Dirty Little Secret (12 page)

“The strippers were very nice to him,” Ace offered.

I looked to Sam for confirmation. He nodded at me. “They brought me Cokes. One of them wanted me to go out with her daughter.”

“Ew!” Charlotte shrieked.

“Strippers aren’t
ew,
” he scolded her. “It’s just another way to make a living.” But he turned around and winked at me, like he’d enjoyed the strippers more than he wanted to let on to Charlotte. And like I understood something about him that she didn’t.

“How was the band before us?” he asked Ace.

Ace shrugged. “It’s never a good sign for a band when they ask a waitress to take the lead for a couple of songs. I don’t think we’re following a whole lot.”

“Depends on how good the waitress was,” Sam said.

“She wasn’t as good as you,” Charlotte said. Sam grinned at her and chucked her gently on the chin. I wanted to throw up.

“That’s positive, right?” Charlotte insisted. “We’ll look great in comparison.”

“It could be bad,” Sam said. “Nobody’s softened up the crowd for us.”

We walked past the one District club I’d been in before—Boot Ilicious, which pointedly flashed a cowboy boot in the middle of its sign, between the “Boot” and the “Ilicious.” It was an eighteen-and-up club Toby had taken me to a couple of weekends in May, right after my birthday. He’d bitched at me before because I wouldn’t go out of my way to find a fake ID. Once inside, he was skilled at acquiring drinks without a wristband. This would have impressed me at the beginning of the school year, but now it seemed immature and lame.

Which didn’t explain why I felt so relieved that we weren’t turning in at Boot Ilicious, or why I held my head down as we passed, hoping he wouldn’t recognize me if he happened to be hanging in the doorway. Toby had made me feel like my talent was something to be embarrassed by. Worse, I half believed him. For some reason, I was concerned about what he thought of me even though I hated him—just as I’d been disappointed to learn I wasn’t the only fiddle player Elvis wanted in his back pocket.

Leaving the club behind, we reached the intersection with Broadway. We were on the lower, less crowded end of the street, so it wasn’t far to the river, with the Titans football stadium on the other side. I leaned around Ace to look up the hill. The sidewalks along Broadway were packed with tourists, country music overflowed onto the street, and neon signs flashed in the shape of cowboy hats and boots and guitars all the way up the sidewalk. The real action was near the top of the hill, in the three or four bars famous for hosting acts that got discovered by record company executives who wandered into the audience, scouting their next star. I felt better just gazing at it—redeemed, like a girl in a country song who stuck to her guns and made it big, despite the stories her boyfriend told her about herself.

The light changed, and we stepped into the crosswalk. Sam was looking up Broadway, too, with his eye on that far corner.

As we crossed the street, I thought I spied the bar where we were headed, only two storefronts down—not a bad gig. But we kept walking right past it, past abandoned and crumbling historic facades, to a building that stood by itself because the buildings all around it had been torn down. A couple of people sat on the sills of the plate glass windows in front, smoking. At least we knew smoking wasn’t allowed inside, and that there were some customers. Two, to be exact. An enormous muscled bouncer stood in the doorway of the building, checking the IDs of some guys wanting in.

Beyond that, the block diminished into businesses that were closed at night, then a slummy area of deserted shells, ending in a huge construction project that wouldn’t be finished for years. I turned around and looked behind us. A few pedestrians peeled off Broadway and ventured down this side street. Very few. The lights of Broadway seemed far away.

If the location bothered Charlotte, she didn’t let on. She still talked animatedly with Sam like he was the only friend she’d ever had. She probably didn’t even notice her surroundings because her eyes had stayed glued to him since we’d left his truck.

“Careful,” Sam told her, pointing out a hypodermic needle lying in the weeds next to the sidewalk.

“Do you want me to carry you?” Ace joked to me.

Honestly, I was tempted to say yes. “No, thanks,” I said instead. “I feel safe with my needle-proof cowgirl boots on.” As I followed Sam through the door, I held my head high in an effort to fake
the bouncer out and make him think I belonged here. Nothing would be more embarrassing than to be the one singled out as not looking old enough, especially after Sam had made such a big deal about it. The bouncer didn’t pull me out of our little line or ask me for ID, though. I stepped across the threshold.

