I nodded, but I had no idea. My parents got along great. They were of one mind when they ditched me.
Sam ran one hand back through his dark waves. “My mom was never able to make him go to rehab, but she dragged us all into counseling. My reaction to everything the counselors said was ‘No way.’ I did not make excuses for my dad. I did not help my dad hide his drinking. Which is exactly what they said my reaction would be. I thought they were a bunch of smart-asses at the time. But now my dad is soberer by a long shot, and still not sober. At eighteen you can see over some walls into other rooms, and you start to wonder whether the adults were right all along. It’s disorienting.”
“Does that mean you’re going to interview with Jimmy for that loading dock job?”
He laughed then. The dark cloud around him lifted. He was happy-go-lucky Sam again, driving his truck through a steamy June evening, into a Tennessee sunset. “I guess we’ll swing by your granddad’s house now so you can change.”
“You know what?” I was afraid to go back. My granddad had let me out of the house with the understanding that I would be with Sam, who seemed to be my carte blanche. I didn’t want to push my luck by going back to switch from an L.A. to a Nashville outfit, then coming up with an excuse for the wardrobe change. I hadn’t forgotten his suspicious look at me that afternoon when I walked out with my fiddle. “Since we’re on this side of town, let’s just pop into my parents’ house. It’s the mother lode of hokey Nashville-wear.”
Just a few miles outside the city, my parents’ neighborhood was a green and gorgeous series of rolling hills and small farms, a stark contrast to the neon lights of Broadway. I’d always loved it here. After being away for a week, I still thought it was beautiful, but the steam hanging in the air seemed sinister. As we passed, I didn’t point out the pond Toby had sunk his car in.
Sam’s truck crunched to a stop on the gravel driveway, in front of the newish farmhouse built to look like an oldish farmhouse. As I stepped out, something seemed very wrong, like I was visiting my deserted house again after the zombie apocalypse. Scanning the acres of pasture around us, I realized what the difference was. “My parents weren’t going to be here much this year, so they sold all the animals.” What had been a cacophony of off-key animal sounds before was now dead silence, save for the hot wind in the trees and the ominous dinging of the wind chimes hanging from the porch ceiling. Wind chimes were the bane of my existence because they weren’t tuned to actual notes. I had told my parents this and they had left the chimes up.
I fished my keys from my purse and climbed the wooden steps. “Wave to the security camera,” I told Sam behind me. I flashed a hand toward the lens hidden in one upper corner of the porch. “I want them to know I know they know I’m here. God forbid they catch me bringing a boy over here to adjust my wardrobe.”
“That is ridiculous,” Sam said, following me through the kitchen. “I am Grandpa-approved.”
It wasn’t until I crossed the den that I realized what a bad idea this had been. Sam was going to find out about Julie’s success sooner or later. Then our relationship, such as it was, would be over. I’d been hoping it would happen later rather than sooner. But the trappings of Julie’s upcoming career were everywhere. On the sofa tables sat framed photos of country megastars hugging her after she’d opened concerts for them. My mom had even framed the program from her biggest concert so far, as if to say, I am so proud! My baby got third billing! My tension mounted until I almost wished Sam would come to the realization that I’d been lying to him, and we could get the awful breakup over with before we were ever really together.
He didn’t seem to see the evidence against me, however. He saw photos of me with the stars at bluegrass festivals. As we mounted the stairs, he paused at a picture of me posing with my fiddle, decked out in cowgirl hat and shirt and boots and square-dancing skirt, age five.
“Awww,” he said, as though I’d been the most adorable child alive. For the hundredth time in a little over a day, my heart opened for him.
I’d told him to wave to the camera so my parents would know our visit was innocent. I’d implied to him that of course it was innocent and I never expected anything else to happen between us. But I wished he’d argued with me or at least acted hurt. I walked more slowly than usual up the stairs, making sure he caught up with me, wishing he would “accidentally” bump into me. I listened for his breathing behind me, so focused on his whereabouts that I hardly noticed my own until I’d reached my room. It was silly, but I knew that for the next few nights I would have fantasies about Sam and me getting too close for comfort on that carpeted stairway.
