Dirty Little Secret (28 page)

He laughed, a pale echo of his musical laughter from the rest of the days I’d known him. “No, he stays put. My mom makes him go to a motel.”

I took a deep breath. “I’m parked in front of your house, I think. Or I’m about to get arrested for staking out the wrong guy.”

I watched his house—or the house I was sitting in front of, anyway. The blinds opened in a second-story window.

“I see you,” he said somberly.

“Well.” Maybe I should have given up on the night and driven away. Instead I said, “I was hoping you might come out with me. I have something I want to show you.”

“Give me ten.” He hung up.

In seven, he was locking the side door and running past his truck, down the driveway. When he was still several paces away, I noticed he was wearing his T-shirt from two nights before, the one I’d cartooned on with Charlotte’s marker. I wasn’t sure whether the marker was especially permanent or he’d washed the shirt carefully, but his heart was still on his sleeve.

He got into my car with his usual bluster, smelling of toothpaste and soap and shampoo, his hair hanging in damp waves as on the first day I’d met him, when he’d played an old Scottish tune in the sun. But nothing else about him was as usual. He didn’t ask where I was taking him. He didn’t make small talk. He sank down in the seat like he wasn’t quite awake and stared stonily in front of him.

Until I drove down the exit ramp to the Grand Ole Opry. Then he sat up.

I found a spot in the crowded parking lot. “Do you have an umbrella?” was the first thing he said the whole trip. As we slammed the car doors and followed the crowd toward the theater, the sky rumbled overhead, and violently pink clouds raced across the twilit sky.

“No,” I said, not that I cared. “Five Feet High and Rising” started playing in my head.

When it was my turn at the box office, I asked for two tickets, half hoping they would be sold out and I wouldn’t be able to go through with my plan. I was dying to see Julie on the Grand Ole Opry stage, and then again, I dreaded it. And when Sam saw her, I wasn’t sure how he would react.

No such luck. Even during CMA week, the Grand Ole Opry wasn’t selling out on a Tuesday, when the headlining acts were middling stars and Julie was unknown.

While I was talking to the cashier, choosing seats, someone slipped my billfold out from under my elbow on the counter. I turned in alarm. When I saw it was just Sam, I continued my conversation until I came away from the window with tickets.

Sam held my billfold open, staring grimly at my driver’s license. At my real name.

He looked up at me, and the accusation in his eyes hurt.

He already knew I’d lied about my name. But I suppose seeing it on my license hit it home to him, like seeing Julie onstage tonight was going to hit it home to me that country music was her life, not mine.

Our seats were high in the large, steep auditorium. To know what was going on, we relied on one of the huge screens that focused on the star onstage. I could tell by the way Sam expressed no surprise at the show that he’d been here as often as I had over the years. The Grand Ole Opry was a theater production but also
a live radio show that had been ongoing and pretty much unchanged since the twenties: some old-fashioned commercials for potato chips and ice cream, an elderly man in a sequined cowboy getup telling jokes about his sex life, a musical act—often bluegrass rather than country—that had been an Opry staple for decades but never made it big, and finally a newbie the record companies were trying to promote, or a genuine star. Repeat four times for a two-hour show. Julie was the newbie for act three.

I thought the announcer would never stop reciting his commercial for hand salve—and then, before I was ready, Julie was walking onstage amid polite applause, wearing a fixed grin, her face turned purposefully toward the audience.

The thing that struck me about her was how beautiful she looked on the jumbo screen. With her face blown up the size of a Chevy, every imperfection in her face should have been noticeable, but she didn’t have any. Her skin was flawless, her lipstick glossy, her brilliant blue eyes outlined in smoky shadow, her blond curls shining in the spotlights. She might have been nervous, she might have sounded off, but the camera loved her, and she looked like a star.

But underneath the gorgeous hair and perfect makeup, I could tell she was terrified. Her easy smile when we used to play together, even onstage, had morphed into a tight one. Her hands moved robotically across the guitar strings. Normally she was good at using the whole stage so the audience didn’t get bored watching her. This time she stayed rooted to the lighter circle in the very center of the wooden floor, hauled here from the Grand Ole Opry’s original home, the Ryman Auditorium, and saved again after this new theater’s flood. She stood on it like it was her life raft in the vast sea of the empty, brightly lit stage, her backup musicians pushed to the edges and too far away to save her.