The music blasting over the speakers, filler between the live bands, was another country song I loved, but that was the end of my reasons to feel comfortable here. I’d been with my parents to the Station Inn, the most important bluegrass concert hall, which had looked so nasty that I’d been afraid to touch anything. This place made the Station Inn look like the Grand Ole Opry.

The walls were filled with framed and signed photographs of country stars from decades past—names I knew because I’d walked the edges of the biz for years, but these stars weren’t famous enough for someone to impersonate them at the mall. Instead of posing carefully for publicity photos, they closed their eyes and opened their mouths like they were singing their hearts out in front of an audience. The implication was that they’d been photographed
here
at this very bar, but the photos could have been downloaded off the Internet for all I knew. I didn’t think so, though. Every facet of the frames and every curve of the little 45-speed records strung from the ceiling was coated with a layer of filth like the place hadn’t been dusted since Elvis died. The dim lights and spotlights in blue, green, and pink didn’t quite disguise the dust.

Despite the bar looking deserted on the outside and unsanitary on the inside, quite a few customers pushed past each other to the bar or the restrooms. Sam held up his guitar case like the prow of a ship that broke through the ice pack in the arctic. I hugged my fiddle case. As we wound through the crowd, middle-aged tourists and Vandy frat boys glanced up and down my body, curious what a fiddle player in a rockabilly band looked like up close.

The entrance was a short ramp from street level to the level of the room. At the end of the ramp, Sam stepped three feet up to the
tiny stage and pulled me up after him. After being surrounded by people taller than me like I was down in a hole, it was a relief to be saved from the throng. From this vantage point I saw that there were actually two small stages, one to the left of the entrance and one to the right, both of them backed up against the windows onto the street. Charlotte’s drum set took up one stage, and Sam and I balanced on the other, with Ace climbing up behind us. He and Sam both opened their guitar cases in the corner.

I could also tell from up here that the building had two levels. The back was elevated so those customers could get a better view of the band. They were already lining up against the guardrail that separated the upper section from the lower one, staking out a good vantage point for viewing the band—for viewing
us,
I realized in a sudden moment of disorientation and pure joy.

After plugging his guitar into an amp and setting it in a stand, Sam pulled out his phone and thumbed the screen. He stepped closer to me and spoke in my ear so I could hear him over the music. My skin buzzed with the sensation of his breath on my skin. “Do you have your phone with you?” he asked.

I nodded, pulling it out of my purse.

“I’m texting all of you the playlist for the first hour.” He eyed me. “Uh-oh. I’ve transposed some of these songs from the key they were in originally. I’m just trying to find the best place for my voice. Is that going to mess you up?”

Yes, it would. I could play a song in a different key from the original, but I would hear the ghost of the first key in my head, an annoying niggling that was as near as I ever came to schizophrenia. I was a professional musician, though, so I said, “I’ll deal with it. You start and I’ll figure it out after a few notes.” My phone vibrated in my hand with his text.

I endured a delicious tingle as I felt his breath in my ear again.
“One more thing,” he said. “The band gets some money from the bar, but we get a lot more in tips. We keep playing while one lucky member strolls around the room with the tip jar.” He pointed to the large glass jar on the far corner of the stage. The faded and peeling “Pickled Eggs” label still clung to it, but “Tips” was written across the label in marker. He grinned at me.

“Oh,
hell
no.” I looked around the room at the crowd watching us, clinking their beer bottles together, bending their heads to talk about us and size us up before we even started.

“They’re friendly,” he promised me, “and not as drunk as you think. They just want to hear some good music. And by the time you pass the jar around, if we’re lucky, there will be brides.”

“Brides?” I asked dubiously.

He nodded. “Bachelorette parties. They tip great.”

“But, Sam.” I
really
did not want to dive into that crowd again. “If you’re so keen on the brides, why don’t
you
carry around the tip jar?”

“Because you’re a lot cuter than I am.” His words were flirtatious but firm. He wasn’t backing down.

