“He literally got down on his knees and begged me to be in his band. I’m sure he’ll do this to you, too, at some point, if he hasn’t already. In public. When he did it to me in the football locker room, I said yes. And now . . . God, we’re all fighting like cats and dogs, but I can’t imagine not playing in this band. I mean, I loved playing in my brother’s band. But the bar last night had an energy, you know?”
“I think that was from the bachelorette party.”
He eyed me like he didn’t believe me, waiting for me to admit the truth.
After a long pause, I admitted, “Fine. I felt it, too.”
Watching me over the rim of his glass, he drank the rest of his tea, then glanced at his watch. “It’s time for Sam to wrap up. I have a family reunion to get to.”
“Oooh,” I said. “Good food?”
“You got that right.” He stood as carefully as he’d sat, stirring not a single wave in my tea. “Do you want me to tell him you’re up here?”
Applause broke out below us. Sam had ended a song. He said a brief thank-you and started the next tune as if impatient with the crowd’s response. All he wanted to do was play some more.
I said, “Yes.”
Ace returned to his post next to Sam, and I passed another quarter hour there by myself, listening to Sam’s voice, contemplating how little he needed me and how long it would take him to realize that whatever I contributed to his band wasn’t worth the trouble. Finally he nodded to the crowd and started to scrape and stack the money from his open guitar case into his pockets. Ace glanced up at me once more. They both disappeared under the deck where I was sitting.
I made my way back down through the building and onto the sidewalk, where Sam was waiting for me.
“Hey,” he said, half smiling.
“Hey,” I said.
He nodded to my fiddle case. “Why didn’t you come play with me?” Immediately he rolled his eyes at himself. “That’s not what I meant.”
I didn’t point out that if he was constantly hearing double entendres in his own words, he had a dirtier mind than he wanted to let on. Sam having a dirty mind was okay with me. It was adorable, actually, as long as his mind was on me. “You didn’t really want me to play with you. You were a soloist today.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t have to be. I always like company. I always like your company.” He leaned down and, before I could protest or remind him I was still mad at him, kissed my cheek. “You look beautiful.”
I smiled demurely and said, “Thank you.”
“I hope you’re not planning on wearing that to the gig tonight, though. You look like L.A., not Nashville. Where are you parked?”
Without a word, I pointed up the street toward both our cars. I didn’t really think he assumed I was playing with him tonight. He just hoped so. He thought that in saying it, it might come true. Now that I hadn’t protested what he said, he would use that against me later. And I didn’t care. His arguments worked on me only if I let them.
Seeming to sense that he’d overstepped his bounds, he eyed me as we moseyed up the sidewalk. “Ace said you talked a few minutes ago. He said you might play with us after all.”
“Hm,” I said noncommittally.
“Charlotte said she called you, and that conversation didn’t go over as well.”
“Hm,” I said again, finally relaxing my hauteur to glance over at him. Beads of sweat balanced at his hairline. To make him sweat a little longer, I changed the subject. “Charlotte said you wear your heart on your sleeve.”
He craned his neck to peer down his arm and lifted his sleeve up with the other hand as if to get a better look.
“You sang all those songs this afternoon with such emotion.”
“Thanks,” he said, as though I’d complimented him on his confident stage presence or the mellow tone of his voice, something he’d worked on.
“I was confused by that,” I said. “Those songs were about getting married. Getting divorced. Stuff that older people have been through and you haven’t. Take ‘Remember When,’ for instance.”
He looked surprised. “You were listening that long?”
I brushed his question off. “What were you thinking about when you sang that? You said last night that you had to be in the right mind-set to sing. I didn’t think you were saying that just to sneak a kiss.”
“Hm,” he murmured, imitating me. The longer I was around him, the smarter I was afraid he was. I’d thought I was making him sweat a little, but it might have been the other way around.
“When you sang Alan Jackson,” I went on, “you weren’t remembering getting married, obviously, or having kids.”
A crowd blocked the sidewalk ahead. They were listening to a banjo player and a guitarist who stood on the front steps of a saloon, playing a mini-set to entice people inside. Automatically, Sam took my elbow as I stepped from the curb down to the street in my high heels, but he was looking back over his shoulder at the musicians. The banjo player gave him a little nod.
Supporting me as I stepped back up on the sidewalk, Sam said, “I guess I was thinking about Alan Jackson himself. Being him. You know, he dropped out of Newnan High School south of Atlanta and married his high school sweetheart. His wife was working as an airline stewardess when she saw Glen Campbell and gave him Jackson’s demo tape, which is truly how Jackson got his start: through luck and a lover.”
“Right.” I knew this story. Everybody in Nashville did. It was why we dreamed of playing the bars on Broadway, where a country legend might drop in and change our lives with one phone call. It was why my parents had instructed me to share the stage with anyone who asked, on the off chance it might be Shania Twain.
“Jackson dragged his wife to Nashville and eventually made it as a country star,” Sam said. “So when I sing his song, I’m thinking about the fact that they fell in love with each other way before he was famous. How hard it was for them at first, and how easy it is now. What a relief it must be that they can pay for their kids to go to college instead of crossing their fingers that their kids are smart enough, or good enough at music, to get a scholarship.”
“So you think he wrote the song about his real life?” I asked.
“I don’t know where else it would come from. Some of the details aren’t right, though. In the song, they aren’t getting along, but then they have kids and everything’s all right again. In real life, having a baby doesn’t solve anything. It just causes more problems.” He sounded so high-and-mighty that I was about to ask him exactly how much he’d been watching those reality TV shows about teen pregnancy when he went on, “If you’re an alcoholic, the last thing you should do is get your wife pregnant. You should go to rehab instead. Let your wife make a clean break and leave you. Don’t try to charm her back to you. She can live happily ever after and have a baby with someone else. The baby won’t know the difference. He’ll probably be a lot better off.”