Dirty Little Secret (21 page)

Between bites I asked, “Is there something going on between Ace and Charlotte?”

He seemed surprised. “Not that I know of. Why?”

“They rode to the gig together last night. I got the impression they’re used to doing that.”

He shrugged. “She doesn’t have a car. He can have any car he wants on loan, anytime. They can get her whole drum set in the back of a minivan. My truck bed is open. We couldn’t stop anywhere if we wanted to. We’d be in trouble if it rained.” He sipped his tea, eyeing me over the rim of the glass. “Do
you
think there’s something going on between them?”

“I think Ace has a thing for Charlotte, and Charlotte has a thing for you.”

He grimaced. “I don’t want to hear it.”

I nodded slowly, thinking about the near-date we were on, and everything Charlotte had warned me about. “I hear you’ve had fifty-two girlfriends in the past year.”

He rolled his eyes. “I wish people would stop saying that. I don’t know who started it, but it’s an exaggeration. I doubt I’ve dated half that.”

“So, more like twenty-six?” I echoed Ace.

Sam shrugged noncommittally, then busied himself with scraping the last forkfuls of food off his plate. He changed the subject to a new song we’d heard on the country station as we drove down here . . . and in midsentence a tune came to me, and lyrics using the trope of the twenty-six girlfriends. I pulled my notebook out of my purse. Angling it carefully so he couldn’t see the staffs, but holding my body casually enough that I hoped I didn’t look like I was trying to hide anything, I scribbled this idea. The illustrations in colored pencil would have to come later. “Just writing something down,” I said defensively when he spoke, though I hadn’t registered what he’d said.

“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 sober
er
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.”

Just a few miles outside the city, my parents’ neighborhood was a green and gorgeous series of rolling hills and small farms, a stark contrast to the neon lights of Broadway. I’d always loved it here. After being away for a week, I still thought it was beautiful, but the steam hanging in the air seemed sinister. As we passed, I didn’t point out the pond Toby had sunk his car in.

Sam’s truck crunched to a stop on the gravel driveway, in front of the newish farmhouse built to look like an oldish farmhouse. As I stepped out, something seemed very wrong, like I was visiting my deserted house again after the zombie apocalypse. Scanning the acres of pasture around us, I realized what the difference was. “My parents weren’t going to be here much this year, so they sold all the animals.” What had been a cacophony of off-key animal sounds before was now dead silence, save for the hot wind in the trees and the ominous dinging of the wind chimes hanging from the porch ceiling. Wind chimes were the bane of my existence because they weren’t
tuned to actual notes. I had told my parents this and they had left the chimes up.

I fished my keys from my purse and climbed the wooden steps. “Wave to the security camera,” I told Sam behind me. I flashed a hand toward the lens hidden in one upper corner of the porch. “I want them to know I know they know I’m here. God forbid they catch me bringing a boy over here to adjust my wardrobe.”

“That is ridiculous,” Sam said, following me through the kitchen. “I am Grandpa-approved.”

It wasn’t until I crossed the den that I realized what a bad idea this had been. Sam was going to find out about Julie’s success sooner or later. Then our relationship, such as it was, would be over. I’d been hoping it would happen later rather than sooner. But the trappings of Julie’s upcoming career were everywhere. On the sofa tables sat framed photos of country megastars hugging her after she’d opened concerts for them. My mom had even framed the program from her biggest concert so far, as if to say,
I am so proud! My baby got third billing!
My tension mounted until I almost wished Sam would come to the realization that I’d been lying to him, and we could get the awful breakup over with before we were ever really together.

He didn’t seem to see the evidence against me, however. He saw photos of
me
with the stars at bluegrass festivals. As we mounted the stairs, he paused at a picture of me posing with my fiddle, decked out in cowgirl hat and shirt and boots and square-dancing skirt, age five.

“Awww,” he said, as though I’d been the most adorable child alive. For the hundredth time in a little over a day, my heart opened for him.

I’d told him to wave to the camera so my parents would know our visit was innocent. I’d implied to him that of
course
it was
innocent and I never expected anything else to happen between us. But I wished he’d argued with me or at least acted hurt. I walked more slowly than usual up the stairs, making sure he caught up with me, wishing he would “accidentally” bump into me. I listened for his breathing behind me, so focused on his whereabouts that I hardly noticed my own until I’d reached my room. It was silly, but I knew that for the next few nights I would have fantasies about Sam and me getting too close for comfort on that carpeted stairway.

I was hyperaware of what he would see when he walked behind me into my room, but I shouldn’t have worried. Except for Julie, I had no secrets from him. My room looked exactly as it should, with the evidence of bluegrass festivals—posters, trophies, and photos—cluttering the room, but it all stopped this time last year. It was like my life had been put on pause.

“You can have a seat,” I said casually, gesturing to my desk chair, my comfy reading chair in the corner, and my bed. I walked into my closet and rifled through the remaining dress bags, pulling out an outfit that said
I am the fiddler in a rockabilly band
or possibly
I am insane
. I walked back into the room to show it to Sam.

Instead of sitting in a chair or lounging across my bed like a too-forward boy in a teen movie, he still stood awkwardly with his arms crossed exactly where I’d left him in the middle of the room. I got this vibe from Sam sometimes: deep down he was a gentleman, but he kept getting confounded by his striking looks. Women must throw themselves at him. It was possible the twenty-six girlfriends hadn’t been his fault.

For a moment he stared at the dress I was holding up as if he didn’t really see it and he’d been thinking hard about something else. He blinked. “Oh. Yeah, that’s okay. May I look?”

After doing a quick mental inventory of my closet and finding nothing embarrassing either way—no dolls that looked like I was still taking care of them and laying them down to sleep on their shelves at night, but also no pot pipes—I swept my arm in that direction:
Be my guest
. The closet wasn’t big enough for both of us to stand in. I walked over to my desk and looked through the junk mail I hadn’t bothered to read the weekend I got in so much trouble.

Because I was about to enter college, theoretically, I received a lot of catalogs trying to sell me college clothes and college bedroom sets. I flipped through one without picking it up from the desk, like it had nothing to do with me. Nice Girls in the photos towed pallets of the contents of their new dorm rooms, all matching in a pink flowered theme or a purple butterfly theme, across the quad. Nice Boys waved to them from the vaulted doorways of what were supposed to be dorms but looked like the original home of the Grand Ole Opry, the Ryman Auditorium, which had started life as a church.

“This,” Sam called. He held up a shirt Julie had given me as a joke, printed with a cowboy boot and “NashVegas” in loopy letters, all outlined in sequins.