She played two songs, both insipid, the upbeat first one better than the slower follow-up. They were cute and they would get radio airplay, but the tunes weren’t catchy. The conceits in the lyrics I’d heard a hundred times. The upbeat one was about going away from home and missing her dog (first verse), her friends (second verse), and her family (third verse). The other was about her true love for her boyfriend (first verse), her parents (second verse), and God (third verse). Nobody would remember them in a year. She would be exactly as successful this week as the record company’s marketing efforts made her, coupled with whatever notoriety she could gain from being only sixteen. These songs wouldn’t help her.

The second song ended with a big buildup. Though I hadn’t heard it before, I could tell she was supposed to hit a money note. She took it down a fifth, like a spooked figure skater at the Olympics attempting a double axel rather than a triple. As the tune wrapped up, my self-absorbed thoughts assaulted me. I’d never wanted Julie to fail. But I did feel a bit self-righteous. If my family hadn’t shut me out, I might have prevented this fiasco by pointing out how crappy the songs were, or just by standing in the wings, supporting her, when she went onstage.

And I was bitter. Bitterness and I were old friends by now, but at the moment bitterness was trying to go down my bra in public. I had spent the last year so depressed that Julie got this opportunity when I didn’t, yet
this
was the upshot of it? It was an opportunity squandered, a year of bitterness over nothing at all.

Sam and I sat through the entire show without getting up, hardly moving. Neither of us laughed at the jokes. We were movie critics, sports writers, record company scouts, leaching all the joy out of watching a performance. And after the heat between us over the past few days, we each stayed in our own cold personal space, never touching.

Finally the show was over. The lights turned up. The audience en masse edged along the narrow rows and up the stairs to the exits. Only Sam and I stayed in the uncomfortable bench seats built to imitate the church pews in the Ryman, staring at the blank screen where Julie’s pretty face had been.

“What’d you think?” I asked.

He sighed. “I’m eaten up inside with jealousy. I don’t like myself very much right now.”

I felt him looking at me. I met his gaze. In his eyes I saw that he understood what I’d been going through for a year. Not that this helped us now.

“You think you could have done better than her,” I guessed.

“She was nervous,” he said diplomatically. “We want to think we wouldn’t be scared shitless if we ever got this opportunity, but we wouldn’t know for sure until we got here.”

I nodded. “You think her songs were duds.”
I
thought her songs were duds. Any second the music notebook in my purse would begin to glow, and we would see the light escaping around the edges of my purse’s leather flap.

“I can’t write songs,” he said, “so I’m in no position to judge.”

I wasn’t sure why I’d expected Sam to be honest with me, now that he and I had no plans for the future. But I was annoyed that he would flake out on me for the sake of politeness after days of brutal honesty. I baited him, “You think if you got a contract, you would make damn sure your songs were better than that.”

“Her songs are . . .” He paused and eyed me, searching his mind for a truthful adjective that wouldn’t offend me. “Cute. They have pop crossover potential.”

“But not blockbuster potential,” I mused.

He said nothing, letting his silence pass for inoffensive agreement.

“What she lacks in catchy songs, she might make up for in pure bubbly personality,” I thought out loud.

“If she works on her stage presence.” With a huff of impatience, Sam turned to me. “I’ll be honest with you, Bailey. I don’t know if I’m supposed to try to make you feel better about her chances, or worse.”

“That’s fair,” I said. “I don’t know, either.” I squinted at the faraway stage, into the wings where Julie had disappeared half an hour earlier. “Her handlers aren’t going to like this.”

“Oh, you’ve met her handlers?” Sam asked in surprise.

“Yeah.” I added bitterly, “And before you ask, no, I’m not going to tell her handlers about you, or the band, either.”

He chose to ignore that remark. “Are they good, like Carrie Underwood’s handlers, or do you get the feeling she’s going to be like one of the also-rans on the singing contest TV shows?”

