Dirty Little Secret

“Uh-oh,” Ms. Lottie said, seeing my pouty expression in the mirror and sticking out her bottom lip in sympathy. “Did Sam steal your heart already? That’s got to be some kind of record, even for him.”

I didn’t want to talk about it. I explained instead, “He and his dad got into an argument in the middle of the food court.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that about those two. I’ve seen it in here.” She nodded toward the empty lounge area, then lowered her voice. “Darren is a drinker when he doesn’t have a gig. He’s hard on Sam, and Sam is hard on him. I feel sorry for both of them. You run into that again and again in this town. So talented, and they’re their own worst enemy.” Shaking her head, she pulled out a few bobby pins and lifted my hair off.

After she disassembled me, I stepped into the changing room, a cubicle with no ceiling. Way up on the wall hung a decorative poster left over from Borders. James Joyce frowned down at me, which made me feel even more na**d as I pulled off my heavy costume. I glanced up at his creepy gaze behind his glasses and fought the urge to hide my bruised thigh under my circle skirt again.

Then I paused, wearing only my black lace undies, and listened to the larger room on the other side of the partition. A banjo strummed. Ms. Lottie laughed. There was no guitar music, and there were none of Sam’s quips under his breath. Yet my body thought it could feel him there.

Ms. Lottie’s commentary had made me wonder again about his argument with Mr. Hardiman, and his snide laughter when Mr. Hardiman said he was tired after working four hours. I’d thought Sam was just a handsome guy. Now that I knew he had problems at home, he was complicated and, in a twisted way, more intriguing.

Which didn’t change the fact that he was gone.

I’d almost forgotten his handkerchief in my circle skirt pocket. I pulled it out and examined it for the first time. It wasn’t stained with my makeup after all. It didn’t have his initials embroidered on it, either. It was just a store-bought square—I marveled briefly that a shop still sold these—and any sweat on it was mine, not his. I didn’t have to cling to it like he was a rock star.

Rolling my eyes at myself, I pulled on my tight jeans, stuffed Sam’s handkerchief into my snug pocket, and ducked into a tighter T-shirt. Emerging into Ms. Lottie’s area, I scrubbed my face clean and started over with my makeup for the third time that day. While Ms. Lottie deconstructed the fake boobs of a banjo player who’d followed Dolly around that day, she kept glancing over at me, carefully maintaining a neutral expression as I applied my black mascara, liquid eyeliner, and blood-red lipstick. The ponytail wig and four hours of sweat had matted my hair. I brushed it out and fluffed my curls until they hung correctly, longer on one side and jet-black all over. Then grabbed my purse and fiddle case and bailed out of Borders.

Out on the loading dock, the summer heat hit me like a rock, and the evening sunlight blinded me. I couldn’t see, but I could hear a guitar to the left. Blinking and then opening one eye, I recognized Sam on the retaining wall. The pompadour was gone, his hair damp. Without all the gel or whatever Ms. Lottie had used to stick it together, his hair was surprisingly wavy and wild, which worked a lot better with the scruffy beginnings of his beard than the pompadour had. He’d traded the plaid button-down for a tight T-shirt, which he wore with the same skinny black jeans, rolled down now, and black sneakers. He was dressed a lot like me.

At first he didn’t seem to notice I was looking at him. He didn’t seem to concentrate on his music, either. His fingers moved automatically over the guitar strings, playing an old tune brought to the Appalachians from Scotland and written before the system of chords in Western music had been regularized, so it was full of progressions that sounded strange to the modern ear. The chords were minor, as if the song was meant to be sad, but the lyrics were ironically upbeat. Sam wasn’t singing them, but I knew the words. He stared into space, in my vicinity but beyond me, through me, like he was thinking hard about something else. His dark brows were knitted, and he squinted a little. The hot breeze moved one dark curl across his forehead, which must have tickled, but he didn’t brush it away.

I considered standing in front of him until he acknowledged me. What did I want out of that, though? He wasn’t interested in me, and I shouldn’t be interested in him. So I just kept walking and hoped he wouldn’t notice me.

