I joined in, too, doing my part for the intro, bowing the lush melody in the key of D-sharp instead of D. It took a lot of concentration for me to sound this bad, because I had a sensitive ear. I made sure my fiddle line was the loveliest tune the crowd had ever heard. My instrument had a mellow tone. My fingers on the strings created a wide vibrato that only seemed easy. It just so happened that every note I played was a half step up from the key Elvis and Mr. Crabtree were playing in.
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.”