Sam turned on Ace. “What the f**k do—”
“Stop,” Ace said. He glanced toward the service road, where a cop car cruised slowly by.
Sam looked, too. “Fine,” he said, stomping toward the SUV.
“Let me drive,” Ace called after him.
We heard a door slam on the far side of the SUV.
“So, Bailey, things might have been better if you’d never showed up,” Charlotte said smugly.
“Can you stop? I swear to God.” Ace encircled the back of her neck with one hand and gave her a gentle shove toward the SUV. He seemed to be steering her toward the backseat with Sam. Her heart must be all aflutter, I thought bitterly.
I waited until everyone was inside the SUV. That way, any individual person would be slightly less likely to take a shot at me. I slipped into the front passenger seat again. As an afterthought—though that’s not what it seemed like to me—Sam half stood and jerked his wadded-up T-shirt out of the console beside me and put it on.
Ace drove the rest of the way to his father’s car lot. Nobody turned to me to say, “You’d better let Ace drive you home because Sam is done with you,” but that was the message, and I got it loud and clear. Sam pulled his guitar case out of the back of the SUV and drove off in his truck without a word.
Ace asked me for my address and plugged it into the GPS. As the robot lady commanded him to drive down the boulevard and turn at Music Row, he commented, “So. Not Bailey Wright. Bailey Mayfield.”
I said defensively, “Bailey Wright Mayfield.”
“It must really hurt to have your sister playing at the Grand Ole Opry,” Charlotte said.
I let that insult lie there, like an egg frying on the hood of a car on a summer day in the desert. She didn’t care what I thought of her, but she cared what Ace thought, and he wasn’t going to like that stab at me.
He didn’t defend me, though, just kept driving past the record company offices.
Charlotte tried again. “It’s a shame that your sister got the blond hair, and you got the jet-black hair. After seeing her, I’d almost say your hair color wasn’t natural.”
If she’d known how close we were to my granddad’s house, she might have started insulting me earlier. Now she’d run out of time. Ace pulled up at the bottom of my granddad’s cement stairs.
“Thanks, Ace,” I said genuinely. “It’s been a pleasure knowing you.”
“Oh,” he exclaimed like I was the one who’d insulted him. “We’re not done with you. You said you were in the band for four more days. This was day one.”
“What?” I protested. “No! Sam doesn’t want me playing with you now.”
“Sam does not cancel a gig,” Ace reminded me in a warning tone.
“There are no gigs.” I opened my hands. “I told him I couldn’t play tomorrow.”
“I know for a fact he’s scheduled us at Boot Ilicious on Wednesday,” Ace said.
“Oh, come on!” I cried. Toby had no idea I was playing in a band, I hoped. But he’d discovered a place to snag booze, and he wasn’t going to give it up anytime soon. I’d likely see him there, and now I would be doing exactly what he’d always made fun of me for.
“No,” I said. “Sam didn’t say anything to me about another gig.”
“He was probably waiting for the right time,” Ace said, “because you freak out every time he tries to get you to play with us again.”
Charlotte burst into laughter. I let her laugh. I felt stunned. It was the first time Ace had raised his voice at me.
He turned around. I didn’t see the look he gave Charlotte, but she stopped laughing.
“And Sam sent in our video to audition for a Broadway gig on Thursday,” Ace said. “Since it looks like you and Sam might not be speaking, I’ll call you both days to make sure you’re coming. If you don’t answer, I will come find you.”
“O-kay!” So much for my sweet parting with my understated friend. I opened the door and jerked my beach bag and fiddle case off the floorboard.
Just before I slammed the door, Charlotte chirped from the backseat, “Good night, Bailey Mayfield!”
I took a step back and opened her door. “Shut up,” I said to her face before closing the door again. I jogged up the steps.
Upset as I was, I had the wherewithal to stuff my fiddle case into my beach bag before opening the front door. If I had been harboring some inkling of an idea that Sam was right and I could make it big with his band, thereby breaking away from my parents completely, those hopes were dashed now. I needed more than ever to keep my moonlighting a secret from my granddad.