I was all the way past him, stepping from the concrete ramp to the asphalt road, when I heard him call behind me, “Bailey!”

I stopped automatically, then wished I hadn’t. Now I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t heard him. He was making everything more difficult. The more I interacted with him, the harder I was going to fall, and the worse the rest of my summer without him or anybody else was going to be.

The damage was done, though. I turned to face him as he jogged the few steps between us, holding his guitar by the neck. “I’ve been waiting for you. I almost didn’t recognize you.” He stared at me, taking in my eyes, then my hair, but not with the appraising expression girls wore when they commented on my looks. A small smile played on his lips like he appreciated the way I was done up but also—a little disturbingly—found it amusing.

To break the silence, I finally said, “I don’t wear the June Carter Cash wig home. Or the Dolly Parton Does Vegas outfit on my Dolly Parton days.”

His brows shot up. “You have Dolly Parton days?”

“And Willie Nelson days, and that’s just the first week.” I confided, “Mr. Nelson was a bit fried.”

“I’m sorry.” Sam sounded genuinely sympathetic.

“The outfit was okay, though, in comparison. How did you get away with wearing your own jeans and shoes while Ms. Lottie sewed me into a circle skirt? Only your hair got caught in the time machine.”

“Yeah.” He laughed, putting one hand through his damp waves. “I’ve been doing this awhile. I know what Ms. Lottie will put up with and what she won’t. The real question is, how did you snag so many days a week of work so soon after you started?” He lowered his guitar to rest on the toe of his shoe and spun it as he said, trying to sound casual, “Your granddad must have a lot of sway.”

“Somebody at the casting company owed him a favor,” I acknowledged. “But he doesn’t have any real clout in Nashville. If he did, everybody in my family would have had a recording contract years ago.” I shifted my fiddle case to my other hand and gazed impatiently at the parking lot like I had something to do tonight besides watch television with a seventy-year-old man and hate myself. “Why were you waiting for me?”

“Oh.” He swallowed. “I just wanted to apologize for all the drama between my dad and me.”

“Don’t worry about it.” I did worry about it, and I wanted to know more, but I waved the drama away with one hand. “I was playing at the very same place in the food court on Tuesday when I got into it myself with Elvis.”

“Oh, man, they stuck you with Elvis, too? Who didn’t they give you to? Was he a prick to you?”

“You could say that.” I decided not to inform Sam about my night of intense anxiety or the fact that in my mind, Elvis had caused me to become a homeless prostitute. “Anyway, maybe there’s something about standing between Baskin-Robbins and McDonald’s that drives us all batty and makes us turn on each other. In high school I knew groups like this were playing around town. I might have passed Loretta Lynn once or twice on my way to shop for shoes, but I never pictured myself actually having this job. And I sure never knew the concert in the food court turns into a reality show. They should advertise it. People would come to the mall just for that.”

“We musicians are impossible,” he said in a dead-on imitation of Ms. Lottie.

I almost laughed. Almost. I opened my mouth, but all that came out was a short noise. I did want him to know how funny I thought he was, so I said dryly, “You sound just like her.”

“Ms. Lottie is full of wisdom,” he said. “She used to do makeup and costumes for the Grand Ole Opry, and once upon a time she was married to a record company executive.”

“I guess she doesn’t have the sway to get anybody a contract, either,” I said. “Everybody in this town knows somebody who was Somebody with a capital S at some point.” When he didn’t say anything, I finished with a zinger that reflected what I’d suspected when he mentioned my granddad. “If she had any clout, you would have used her by now.”

He lifted his chin and turned his head, as if he couldn’t see me clearly, and looking at me with the other eye might help. “Why does that bother you?” he asked. “Wouldn’t you do anything to get a recording contract?”

“No,” I said too loudly. My voice echoed against the flat, blank concrete walls of the mall. “Absolutely not. I wouldn’t use somebody.”

