Dirty Little Secret (32 page)

“Your patron had his hand on my girlfriend’s ass!” Sam shouted right back at them. “I won’t start a brawl if your security people do their jobs!”

That’s when Ace walked over. “Please excuse us for a moment,” he told the owners. He put his hand on Sam’s chest and pushed him backward across the floor, all the way to me on the stage. Then he hissed, “Shut up. Let me handle this.”

“Ace,” Sam cried, “they—”

“Shut. Up!” Ace insisted. He gave Sam one last glare, then sauntered back to the group of men with his hand out for introductions like he was selling them a car. Sam scowled after them for a moment, then took out his phone and scowled at that.

Charlotte sat down beside me—not between me and Sam, for once, but on my other side. With her eyes on Ace, she whispered to me, “Do you think you could possibly take me and my drums home?”

“Sure,” I said with lots of fake enthusiasm, “if they’ll fit in my car.”

“Ace isn’t talking to me,” she said. “I think I fucked up.”

“I think you did, too,” I said.

“Thank you,” Ace called to the men, who were retreating through the door into the bar. “See you soon.” When they’d disappeared, he turned to us with rage in his normally placid face. “Well, we’re not blackballed,” he said, “but we have five minutes to clear out before the next band. I swear to God, I’m not sure I even want to be in this band anymore. I am sick to death of you.” He pointed at Sam. “And you!” He had a special scowl for Charlotte. Then he turned to me. “And . . . I don’t know
what
the fuck you’re doing half the time. The way things are going, I’d just as soon quit.”

“That’s too bad,” Sam said quietly, handing Ace his phone with an e-mail message open, “because tomorrow night, we’re playing on Broadway.”

The next afternoon,
at the end of a long four hours touring the mall with Mr. Crabtree and Elvis, I slipped into Ms. Lottie’s chair.

“Well, hon,” she said by way of greeting, “I didn’t think your face could get any longer than it already was.”

Suddenly angry and tired of her teasing, I burst out, “Remember when you told me Sam Hardiman was a heartbreaker?”

She stared at me in the mirror with two hairpins in her mouth and two hands on my ponytail wig.

“I am done with all the sage advice Nashville has to offer. If you’re going to hurt, not help, what are you dispensing advice for?”

Frowning, she spat out the pins, which made the smallest
clink
s as they hit the floor, and spun me around in the chair to face her. She towered over me with her hands on her hips. “Sam Hardiman is a good man,” she declared angrily.

“O-kay,” I said, hoping my ironic tone would kick her out of my business and shut her up.

No such luck. “He is not a drinker,” she said, tapping her pointer finger with a long, French-manicured nail. “He is at work every time he’s supposed to be.” She tapped her middle finger, then paused on her thumb. “He didn’t cheat on you, did he?”

A lump formed in my throat. I couldn’t even answer her. He had
better
not cheat on me. But now that we weren’t together, he could do what he wanted. The thought of him hooking up with someone else stopped me from breathing.

“Then you need to get your ass off your shoulders,” she told me, “and figure out how to make it work.”

“There’s more to it than that!” I exclaimed. “You make it sound stupidly simple, like a country song.”

She looked over her bifocals and down her nose at me. “Country songs are so simple because they’re about what really matters.”

“Would you
stop
it with the
aphorisms
?”

Abruptly she spun me back around in the chair. We faced each other in the mirror. Muttering to herself, she took the rest of the pins out of my ponytail wig and lifted it off my head. I scowled down at my hands in my lap. I should have been relieved our confrontation was over, but the lump in my throat hadn’t gone away. I swallowed.

“Bailey.”

I looked up at Ms. Lottie in the mirror.

She put her hands on my shoulders and asked my reflection, “Do you have a gig with Sam tonight?”

I nodded sadly.

She fingered my black hair. “I see the look you’ve been going for. Do you want me to help you do it better? Like a real country star?”

I pictured Goth-country, rebel-hearted me, but better. Just as Julie had looked like herself at the Grand Ole Opry, but better. That’s what a professional like Ms. Lottie could do for me.

And whether Sam only thought it would help the band’s reception, or his heart raced because his latest ex looked so beautiful, he would take notice.

I told her, “Yes, ma’am.” And then, as she got to work with her comb, I whispered, “Thank you.”

When I got back
to my granddad’s house, with my makeup dramatically perfect and my hair in a glamorous version of itself like I was headed to the Grammys, my granddad had already left to fight the CMA Festival traffic and take his VIP seat for Julie’s performance on the Riverwalk stage. It was easy for me to dress in an outrageous country getup to go with my starlet hair and slip out of the house for one last gig. Picking up Charlotte at her run-down apartment complex made saying good-bye to my life as a performer a little easier, because I didn’t have to ride with Sam and talk to him, or drive alone and obsess about him. I’d had a couple of song ideas since last night, but I hadn’t written them down.

Because we’d made it up the musician pecking order to a Broadway bar, the city had reserved a parking space for me in back. We pulled into the place in plenty of time before the gig so Sam didn’t have a stroke. The summer solstice was approaching, and the sun hadn’t quite gone down. Sam leaned against the wall outside, pretending to focus before he sang, but actually making sure we showed up. Ace stood on the other side of the door, with his back to Sam, talking to a group of college-age girls.

