Dirty Little Secret (14 page)

I obliged, watching Sam for the precise timing, never once thinking about the harmony itself. I could sing harmony automatically, which was why I’d sung it above Julie while she sang melody. Record company scouts assumed she was the stronger singer and that’s why she was the center of attention, but really she was on melody because she had trouble with harmony. She lost her way. I never did. When every other facet of my life was a mess, music stayed true as math. My notes slipped into their predetermined places above Sam’s voice in the chords.

My harmony ended along with the tune. Sam and Charlotte started a new groove before I caught my breath and brought my fiddle under my chin. We played song after song like that. The crowd grew happier. The bar grew hotter. Long tendrils of Charlotte’s
hair stuck to her face as she whipped it around in a frenzy of rhythm. Sam pulled his handkerchief from the pocket of his tight jeans, removed his hat, mopped his brow, and put his hat back on, like a young farmhand on the prairie.

When I’d glanced around at Ace between songs, I’d noticed his face was covered with a sheen, too, and he was taking long pulls from the bottle of water that had been handed from the bartender to Sam to me to Ace. The next thing I knew, college girls were rushing to my feet with their eyes up and their hands out, reaching past me. When I looked behind me again, Ace had taken off his chemical formula shirt and was wiping his brow with it. It must have shown the formula for pheromones, the way these chicks were acting. Charlotte seemed to feel it, too. She craned her neck to get a better look at Ace’s bare chest around her high hat cymbals.

“Throw it!” one of the ladies shrieked to Ace.

“I can’t. I’ll need it later,” Ace said, laughing heartily now, his unamplified voice sounding dead against the ceiling.

“Maybe we need to let
you
pass around the tip jar,” came Sam’s voice over the mike. He was grinning at Ace. The women screamed enthusiastically. Sam swept his eyes over them. I could almost see the wheels turning in his head, calculating the exact moment when the joke had played out and we needed to move on.

He turned around to signal Charlotte. For once, Charlotte didn’t see him. She stared at Ace with her lips parted. Sam reached toward her and snapped his fingers. Startled, she blinked at Sam and immediately started the song.

Only a moment later, it seemed—but when I thought about it, we’d played seven songs in the interim—Sam looked pointedly at me, tapped his watch, and stuck out his pinkie and thumb to make an old-fashioned phone receiver. I’d been checking my own phone
periodically for the playlist, but I hadn’t even glanced at the time, or thought of Julie at all. For the first time in almost an hour, my guilt came rushing back.

I slipped my phone into my pocket, quickly packed my fiddle into its case against the wall, and grabbed the big glass jar in the corner. Ace balanced his guitar with one hand and helped me down from the stage with the other. The smiling college-age girls who liked Ace so much were the ones surrounding me, but I felt a little like I was being lowered into the lion habitat at the zoo.

“Ladies and gents,” Sam said into the mike, “we’re passing around the tip jar now. Please tell us with your generosity whether you like what you see.”

Asking the crowd whether they liked what they heard would have made more sense, but he was playing to the women in the audience, I thought. He knew how good he looked. I glanced up at him, intending to roll my eyes. He
was
eye candy, but I didn’t want him to know I was such a pushover.

When I looked over at him, though, he was watching me, his eyes traveling down the line of my dress as though he’d meant people liked what they saw in
me
. I grinned at the idea. I loved that he kept telling me how good I looked tonight, and that I was beautiful and perfect and exactly what he’d had in mind. My outfit might be time-warped country cosplay, my makeup too heavy, my hair a color not found in nature, but I’d never felt prettier—or sexier. With new confidence I waltzed around the room to the beat of the band wherever the crowd parted for me, holding my tip jar high and pausing when hands sought it with folded twenties. I smiled brilliantly at them whether they were leering frat boys or old men with loosening skin, and I feigned nonchalance over the bills piling up in the jar.

The song ended with a crash of Charlotte’s cymbal.
“Thank you for your kindness. We’ll be right back,” Sam said before the crowd could drown him out with a “Woooooo!” I handed the tip jar up to Ace, who was in the middle of putting his shirt back on, and clomped down the ramp.

