“Hey, sweetie,” my mom said. “Behaving yourself?”
“Yes, ma’am, I’m five years old and I’m behaving myself.”
“If you feel you’re being treated that way, maybe you should ask yourself why.” My mother’s voice thinned out, pitching into the same guilt trips and threats she’d laid on me for a year. I wasn’t listening anymore. I didn’t need to. I knew what she’d say because I’d heard it a million times, and because, nauseatingly, I was exactly like her.
I’d inherited her high-strung anxiety about success, along with my dad’s easygoing willingness to practice his music dogmatically—the terrible combination that had made me a proficient has-been before I was old enough to vote. Julie was unlike either of them. She loved music, she wanted to be successful, and she’d enjoyed the bluegrass festivals that had made up our childhood. But privately to me, she often said she longed to quit it all so she could go to the movies with her friends on Friday night, or get a job at the Gap. In short, she was the only one in the family who was normal. That’s probably what the record company saw in her when they tapped her (and not me) to become famous.
When my mom took a breath, I asked, “May I please speak with Julie?”
“Julie is not ready to speak with you.”
“She doesn’t want to talk to me, or you won’t give her the phone?”
“She’s sitting right here, shaking her head no.”
I believed it. For the past year, every night that Julie had been out of town, I’d called her around ten. But she’d told me the night of my accident that she wasn’t speaking to me anymore. Last night, for the first time, she hadn’t answered when I called.
“Here’s your father,” my mom said. They murmured in the background. Then my dad said brightly, “I miss you, Bay.”
My stomach twisted into a knot, my nose tickled, my eyes watered, and suddenly I was sobbing silently, turning my mouth away from the receiver so I didn’t gasp in my dad’s ear.
“Bay?” he prompted me.
I couldn’t talk to him, but I didn’t want to hang up on him, so I leaned through the doorway and stretched the spiral cord to hold out the receiver in the direction of my granddad.
He jumped up from his chair, surprisingly spry for an old guy, and took the phone from me. As I walked into the living room to grab my fiddle case and escape up the stairs, I heard him saying, “Mack, I think she’s really tired right now. I worked her pretty hard around the shop today . . . .”
I closed myself in the bedroom I was using and dealt with my feelings the way I had for a year. I rummaged in my purse, pulled out my now-battered notebook printed inside with music staffs rather than blue lines—my fifth notebook since I’d started over without Julie—and wrote a song. This one was about crying suddenly, unable to speak on the phone, and afterward wondering why. As always, I wasn’t so sure about the words, and I would continue to tinker with them, but I was dead sure about the melody and the crazy chords that held it up like pillars under a highway.
As I considered the song, playing it over in my mind, I decorated the edges of the pages in doodles of hearts and flowers, shading them with delicate strokes in colored pencil. I’d never had the urge to do that in the notebooks I’d filled with songs as a child. I’d played those tunes with Julie. I’d gotten her to sing them with me when they weren’t even done so I could hear where I was going. But for these new notebooks, I had nobody to play with. I might spend a lifetime as an anonymous costumed fiddle player at the mall and never hear my own compositions—not in real life. The drawings of hearts and flowers were a strange compulsion. I felt better when I added them, as if they were a consolation prize, a sympathy card after a loss.
It wasn’t until I rolled into bed that I realized my granddad had been half-right when he made an excuse for me over the phone to my dad, saying I was tired because I’d worked hard. I was so upset with my mom and Julie and myself that my dad’s kindness had been too much of a shock. But I probably wouldn’t have reacted that way if I hadn’t had such a hard day at work with Elvis.
I was afraid Elvis would turn me in for ruining “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” I suspected he wouldn’t dare. Musician jobs were too hard to come by in Nashville, which was chock-full of wannabe’s. Elvis would prefer to fly under the radar. He wouldn’t want to cause a stir at the casting office by complaining about a coworker.
Even if he did, it would be his word against mine. My boss would believe him, though, because he’d worked in the tribute band longer. I would be fired. My granddad would be disgraced because he’d put in a good word for me and I’d let him down. He would report my failure to my parents. They would carry through on their threat to withhold my college tuition. For the rest of the summer I would spend not just the mornings but the afternoons, too, helping my granddad in his shop, sanding guitars and sweeping up wood shavings as if they were pieces of my own soul that had sloughed off my body and fallen onto the floor.
Or, if my parents were cutting me off anyway, I could buy a bus ticket to L.A. Wasn’t that where runaways went? Out there, passersby probably didn’t even throw a dollar to rock guitarists on the street, but a bluegrass musician from Nashville might be a novelty. Playing my fiddle would keep me out of prostitution for a whole day before I had to pawn it.
Or I could be proactive and tell on Elvis before he told on me. He was the guilty one, after all. I had to keep reminding myself of this. He was the one who’d made lewd comments. I’d only played in the wrong key in response.
The next afternoon, I parked in the mall’s vast lot, walked around to one of the loading docks, and swung through the employee door of what used to be a Borders bookstore. My plan was to let Ms. Lottie make me up like a demure 1950s teenager, then march into the casting office and file my complaint against Elvis. I’d rehearsed my speech in my head so many times that I’d memorized it. And I’d strategized that I should complain in the squeaky-clean ponytail wig Ms. Lottie pinned on me rather than my normal bad-ass hairdo, so my boss would more likely believe me.
The bookstore was too big to be this empty, books long gone. Only a few comfy chairs and a couch remained where the café used to be. Now it was a lounge area for musicians to tune their instruments and wait for the rest of their group. But nobody had their instruments out today. Willie Nelson watched and occasionally interjected a comment while Elvis argued with Dolly Parton. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Elvis’s tone and body language were a lot like what he’d used on me the day before. Good—at least I knew he wasn’t really a king around here. I likely wasn’t the only fiddle player who’d ever pissed him off.