But as I entered the dark house and peeked out the front window to watch Ace drive away, I knew my Wednesday and Thursday nights with the band wouldn’t be all I saw of Sam. I had a mall performance to get through tomorrow afternoon, and then I was making a date.
12
After I got off work the next evening and changed from Dolly Parton’s helper back into my bad-ass self, I found Sam’s dad’s address online, then parked in front of his house. It looked a lot like my granddad’s house, actually, but in a neighborhood that hadn’t been kept up as nicely: a house people bought when they weren’t a hundred percent sure what they would get paid from month to month. I called Sam.
“Hey, Bailey,” he said sleepily.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” I said, then waited for him to deny he’d been asleep. When he didn’t, my heart twisted. All day I’d thought how unreasonable and selfish he was, if he would throw away our relationship just because I wouldn’t give him a shortcut to success. But he must have gone home last night, then stayed up so late that he was still asleep at six the next evening. That made me want to comfort him, run my fingers through his hair with his head in my lap as he’d done for me last night, even though I was the one who’d caused the trouble.
“My granddad wouldn’t let me sleep that late,” I said by way of conversation.
Sam yawned. “My folks aren’t home. My mom had an early meeting before night shift. My dad’s on a bender.”
“He’s not driving around, is he?” I hoped I didn’t sound as alarmed as I felt. Sam’s real problems surprised me every time, even now that our whole relationship had turned dark.
He laughed, a pale echo of his musical laughter from the rest of the days I’d known him. “No, he stays put. My mom makes him go to a motel.”
I took a deep breath. “I’m parked in front of your house, I think. Or I’m about to get arrested for staking out the wrong guy.”
I watched his house—or the house I was sitting in front of, anyway. The blinds opened in a second-story window.
“I see you,” he said somberly.
“Well.” Maybe I should have given up on the night and driven away. Instead I said, “I was hoping you might come out with me. I have something I want to show you.”
“Give me ten.” He hung up.
In seven, he was locking the side door and running past his truck, down the driveway. When he was still several paces away, I noticed he was wearing his T-shirt from two nights before, the one I’d cartooned on with Charlotte’s marker. I wasn’t sure whether the marker was especially permanent or he’d washed the shirt carefully, but his heart was still on his sleeve.
He got into my car with his usual bluster, smelling of toothpaste and soap and shampoo, his hair hanging in damp waves as on the first day I’d met him, when he’d played an old Scottish tune in the sun. But nothing else about him was as usual. He didn’t ask where I was taking him. He didn’t make small talk. He sank down in the seat like he wasn’t quite awake and stared stonily in front of him.
Until I drove down the exit ramp to the Grand Ole Opry. Then he sat up.
I found a spot in the crowded parking lot. “Do you have an umbrella?” was the first thing he said the whole trip. As we slammed the car doors and followed the crowd toward the theater, the sky rumbled overhead, and violently pink clouds raced across the twilit sky.
“No,” I said, not that I cared. “Five Feet High and Rising” started playing in my head.
When it was my turn at the box office, I asked for two tickets, half hoping they would be sold out and I wouldn’t be able to go through with my plan. I was dying to see Julie on the Grand Ole Opry stage, and then again, I dreaded it. And when Sam saw her, I wasn’t sure how he would react.
No such luck. Even during CMA week, the Grand Ole Opry wasn’t selling out on a Tuesday, when the headlining acts were middling stars and Julie was unknown.
While I was talking to the cashier, choosing seats, someone slipped my billfold out from under my elbow on the counter. I turned in alarm. When I saw it was just Sam, I continued my conversation until I came away from the window with tickets.
Sam held my billfold open, staring grimly at my driver’s license. At my real name.
He looked up at me, and the accusation in his eyes hurt.
He already knew I’d lied about my name. But I suppose seeing it on my license hit it home to him, like seeing Julie onstage tonight was going to hit it home to me that country music was her life, not mine.