As soon as I passed the bouncer and stepped into the night air, I realized I’d gotten just as hot as the rest of the band, and I probably looked it. My sweat cooled on me as I glanced toward Broadway. If I walked that way with my phone, Julie would hear the music from the other bars, and she’d know I was out. She’d been on the road constantly for the past year and, up until she stopped taking my calls, was often backstage at a concert when we spoke, or at dinner with Mom and Dad and record company bigwigs. I could always hear her voice, but the ambient noise threatened to drown it out. If she caved and answered the phone, it would be just my luck for her or my parents to hear the music from the bar and ask me where I was. I didn’t want to tell them and forfeit my college education. I didn’t want to lie, either.

The volume turned up on the canned country music and leaked through the door of the bar. The pop-goes-country song with a throbbing beat seemed to vibrate the broken glass under my boots. I couldn’t stay here. I headed in the other direction on the sidewalk.

A girl at the corner of the building yelled into her own cell phone. Passing her, I heard her say, “ . . . can’t believe y’all want to go to that place. You’ll stand in line on Broadway for two hours before you get in. I’m telling you, this place has
no
line and the lead singer is
hot
. You should have heard him singing a hick version of Justin Timberlake. Sheila may be marrying David in a month, but on their big night, she’ll be staring at the ceiling, thinking about this guy.” The girl was silent for a moment, listening. She burst into laughter.

As I retreated down the sidewalk and her laughter faded, I wanted so badly to turn around. I’d gotten only a glimpse of her before I’d heard her talking behind me. I wondered how old she was, and therefore how old her friend likely was. That is, I wanted to know how far away they were from
me
.

I hadn’t pictured myself getting married anytime soon, especially when Toby was all I had to choose from for a husband: shudder. But a couple of girls I’d graduated with were getting married in the next few weeks. One was pregnant. The other had signed a contract at her church that she wouldn’t have sex until she got married, rumor had it. She needed to get married ASAP so she could finally do it with her dork boyfriend.

I tried to imagine shackling myself to a loser just because I couldn’t wait any longer for one big night, then discovering someone like Sam a day too late. The best way to prevent that from happening, besides not getting married, was never meeting someone like Sam.

Half a block away from the bar, I finally looked back. The girl gestured wildly with her free hand while she talked into her phone, but I couldn’t tell how old she was. She was too far away. The bar seemed small, isolated in a sea of abandoned buildings, pitch-black behind their barred windows.

The music was still loud enough for someone to hear on the other end of my phone, so I kept walking, even though I didn’t feel safe here. Nobody was around. A single car swooshed by slowly, stopped at the traffic light at the corner, and moved on without backing up to kidnap me. I kept walking to the next streetlight and stood under its glow, as though the light were a force field that could keep me safe. The problem was, I couldn’t see clearly beyond the brilliance.

I scrolled through my phone—three new drunk texts from
Toby—and hit Julie’s number. She’d waited for my call nearly every night this year. My face had flashed on her screen, and she’d picked up before the phone rang on my end even once. Not this time. I listened to one hollow ring, then two.

As I stared into space, waiting, a tall figure appeared around the corner across the street. I couldn’t make out colors or details outside my pool of light. He could have been a college student coming to my concert at the bar. He could have been anybody. The first thing I noticed about him that alarmed me—besides the fact that he’d been lurking in an empty lot—was that he stepped out into the street without looking both ways for traffic. Granted, there wasn’t any traffic and he wasn’t in danger, but most people would have looked all the same. And if he’d been headed for the bar, he probably would have walked down the sidewalk on his side of the street first before crossing. He wasn’t headed for the bar. He was headed for me.

I didn’t panic. Julie’s phone still rang in my ear, and there was a chance she’d pick up any second. As the figure drew closer, I could see that he was an older man, not a college student. He had a full beard. His clothes were shabby and looked way too warm for this hot night. He was homeless, maybe, but I had no way of knowing that. And even if he were, that didn’t automatically mean he was racing across the street to assault me. This is what I was thinking. I knew I ought to be alarmed and I also knew if I was alarmed I was making a lot of baseless assumptions.