I was hyperaware of what he would see when he walked behind me into my room, but I shouldn’t have worried. Except for Julie, I had no secrets from him. My room looked exactly as it should, with the evidence of bluegrass festivals—posters, trophies, and photos—cluttering the room, but it all stopped this time last year. It was like my life had been put on pause.
“You can have a seat,” I said casually, gesturing to my desk chair, my comfy reading chair in the corner, and my bed. I walked into my closet and rifled through the remaining dress bags, pulling out an outfit that said I am the fiddler in a rockabilly band or possibly I am insane. I walked back into the room to show it to Sam.
Instead of sitting in a chair or lounging across my bed like a too-forward boy in a teen movie, he still stood awkwardly with his arms crossed exactly where I’d left him in the middle of the room. I got this vibe from Sam sometimes: deep down he was a gentleman, but he kept getting confounded by his striking looks. Women must throw themselves at him. It was possible the twenty-six girlfriends hadn’t been his fault.
For a moment he stared at the dress I was holding up as if he didn’t really see it and he’d been thinking hard about something else. He blinked. “Oh. Yeah, that’s okay. May I look?”
After doing a quick mental inventory of my closet and finding nothing embarrassing either way—no dolls that looked like I was still taking care of them and laying them down to sleep on their shelves at night, but also no pot pipes—I swept my arm in that direction: Be my guest. The closet wasn’t big enough for both of us to stand in. I walked over to my desk and looked through the junk mail I hadn’t bothered to read the weekend I got in so much trouble.
Because I was about to enter college, theoretically, I received a lot of catalogs trying to sell me college clothes and college bedroom sets. I flipped through one without picking it up from the desk, like it had nothing to do with me. Nice Girls in the photos towed pallets of the contents of their new dorm rooms, all matching in a pink flowered theme or a purple butterfly theme, across the quad. Nice Boys waved to them from the vaulted doorways of what were supposed to be dorms but looked like the original home of the Grand Ole Opry, the Ryman Auditorium, which had started life as a church.
“This,” Sam called. He held up a shirt Julie had given me as a joke, printed with a cowboy boot and “NashVegas” in loopy letters, all outlined in sequins.
I took the shirt from him. Closing myself alone inside the closet, I exchanged the L.A. blouse I had on for the Nashville shirt that turned me into Sam’s centerpiece. After swapping my heels for shiny white cowgirl boots, I opened the door to show him.
He was staring at the doorway, waiting. “Oh, yeah.” His whole face brightened with his smile. “That’s it. Do you have a skirt?”
Obligingly I retreated into the closet and came out in a miniskirt with an electrified print that I’d thought fit my image last year but I’d never had the courage to wear.
“Yes, ma’am,” Sam said, the admiration evident in his voice. “You should always wear skirts onstage. That should be your thing.” He held out his hand to me. “Ready?”
It seemed to me that the gig was over almost before it started. I had almost forgotten how time could fly when I was performing. I was tempted to put down the heel of my cowgirl boot to step on the night and anchor it there before it slipped away.
We played completely different songs from the ones the night before. When Sam texted me the playlist and I asked him about it, he said, “It’s Sunday. A lot of tourists are here for the weekend. If they liked us last night, they might come back tonight, and we need to be playing something different so they don’t get bored. A lot of the bands around here are great, but they’ve got a tiny repertoire. We have to be better.” He glanced up at me, then grudgingly added, “My dad taught me that.”
Ace’s family reunion came. He had to whisper to one college girl from the night before that he couldn’t take off his shirt again because his mom was in the audience, but generally we were under a gag order, forbidden to admit that Ace’s relatives belonged to him. We wanted the bar to think we were drawing a crowd because of our actual talent. The ploy seemed to work. Once while I played staccato notes, keeping time with Sam’s guitar break, I saw the bearded owner who’d been talking to Sam the night before looking with obvious satisfaction over the whole bottom floor succumbing to a line dance that Ace’s aunts had started.
