“Bailey.” He put his hand on my shoulder. Looking up from my notebook for the first time, I realized the restaurant crowd had thinned. He was holding a to-go box like he’d had time to go all the way through the buffet line again.
“Still hungry?” I laughed. Quickly I flipped my notebook closed and slipped it into my purse.
“I promised my mom I’d pick her up some dinner.” When we got back in the truck, he handed me the foam box to balance on my bare knees. “I could tell she felt down when she went in to work today. She’s worked a month straight at the car plant without a day off.”
“What?” I exclaimed. “Why?”
“They have a lot of orders. The opposite problem is that they get laid off because they don’t have enough orders. This is hard, but trust me, it’s better.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “I thought auto workers had unions to protect them from that kind of thing.”
“They have unions up north, in Detroit. But the car factories moved to the South to get away from the unions. Maybe the workers don’t need them anymore. I mean, yeah, my mom has to work all the time, but she gets paid for it. She gets time and a half and sometimes double time, and I guarantee you no hourly worker in Tennessee has ever seen base pay like this before.”
He slowed down and waved to the uniformed man in a guardhouse, who grinned. He parked in an open space on the fringe of the largest parking lot I’d ever seen. The asphalt gave off waves of heat and scent as we hiked across the lot toward the vast factory building. Out front, workers in jeans and uniform polo shirts smoked cigarettes or played peekaboo with visiting toddlers or accepted dinner from family members. As we approached, a tiny, pretty blond lady who looked nothing like Sam left her chat with a group of workers and came toward him with her arms out.
He hugged her without embarrassment and kept his arm around her as he pointed her toward me. “Mom, this is Bailey Wright.”
“Oh! Very nice to meet you.” She shook my hand. Her eyes drifted to the right and took in my asymmetrical haircut. Immediately she turned back to Sam. I knew what she was thinking. She wanted to be nice, but she saw no need to invest time in getting to know me, because I would be replaced next week. I was Girlfriend Twenty-seven.
“You know that job your father wanted you to get?” she asked him.
The smile never left Sam’s lips, but he wasn’t smiling with his eyes anymore. “Yeah, I know that job my father wanted me to get.”
“Jimmy says he has an opening for you on the loading dock, but you have to come in for an interview tomorrow or Tuesday. He wouldn’t grill you or anything. The interview just has to be down on paper. The Japanese want things done a certain way. It’s not like a Ford plant.”
Still smiling, Sam nodded. “I have something else to do tomorrow and Tuesday and every other day Jimmy is available to interview me.”
His mom gave him a warning look. “You have to do something this summer, Sam. Your father thinks this job would be great experience when you switch your major from music to engineering.” She grinned, a joke, and showed him her crossed fingers.
“If my father thinks working on a loading dock would be such great experience,” Sam growled, and I took a step back because I’d never heard this angry tone from him before, “my father should come interview with Jimmy tomorrow or Tuesday. I’ll bet he’s not busy.”
His mom looked hurt, like he’d insulted her as well as Mr. Hardiman. Her gaze slid to me, then back to Sam. “Seriously, Sam. He’s going to make you get a job or get out. This wouldn’t have anything to do with the music career you’re not supposed to be pursuing, would it?”
Sam took a deep breath through his nose and let it out slowly. Then he leaned down, kissed her cheek, and took the box of food from me to hand to her. “There’s banana pudding.”
“Oh, baby!” she exclaimed. “Bless your heart! Thank you, Sam.”
He gave her a halfhearted wave as he turned, and we crossed the parking lot to his truck again. I knew he was in a terrible mood because he went a whole two minutes without saying anything, which was probably a record for him.
We were through the gate, down the road, and back on the interstate toward Nashville before he burst out, “She’s as high as she can go in the factory without a college degree. In fact, they’ve told her they’ll pay for her to go to college. But there’s no way she could do that, working like she does. She’s exhausted. She’d have to quit temporarily. There’s no guarantee the job would be waiting for her when she got back. My dad would have to get a real job.” He paused. “Which might be good. He wouldn’t get to play gigs for a living, but he wouldn’t get to drink like he does, either.”
I nodded. He was talking more to himself than to me. I stayed quiet and watched the emotions pass across his face.
“Maybe it will be good for my parents when I go to Vandy in August and move out of the house,” he said. “Maybe I’ve been taking up some of the slack for both of them. I’ve always thought I was helping them out, but I’ve really just been the glue holding them together when they would have been better off apart all along.”
I nodded, but I had no idea. My parents got along great. They were of one mind when they ditched me.
Sam ran one hand back through his dark waves. “My mom was never able to make him go to rehab, but she dragged us all into counseling. My reaction to everything the counselors said was ‘No way.’ I did not make excuses for my dad. I did not help my dad hide his drinking. Which is exactly what they said my reaction would be. I thought they were a bunch of smart-asses at the time. But now my dad is soberer by a long shot, and still not sober. At eighteen you can see over some walls into other rooms, and you start to wonder whether the adults were right all along. It’s disorienting.”
“Does that mean you’re going to interview with Jimmy for that loading dock job?”
He laughed then. The dark cloud around him lifted. He was happy-go-lucky Sam again, driving his truck through a steamy June evening, into a Tennessee sunset. “I guess we’ll swing by your granddad’s house now so you can change.”
“You know what?” I was afraid to go back. My granddad had let me out of the house with the understanding that I would be with Sam, who seemed to be my carte blanche. I didn’t want to push my luck by going back to switch from an L.A. to a Nashville outfit, then coming up with an excuse for the wardrobe change. I hadn’t forgotten his suspicious look at me that afternoon when I walked out with my fiddle. “Since we’re on this side of town, let’s just pop into my parents’ house. It’s the mother lode of hokey Nashville-wear.”