Charlotte stood at the edge of the opposite stage. She waited for a break in the crowd pushing up and down the entrance ramp, then stepped across the gap between the stages and extended her phone toward us. Her glance flitted from him to me and back to him like he wasn’t technically allowed to whisper in my ear. “Hey, what’s this third song on the playlist?” she shouted over the crowd noise. Needlessly, I thought, because if the three of them had played all these songs before, she could figure it out. She just wanted to break things up between Sam and me.

Ignoring her, I told Sam, “If I’m a lot cuter than you, so is Charlotte. This is a girl thing, right? You think people will tip a girl better. If she carried the tip jar before, she can do it again.”

He stared at me a moment. I knew he’d heard me. But he turned to Charlotte, took her phone, and peered at it. “It’s the Cyndi Lauper song. Sorry, I can’t spell.” He handed her phone back and turned away, dismissing her. He told me, “We’ve never played with you before. It’ll be easier to play without you than without Charlotte.”

“Oh, fuck that,” Charlotte broke in. She sneered at me. “It’s because you’re prettier than me.”

Sam took Charlotte by both shoulders and spun her to face him. Looking straight into her eyes, he told her firmly, “Stop.”

Charlotte stared up at him with her lips drawn down and her strange blue-green eyes big as the sky. I thought I saw tears forming at the edges of her lashes, and as I watched, goose bumps popped up on her forearms. Her fingers were splayed in midair, her fingernails scribbled with a type of nail polish I’d never seen before, translucent black. The embrace, or the scolding, or whatever it was, lasted so long that I got uncomfortable as a spectator, like they were involved in a round of PDA.

Ace must have felt the same way. “That’s enough,” he said, looming behind Charlotte. He punched Sam in the shoulder—gently, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be punched even lightly with that meaty fist.

Sam blinked at Ace and dropped his hands from Charlotte’s shoulders. He glared at me. And then he placed his cowboy hat on the head of his guitar, and jumped down from the stage. He walked out the front door of the bar.

Charlotte retreated behind her drum kit like this was normal behavior for all of them. Shaking his head, Ace took a few steps backward, too, into his position onstage. I was left standing there with my hands out and pleading like I wanted to give my violin and bow away to the next person who walked by.

Exasperated, I called to Ace, “Is Sam coming back?”

“Yeah. He has to ‘focus’ before gigs.” Ace made finger quotes around
focus
. He turned his ear to his amp and thumbed one of his bass strings, twisting the tuning peg.

I wasn’t sure I believed Ace. I looked from him to Charlotte to the expectant crowd watching us—watching
me
more than any of us, since I was the one out front. I’d complained about my tip jar duties. I’d hesitated to let Sam drag me into this gig. But now I was here, and I’d be damned if I let this opportunity go.

Depositing my fiddle and bow in my case—and
closing
the case because my parents had taught me to be more careful with my fiddle than my own body—I sat daintily on the edge of the stage and stepped to the floor, avoiding giving the crowd an eyeful of my underwear. I followed Sam out the door.

Either the bouncer read the panicked look in my eyes, or he was used to band drama. Before I could say anything, he pointed. I walked in that direction, around to the side of the building. Sam stood with his back against the brick wall, between two metal joints sticking out of the mortar where the building next door used to be. His chin pointed up as if he stared at the stars, but his eyes were closed.

Boots crunching in the broken cement and glass, I stopped so close to him that he must have heard me even over the music booming from inside. He didn’t open his eyes, though.

“Sam,” I said.

“What.” He wasn’t bending over backward to sweet-talk me anymore. He sounded angry and impatient with me—like Toby.

“What the hell is your problem?” I hated that my voice climbed into shrill fear, but I couldn’t believe I’d gotten so close to this gig, only to have it yanked out from under me because previously adorable Sam had unadorable stage fright.

“It’s Charlotte,” he bit out. “I can’t have that negative emotion in my head before a gig. Charlotte knows that. She’s a great drummer and a good friend, but if I ever fire her, it’s going to be for fucking with me before a gig.”

“She wasn’t fucking with you. She was expressing her insecurity about her relationship with you and her position in the band, and she was asking you to tell her she was wrong. You didn’t do it.”