingness to practice his music dogmatically—the terrible combination that had made me a proficient has-been before I was old enough to vote. Julie was unlike either of them. She loved music, she wanted to be successful, and she’d enjoyed the bluegrass festivals that had made up our childhood. But privately to me, she often said she longed to quit it all so she could go to the movies with her friends on Friday night, or get a job at the Gap. In short, she was the only one in the family who was normal. That’s probably what the record company saw in her when they tapped her (and not me) to become famous.

When my mom took a breath, I asked, “May I please speak with Julie?”

“Julie is not ready to speak with you.”

“She doesn’t want to talk to me, or you won’t give her the phone?”

“She’s sitting right here, shaking her head no.”

I believed it. For the past year, every night that Julie had been out of town, I’d called her around ten. But she’d told me the night of my accident that she wasn’t speaking to me anymore. Last night, for the first time, she hadn’t answered when I called.

“Here’s your father,” my mom said. They murmured in the background. Then my dad said brightly, “I miss you, Bay.”

My stomach twisted into a knot, my nose tickled, my eyes watered, and suddenly I was sobbing silently, turning my mouth away from the receiver so I didn’t gasp in my dad’s ear.

“Bay?” he prompted me.

I couldn’t talk to him, but I didn’t want to hang up on him, so I leaned through the doorway and stretched the spiral cord to hold out the receiver in the direction of my granddad.

He jumped up from his chair, surprisingly spry for an old guy, and took the phone from me. As I walked into the living room to grab my fiddle case and escape up the stairs, I heard him saying, “Mack, I think she’s really tired right now. I worked her pretty hard around the shop today . . . .”

I closed myself in the bedroom I was using and dealt with my feelings the way I had for a year. I rummaged in my purse, pulled out my now-battered notebook printed inside with music staffs rather than blue lines—my fifth notebook since I’d started over without Julie—and wrote a song. This one was about crying suddenly, unable to speak on the phone, and afterward wondering why. As always, I wasn’t so sure about the words, and I would continue to tinker with them, but I was dead sure about the melody and the crazy chords that held it up like pillars under a highway.

As I considered the song, playing it over in my mind, I decorated the edges of the pages in doodles of hearts and flowers, shading them with delicate strokes in colored pencil. I’d never had the urge to do that in the notebooks I’d filled with songs as a child. I’d played those tunes with Julie. I’d gotten her to sing them with me when they weren’t even done so I could hear where I was going. But for these new notebooks, I had nobody to play with. I might spend a lifetime as an anonymous costumed fiddle player at the mall and never hear my own compositions—not in real life. The drawings of hearts and flowers were a strange compulsion. I felt better when I added them, as if they were a consolation prize, a sympathy card after a loss.

It wasn’t until I rolled into bed that I realized my granddad had been half-right when he made an excuse for me over the phone to my dad, saying I was tired because I’d worked hard. I was so upset with my mom and Julie and myself that my dad’s kindness had been too much of a shock. But I probably wouldn’t have reacted that way if I hadn’t had such a hard day at work with Elvis.

I was afraid Elvis would turn me in for ruining “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” I suspected he wouldn’t dare. Musician jobs were too hard to come by in Nashville, which was chock-full of wannabe’s. Elvis would prefer to fly under the radar. He wouldn’t want to cause a stir at the casting office by complaining about a coworker.

Even if he did, it would be his word against mine. My boss would believe him, though, because he’d worked in the tribute band longer. I would be fired. My granddad would be disgraced because he’d put in a good word for me and I’d let him down. He would report my failure to my parents. They would carry through on their threat to withhold my college tuition. For the rest of the summer I would spend not just the mornings but the afternoons, too, helping my granddad in his shop, sanding guitars and sweeping up wood shavings as if they were pieces of my own soul that had sloughed off my body and fallen onto the floor.

Or, if my parents were cutting me off anyway, I could buy a bus ticket to L.A. Wasn’t that where runaways went? Out there, passersby probably didn’t even throw a dollar to rock guitarists on the street, but a bluegrass musician from Nashville might be a novelty. Playing my fiddle would keep me out of prostitution for a whole day before I had to pawn it.

Or I could be proactive and tell on Elvis before he told on me. He was the guilty one, after all. I had to keep reminding myself of this. He was the one who’d made lewd comments. I’d only played in the wrong key in response.

The next afternoon, I parked in the mall’s vast lot, walked around to one of the loading docks, and swung through the employee door of what used to be a Borders bookstore. My plan was to let Ms. Lottie make me up like a demure 1950s teenager, then march into the casting office and file my complaint against Elvis. I’d rehearsed my speech in my head so many times that I’d memorized it. And I’d strategized that I should complain in the squeaky-clean ponytail wig Ms. Lottie pinned on me rather than my normal bad-ass hairdo, so my boss would more likely believe me.

The bookstore was too big to be this empty, books long gone. Only a few comfy chairs and a couch remained where the café used to be. Now it was a lounge area for musicians to tune their instruments and wait for the rest of their group. But nobody had their instruments out today. Willie Nelson watched and occasionally interjected a comment while Elvis argued with Dolly Parton. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Elvis’s tone and body language were a lot like what he’d used on me the day before. Good—at least I knew he wasn’t really a king around here. I likely wasn’t the only fiddle player who’d ever pissed him off.

I slipped into the restroom to scrub off my makeup, plus the fine sawdust that had stuck to it during my morning of helping my granddad build guitars. Then I returned to the wardrobe area set up at the front of the store, near the floor-to-ceiling windows onto the mall, now covered in brown paper to protect us from the curious stares of shoppers. I plopped into Ms. Lottie’s chair.

“You know, hon,” she said, peering at me over the tops of her rhinestone reading glasses, “you could come in without makeup. Then we wouldn’t have to go through so many steps.”

“I never leave the house without makeup,” I told her. “I’d feel na**d.” All of which had become true in the past year. I’d been hiding behind inky black mascara and a scowl since I cut off my long hair. Nobody messed with a tough-looking chick like me. I’d felt like I was surrounded by a force field when I’d passed Elvis in the lounge area just now. I got in trouble only when I washed my makeup off and Ms. Lottie made me up nicely to look like the high school portrait of my now-dead grandma.