When ten o’clock rolled around and we took our break, I gazed up the street toward the abandoned buildings and new construction, looked at Sam scowling at me, and dropped my phone back into my purse. I couldn’t get far enough away from the noise of the bar to make my call to Julie without putting Sam’s life and mine in danger. And after she’d ignored my calls and voice mails for a full week, I decided she wasn’t worth it. If she wanted to talk to me, she knew how.
We ended the night on a high note, with the crowd clamoring for more and complaining as we vacated the stage for the next scheduled band. The bearded owner asked us back again. This time, rather than dividing the tips in Ace’s van and sending him and Charlotte on their way, Sam suggested we grab a bite at an all-night restaurant on the edge of the District. I could tell by the way he glanced uneasily at me that he was concerned his line to me about playing with the band “just this once” was wearing thin.
Ace and Charlotte parked the van back in the lot where they’d already paid for the night. Sam and I walked up the hill and stowed our instruments in my car and his truck. We waited for Ace and Charlotte outside the bustling dive. Just as I spied them hiking up the sidewalk together, a train sounded its horn a few blocks over. I closed one eye and made a face and hoped Sam didn’t think I was reacting to the idea he was excitedly telling me about for a new soul cover tune.
He stopped in the middle of what he was saying and stared down at me. “It’s the train, isn’t it?”
“Yes, ugh!” I exclaimed. The relief in my voice didn’t begin to match the relief I felt. Either Sam’s own pitch was close to perfect, or he wanted mine badly enough that he’d thought through the pros and the cons. He understood how I experienced loud, inescapable, off-key tritones, whereas everybody else thought I was making my discomfort up.
Chuckling down at me, he placed his warm hands over my ears, shutting out the plaintive moan of the train.
A second before, the sidewalk had been crowded with people passing in and out of the restaurant, and I’d been aware of the diners on the other side of the glass storefront. Suddenly they were all gone. Sam and I were the only two people in the world. I’d felt close to him while we played for the past two hours. We’d flirted with each other for hours before that. But now his dark eyes held mine and lost all their humor. Tingles raced across my skin.
“Poor thing,” he said in a low, sexy tone.
And then, as quickly as the moment had come, it was gone again. He slid his hands off me and turned away in one movement. Charlotte and Ace had almost reached us. Sam’s body had shielded them from seeing the way he touched me.
I tried not to overthink this as we all took a booth in the restaurant, flanked on one side by a table of tipsy adults who giggled over their barbecue sandwiches, and on the other by teenagers who only wished they could find a way into the Broadway bars. A barbecue sandwich here was as close as they could get. When I slid in beside the window so we could order our own late-night munchies, Sam took the seat across from me, leaving Charlotte to sit next to him. But I didn’t honestly think he had a thing for Charlotte anymore. He had a thing for his band. In deferring to Charlotte’s happiness by taking his hands off me, he was only trying to keep the peace.
While we ate, I noticed Sam picked at his fries. This didn’t make me self-conscious about eating my own. I’d felt so lonely and stressed and skipped so many meals when my mom was out of town during the past year that I figured an extra plate of fries couldn’t hurt me now. But Sam’s lack of an appetite did make me wonder again what he was up to with this sudden band camaraderie. He finally popped a fry into his mouth, almost as a prop for his casual act, then chewed and swallowed and asked Ace, “Did your dad say the video turned out okay?”
“No, no, no,” I insisted, “what video?”
“The picture is a little dark because of the low lighting and the neon,” Ace said, eyeing me, “but the sound is perfect.”
“What video?” I demanded again.
“I told you,” Sam said as innocently as his guilt would allow. “You can send in a video audition for a lot of the Broadway bars. One of them told me to make the band more special and try again.”
I nodded, biting my lip to keep from bursting into a recitation of exactly what I thought of Sam. He’d brought me here to break it to me that he’d moved on to the next stage of his plan for the band, whether I liked it or not. He was telling me in the crowded restaurant, with Ace and Charlotte present, in the hope I wouldn’t make as much of a scene.