Our seats were high in the large, steep auditorium. To know what was going on, we relied on one of the huge screens that focused on the star onstage. I could tell by the way Sam expressed no surprise at the show that he’d been here as often as I had over the years. The Grand Ole Opry was a theater production but also a live radio show that had been ongoing and pretty much unchanged since the twenties: some old-fashioned commercials for potato chips and ice cream, an elderly man in a sequined cowboy getup telling jokes about his sex life, a musical act—often bluegrass rather than country—that had been an Opry staple for decades but never made it big, and finally a newbie the record companies were trying to promote, or a genuine star. Repeat four times for a two-hour show. Julie was the newbie for act three.
I thought the announcer would never stop reciting his commercial for hand salve—and then, before I was ready, Julie was walking onstage amid polite applause, wearing a fixed grin, her face turned purposefully toward the audience.
The thing that struck me about her was how beautiful she looked on the jumbo screen. With her face blown up the size of a Chevy, every imperfection in her face should have been noticeable, but she didn’t have any. Her skin was flawless, her lipstick glossy, her brilliant blue eyes outlined in smoky shadow, her blond curls shining in the spotlights. She might have been nervous, she might have sounded off, but the camera loved her, and she looked like a star.
But underneath the gorgeous hair and perfect makeup, I could tell she was terrified. Her easy smile when we used to play together, even onstage, had morphed into a tight one. Her hands moved robotically across the guitar strings. Normally she was good at using the whole stage so the audience didn’t get bored watching her. This time she stayed rooted to the lighter circle in the very center of the wooden floor, hauled here from the Grand Ole Opry’s original home, the Ryman Auditorium, and saved again after this new theater’s flood. She stood on it like it was her life raft in the vast sea of the empty, brightly lit stage, her backup musicians pushed to the edges and too far away to save her.
She played two songs, both insipid, the upbeat first one better than the slower follow-up. They were cute and they would get radio airplay, but the tunes weren’t catchy. The conceits in the lyrics I’d heard a hundred times. The upbeat one was about going away from home and missing her dog (first verse), her friends (second verse), and her family (third verse). The other was about her true love for her boyfriend (first verse), her parents (second verse), and God (third verse). Nobody would remember them in a year. She would be exactly as successful this week as the record company’s marketing efforts made her, coupled with whatever notoriety she could gain from being only sixteen. These songs wouldn’t help her.
The second song ended with a big buildup. Though I hadn’t heard it before, I could tell she was supposed to hit a money note. She took it down a fifth, like a spooked figure skater at the Olympics attempting a double axel rather than a triple. As the tune wrapped up, my self-absorbed thoughts assaulted me. I’d never wanted Julie to fail. But I did feel a bit self-righteous. If my family hadn’t shut me out, I might have prevented this fiasco by pointing out how crappy the songs were, or just by standing in the wings, supporting her, when she went onstage.
And I was bitter. Bitterness and I were old friends by now, but at the moment bitterness was trying to go down my bra in public. I had spent the last year so depressed that Julie got this opportunity when I didn’t, yet this was the upshot of it? It was an opportunity squandered, a year of bitterness over nothing at all.
Sam and I sat through the entire show without getting up, hardly moving. Neither of us laughed at the jokes. We were movie critics, sports writers, record company scouts, leaching all the joy out of watching a performance. And after the heat between us over the past few days, we each stayed in our own cold personal space, never touching.
Finally the show was over. The lights turned up. The audience en masse edged along the narrow rows and up the stairs to the exits. Only Sam and I stayed in the uncomfortable bench seats built to imitate the church pews in the Ryman, staring at the blank screen where Julie’s pretty face had been.
“What’d you think?” I asked.
He sighed. “I’m eaten up inside with jealousy. I don’t like myself very much right now.”
I felt him looking at me. I met his gaze. In his eyes I saw that he understood what I’d been going through for a year. Not that this helped us now.