His dark eyes widened in surprise—which surprised me in turn. Though I’d walked around the mall with him for hours, I hadn’t had the chance to watch him much. He’d stood on the other side of his father most of the time. Only now was I noticing how expressive his eyes were, and how tall he was, and how young he seemed all of a sudden, like he hadn’t been tall for long and he wasn’t yet used to his own height.

But what he said next surprised me more than anything else he’d said or done. “I am so disappointed you feel that way, because I wanted to use you.”

He uttered this with such confidence that I thought his innuendo was intentional. And despite the fact that I did not—did not—want to be used, chill bumps popped up on my arms in the hot sun.

His eyes grew even wider. “That’s not what I meant.” He closed his eyes and cringed. “God, what else can I say to embarrass the f**k out of myself?”

He’d teased me that afternoon, but this time I could tell his discomfort was sincere. And it was adorable. I wanted to hug him and help him out of it.

I couldn’t, though. I stood paralyzed in front of him, letting him flail as if I enjoyed watching it.

With a final tortured look at me, he burst out, “When I first met you, I wasn’t sure how old you were. It’s hard to tell whether somebody is thirteen or thirty without seeing what they’re wearing.”

Perplexed, I asked, “How old am I?”

“Eighteen, like me. Please, God, say you’re eighteen like me.”

He sounded so desperate that I repeated automatically, “I’m eighteen like you.”

“And I’m so glad,” he rushed on, “because I didn’t figure a thirty-year-old woman would be interested in my band.” He looked around the empty loading dock and over both shoulders at the parking lot like somebody might be crouching behind the cars, listening in. “I couldn’t say anything when my dad was around. I mean . . .” He rolled his eyes at his own words, just as he’d done several times that day. I got the impression that his mouth moved faster than his brain. He seemed to blurt out a lot of things before his brain caught up. “My dad knows about my band. It’s not a secret. But he doesn’t want me to pursue music as a career because he wasn’t successful and therefore there’s no way I could be successful either, get it? My only musical activity that gets his approval is backing up his loser impersonation job.”

“Got it.” I didn’t, exactly, but I wanted to hear the rest.

He talked fast. “So I have this parentally acknowledged and yet discouraged band that plays country and rockabilly. Some Cash, actually. Alan Jackson. Zac Brown.”

“Michael Jackson?” I ventured.

He grinned and opened his hands, forgetting he was balancing his guitar on his foot. He snatched it up before it touched the concrete ramp. “See,” he said, “I knew you would get it.”

I flushed with pleasure, basking in the glow of his approval.

“Yes,” he went on, “the Johnny Cash songs do have a tendency to morph into Michael Jackson’s funky deep cuts, and the Zac Brown will sometimes give way to Prince. There might be some Chaka Khan thrown in. . . .” He slowed, less sure of himself as he saw my skeptical expression. “And some Justin Bieber for irony, and maybe a little Ke$ha. Look.”

He stepped closer and stooped so that he looked straight into my eyes. I got the feeling he’d done this before. Maybe he’d never asked a punky fiddle player to come see his band, but he’d persuaded plenty of girls to follow along with his outlandish schemes. In his words I could hear the echo of every other time he’d done this to every other girl since he was a blond kid.

“A good song is a good song,” he said. “You know that. The most important thing is the unrelenting beat. We’re a dance band, a crazy party band, emo with a side of redneck. So far people seem to like us, but we’ve only played our friends’ parties and a street festival and my mom’s cousin’s retirement party, and then it’s a long story but there are a lot of immigrants from Laos living south of town and we were fortunate enough to get on the Lao wedding circuit. But tonight we have a gig.” Remembering to secure his guitar this time, he opened only two fingers of that hand and all the fingers of his other hand as he said gig.

“A gig,” I repeated, imitating him by opening my own hand, not the one holding my fiddle case.

“Yes,” he exclaimed, delighted that I was mocking him, “and it’s at a bar!”

“A bar!” I echoed, trying hard not to laugh at the ecstatic expression on his face. He was excited about this gig. He wanted me to come see him play. And I couldn’t, because I was grounded—at least, as grounded as a legal adult could be. “Good luck!” I stepped past him.