I cut the engine, but neither Charlotte nor I made a move to get out of the car.

“Maybe we could find a way to make the band work with none of us dating,” she mused, eyes on Ace.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Maybe we’ll have such a great time tonight that we’ll forget what we were fighting about before.”

“Maybe,” I agreed, because she wanted to believe there was still hope for her and Ace, and she wasn’t listening to me anyway.

“I guess we’d better get out,” she said, and I was about to agree when my phone rang. The ringtone signaled the call was from Julie.

I pawed through my purse so violently that even clueless Charlotte knew to ask, “What’s wrong?”

Ignoring her, I said breathlessly into the phone, “Julie?”

“You have to get down here to the Riverwalk stage,” my mother said. “Julie has her first CMA Festival performance in just a few minutes, and she’s refusing to go onstage.”

I stared through the windshield at Sam. He was still pretending I wasn’t here, but I knew he was hyperaware of me and was
dying
to go onstage. What my mother was saying did not compute. “Let me talk to Julie.”

“She’s not allowed to talk to you,” my mother said. “Not while she’s refusing to go onstage. She’s grounded from her phone. You come down here and talk to her right now.”

“Mom,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on and how serious it is. I’m in the middle of something.”

“You’re in the
middle
of something?” my mother shrieked. “You’re spending the summer sanding guitars for your grandfather, and he’s here. What could you possibly be in the middle of? What could be more important than your sister?”

With a pointed look at me, Sam slowly pushed off from the wall, crossed in front of the door to the bar, and laughingly joined the conversation with Ace and the college girls.

“I’ll be right there.” I clicked my phone off and turned to Charlotte. “I have to go. I’ll try to be back before the gig, but no guarantees.” I jumped out of the car.

“Then you can’t go!” Charlotte exclaimed, jumping out, too.

“Go where?” Suddenly I had Sam’s full attention. He and Ace forgot all about the other girls, meeting Charlotte and me at the back of the car.

“Julie’s playing at the Riverwalk stage in a few minutes,” I told Sam, “and she’s refusing to go on. She needs me.”

“You can’t go.” He repeated Charlotte’s words as though they were obvious, spray-painted on the back of this row of nineteenth-century buildings.

“I promise you I can,” I said, taking a step in the direction of the river. I could have assured him, as I’d assured Charlotte, that I would try to be back in time for our gig. But I didn’t even care when he was ordering me around.

He stepped in front of me. “No, you can’t!” he shouted. “We have a gig, Bailey! There is nothing more important than this gig right now.”

I put my hands on my hips. “There are a lot of things more important than this gig. My sister is more important.
I
am more important.
You
are more important. But you’ll never understand that, and that is your whole problem.” I walked around him.

“This is not your fantasy that the record company and your parents and Julie decide she can’t do this without you, Bailey,” he called after me. “She’s been doing it without you for a year. There is
no way
they’re scrapping a year of work and deciding at the eleventh hour that they need you.”

I turned around backward and called, “That’s not what I think.”

“That
is
what you think, or hope. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be going.”

Oh. We’d known each other less than a week, but he sure knew how to keep me around—at least as long as it took me to tell him off. I stomped all the way back to him on the uneven pavement of the alley. “Yes, I
would
be going, because I’m not you. Just because
you
don’t care about anything but performing doesn’t mean you should judge everybody else by your own low standards.”

He blinked, but his jaw was set. “If you walk away from this gig, that’s it for us. Don’t come back to the gig, and don’t come back to me. Ever.”

I looked at him. Really looked him up and down—the cowboy hat mashing his dark hair, his handsome face half-hidden by now with dark stubble, his chocolate eyes—because I knew I might not see him again. I made sure I took in what I was leaving, and then I turned.

He caught me by the arm. “We have to rely on you to make gigs, Bailey. Nobody will book us anymore if they can’t rely on us to be there. All four of us.”

“It doesn’t matter why,” I said. “You told me don’t leave or we’re over. And I’m leaving.” I turned one more time, but, aware of what I was putting behind me, I circled back around and stopped directly in front of Ace.

“It’s not that Charlotte doesn’t love you,” I told him in a rush. “She’s just so insecure that she can’t imagine
you
would love
her
. The only reason she’s hung up on Sam is, she didn’t have to guess how he felt about her. Once upon a time, Sam told her that he loved her and she was beautiful. You’re going to have to do the same.” I turned and flounced down the alley. When nobody called their thanks to me, I turned around, gave them a little curtsy, and called, “You’re welcome.” They were all staring at me, motionless, and I was a little afraid that I’d ruined whatever chance Ace and Charlotte had with each other.

But before the back door of the bar disappeared beyond the curve of the steep hill, I spun around one more time. Ace stood in front of Charlotte, hands on her shoulders, head bent, lips close to hers. She gazed way up at him, then inched closer. He kissed her mouth.

As I watched them, heat spread across my face, and my lips tingled. At least one good thing had come out of the past wonderful, horrible week.

Sam stood only a few feet from what must have been a shocking sight for him, his two best friends finally making out. But he wasn’t looking at them. He stood with his feet planted stubbornly far apart, like he was ready for someone to try to push him over, with his strong arms crossed on his chest, watching me go.

I put my eyes on the alley ahead of me and tried to think of the best way to cut through the crowded streets to the Riverwalk stage.