Sam pulled to a stop in front of my granddad’s hill of a front yard. I hoped I could just bail out of the truck. No such luck. Sam wasn’t done with me. He turned off the ignition and placed one hand on my knee.
“Here’s what I don’t understand,” he said. “Your parents put you and your sister on the bluegrass circuit and tried to get you a deal. They got one for your sister, and they kind of gave up on you.”
No, that wasn’t right. I clarified it for him. “They totally gave up on me.”
Without lifting his hand, he shifted his whole body toward me. The soft light from the porch touched his hair but left his eyes in darkness as he asked, “Why have you given up on you?”
“Because they did,” I said shortly. “Everybody did.”
“You are part of everybody,” he pointed out. “As long as you have faith in yourself, you still have someone’s support.”
He sounded like the tail end of a TV gospel show, or a fortune cookie. “That is cockamamy.”
He squeezed my knee. “You have my support.”
Done with him, I knocked his hand away. “Of course you’re going to say that. You want me in your band.”
“Why would I want you in my band if you weren’t good?” he protested. “I’m not operating a charity mission here. You are in my band. Our band. You heard how good we sound together. No professional musician would walk away from that.”
“I guess I’m not as professional as you thought.” I opened my door, slid out of the truck, and waited for him to slide out, too, so I could retrieve my fiddle.
He stared across the seat at me. I still couldn’t see his shadowed eyes, but I could read the outrage on his parted lips. I thought he might refuse to move, holding my fiddle hostage.
Slowly he slid out and even bent the seat forward for me. But as I reached in for my case, he said, “This has to be about what Charlotte said to you. There’s no way you would turn this gig down unless you were mad at me. Come on, Bailey. You have to be bigger than that.”
Jerking my case free, I shoved the seat back into place and slammed the door, then backed a few paces to stand on the concrete staircase up the hill. “I have to be bigger than that?” I shouted at him over the roof of the cab. “You should have been bigger than that when you decided to make out with both of us. Unlike you, I don’t take just any gig I’m offered.” I whirled around, the thin skirt of my dress failing to make as dramatic an exit as my heavy circle skirt that afternoon. I jogged up the stairs.
As I fished the key out of my purse and opened the front door, all my attention was on Sam’s truck behind me. I listened for him to rev the engine and tear off down the street, but he didn’t. Maybe he wasn’t as mad as he’d seemed. He’d only feigned anger to try to get what he wanted, but he didn’t care as much about having me in his band as he’d claimed. Tomorrow night he’d be feeling up another fiddle player in the parking deck.
More likely, he had no place for negativity because he was too busy thinking, plotting out how to manipulate me next. I’d met Sam half a day ago, but already I knew when he wasn’t done with me.
I closed the door behind me. Only then did Sam’s truck start and move down the street.
As the noise faded, my alarm grew. I’d been so focused on Sam that I’d completely forgotten about my granddad. All the lights were on in the living-room-turned-showroom with shiny finished instruments hanging in rows from the ceiling. I was totally exposed with my bra straps showing—my shrug must have been behind Sam’s seat, crushed under two guitar cases—and I was holding my forbidden fiddle. I’d just taken great pains to walk away from the dangerous lure of my life’s goal, only to get busted.
But as I paused and listened, I heard my granddad snoring softly in his bedroom. I hadn’t asked him what my curfew was, if I had one, but it was way past midnight and he wasn’t waiting up for me.
I slipped off my boots at the bottom of the stairs so I wouldn’t wake him with my clomping. Then I walked into the kitchen and opened the pantry. My grandmother’s mason jars were still there, though she hadn’t been alive to can tomatoes from the garden in ten years. I unscrewed the lid of one, opened my fiddle case to extract my share of the night’s wages, and plopped the bills inside, where they unrolled and expanded against the glass. It seemed like a fittingly redneck place to keep the money from a rockabilly band.
I lugged my boots and fiddle and the jar to the top of the stairs. In my room, I slid the jar onto the dresser, collapsed on the bed, and stared at the money. It was so much money. I’d made it all from playing my fiddle for two hours. I couldn’t quite believe it.
Yet Julie with her high-powered contract made that much money every second.
I stayed in that strange in-between place for a long time, wanting to be ecstatic that I was a professional musician, not wanting to be jealous of Julie, saddened all over again that the two always walked hand in hand. I thought about hiding the jar in a drawer so I wouldn’t see it constantly and feel that wash of jealousy over and over again. But the sense of accomplishment was too good and too strong. When I received my first paycheck from the mall next week, I could deposit it in my bank account, but I knew I would cash it and stow it in the mason jar like an idiot hiding money in the mattress, just so I could see it.
And I knew that, angry as I was at Sam, and much as he probably hated me right now, we would be playing with each other again tomorrow.
Pulling my music notebook and colored pencils from my purse, and rubbing my eyes to my heart’s content, I sat down at the desk and wrote a song about that.
8
The next afternoon, my granddad and I rocked in chairs on his front porch, lazily playing our instruments. He strummed along with me, agreeing to whatever sleepy oldie popped into my head, while I tried to enjoy the sound of my fiddle, the touch of the bow against the strings, the way those sounds seemed like a natural accompaniment to a breezy summer day.
I tried and failed. I played songs as familiar to me as my own fingers, but different possibilities cropped up stubbornly in my mind, places these tunes were never intended to go. I could add a seventh to the bass line in my head. I could slide from a bluegrass tune straight into a startlingly similar R & B standard. I was awake and alert and out of my comfort zone. Sam had done this to me.
“Phone’s ringing,” my granddad said.
I stopped fiddling and listened and sure enough heard my Alison Krauss ringtone, faintly. At least my granddad wasn’t in danger of losing his hearing anytime soon.