Since he was keeping the conversation mature and unemotional, I tried to do the same. “I think they’re okay in terms of the advice they give her, but they don’t actually talk to her. They talk to my parents.” In turn, I would bet money that my mother was giving Julie the lecture of her life right now.
Don’t you want this? Didn’t your daddy and I give up our jobs and go on tour with you because you wanted this? You need to start acting like it.
On a normal night, Julie would call me in tears at ten o’clock, wishing for her old life back. I would talk her down, reminding her that this was what we’d both always wanted.

Suddenly I realized I was hanging on to the edge of the bench with a death grip, and my fingertips had gone numb. Taking a deep breath and making a conscious effort to relax, I saw that Sam and I were nearly alone in the auditorium. Only a few ushers laughed in the far corner, wondering how long they should give us before they kicked us out.

I turned to Sam. “So, I wanted to come clean with you and show you everything I know about my sister. Her first single is out today. She has enormous record company backing. She may or may not drop the ball. It’s too early to tell, I guess. And I am persona non grata. I bought these tickets myself.”

“Regardless, you could still use your connections to get us an audition with the record company if you swallowed your pride and asked.”

Oh, so he
wasn’t
going to play nice after all. Hurt and shocked and insulted, I told him, “I knew it was going to be like this from the moment I met you. I wanted to show you this, and I was hoping we could save whatever we had. But the bottom line is, you don’t want to be with me now, and I don’t want to be with you.”

“I want desperately to be with you,” he said quietly. “I just know that I would be angry with you every second of my life, and it wouldn’t work.”

I met his dark, worried gaze. “You wear your heart on your sleeve.” I reached out and touched the heart I’d drawn on the soft cotton of his T-shirt. My finger slipped under the material and stroked his warm skin, then pressed his hard biceps more firmly. His arm didn’t give.

The feeling started small, tingles of awareness around my fingertips where they touched him. The feeling raced up my arm and across my chest. I knew my face was flaming, and I tried to figure out why. We’d kissed, after all. He’d put his hands pretty much everywhere there was to put them. There was no reason for me to blush with my ears burning just because I was touching his arm.

But as the strange warmth continued, I realized what was different this time. Instead of him touching me, propositioning me, coming on to me,
I
had touched
him
. He’d talked about my
stand-offishness, that gulf between us. Without meaning to, I’d reached across it.

And I couldn’t take it back now. He was thinking what I was thinking. Head tilted and eyes down, he watched my hand stroking his skin. His eyes didn’t rise to mine. Maybe he suspected, as I did, that if our eyes met, we’d be acknowledging what was going on, and the spell would be broken.

The spell was too good. We both wanted to stay under it.

I continued to move my fingers across his skin exactly as I had before, but I needed to make a decision. I had reached for him, but I could back out of it by trailing my fingers down his arm and settling my hand in his, like I wanted us to be friends.

I didn’t want us to be friends.

Ever so slowly, I slid my hand up his sleeve, across his shoulder, and up his neck to cradle his jaw, prickly with stubble.

He bit his lip. “Let’s go back to my house,” he whispered, “and we can discuss our differences in private.”

We’d both forgotten about the storm blowing up. As soon as we climbed the stairs and slipped through the doors into the lobby, we could hear the rain beating on the windows.

Sam turned to me in question. I replied, “I still don’t have an umbrella.”

“Give me your keys and I’ll bring your car around.”

“I’ll get soaked on the walk to the driveway, no matter what.”

He continued to look questioningly at me. He’d been raised a southern gentleman. Whether the ladies were already soaked or not, gentlemen brought the car around in the rain. Their alcoholic fathers taught them this. The fathers might not be much good to the family, but they would bring the car around in the rain. This was another song in the making, one I struggled to push to the
back of my mind. Now was not the time. I took Sam’s hand and said, “Come on.”

We agreed silently that it would do us no good to run. The rain came down so fast that no puddles formed, only swift rivers down the sidewalk. Under an awning near the driveway, several people huddled, laughing that they were wet, waiting for a shuttle to the huge hotel nearby, but those were the only folks we encountered all the way across the shining parking lot, empty except for my car. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees since we first entered the theater. A stiff, cold breeze chased us the last few yards.