Meanwhile, I should have felt a spike of adrenaline—he was coming closer, he was running now, he’d reached the center line in the street, I could see his face, his eyes on me—but I didn’t feel a thing, just watched him coming and thought this was how I would die.

“You’ve reached Julie Mayfield!” Julie’s voice mail chirped. “Shout out!”

As the man loomed in front of me, I still didn’t run. He would catch me. I just wanted to click my phone off before Julie’s voice mail beeped and recorded what happened next, so she wouldn’t have to listen to it. My thumb hit the button to end the call. The man entered the glow of the streetlight, his face dark with dirt and shining under sweat. I could smell him just before he reached out one hand to touch me.

“Back off!” Sam shouted, shouldering himself in front of me, knocking me so hard that I nearly dropped the phone. He was between me and the man now. Down by his side I saw the flash of a knife blade. I meant to cry out or pull him back to stop him, but the man had seen the knife. He backed into the street, again without looking, then spun around and ran.

Sam returned his knife to his pocket. Breathing like he’d dashed all the way here from the bar, he watched the man until his shadow disappeared behind a temporary wall around the new construction at the end of the street. I’d thought all day that Sam’s young face belied the old beard he was trying to grow, but at that moment, dark eyes narrowed against danger, he looked as world-weary and tough as Johnny Cash himself. He scanned the area, turning in a slow circle—something I hadn’t thought to do. If a second man had wanted to attack me from behind, I never would have seen him.

“Walk,” Sam barked, giving me a little shove on the small of my back. I started down the sidewalk in the direction he pushed me, toward the bar. Normally I would have protested being pushed around, but he still looked furious. As he walked beside me, he demanded, “What were you doing?”

“Making my phone call, like we discussed.”

“Did you have to walk to Georgia? You were calling your boyfriend, weren’t you?”

“My boyfriend?” I repeated, confused and disgusted at the
thought of running out of a gig with Sam to convey some breathless secret message to Toby. “No.”

Sam was jealous. This registered with me on some level, blank as I felt.

But the next thing he said made me think he wasn’t jealous after all, only wary that I was manipulating him. “You called someone who you didn’t want to hear the music,” Sam insisted. “Someone you didn’t want to figure out where you are.”

“It was just my sister.” I caught the pointed toe of my boot on the broken sidewalk and tripped. Sam saved me from falling with a hand on my elbow. He held me for a few seconds while he looked over his shoulder again in the direction the man had gone.

Several minutes too late, the little good sense I usually possessed came rushing back. I began to realize how close we’d both come to tragedy. I squealed, “Were you going to knife that guy?”

“No,” Sam said firmly. “I was going to
show
him my knife and get you away from him. Which I did. Were you going to let him grab you?”

I didn’t know. Now that I had my wits back, I couldn’t quite puzzle out what I’d been thinking when the strange man stalked like a shadow into my bright circle.

“You
were
going to let him grab you,” Sam said incredulously. “Do you have some sort of death wish?” As we walked, he looked behind us, then to our right at the empty lots, then to the left across the street, ahead of us at the bar, and behind us again.

“Me!” I exclaimed. “He could have turned that knife around and used it on you. Why are you walking around with a concealed weapon, anyway? Is this neighborhood really that unsafe?”

“I didn’t expect you to walk a mile down a deserted road to make a phone call,” he said testily. Then, glancing sideways at me and looking almost sorry, he said, “I didn’t know it wasn’t safe.
I think it
would
be safe if you hadn’t wandered in that direction alone.” When I glared back at him and didn’t give in, he sighed. “Okay.” He pulled his knife out of his pocket to show me. I drew back in surprise before I saw it was his shiny silver guitar slide covering his entire middle finger.

“Oh.” As relieved as I felt that he wasn’t actually brandishing a knife, my heart went out to him. When he’d seen that guy coming for me, he could have watched the shit go down and called 911. Instead, he came for me, armed only with sleight of hand. He might as well have threatened to slay a dragon with a banana. I was overwhelmed with warmth for him, and somehow unable to tell him so.

“Yeah, lame.” He examined the slide ruefully, turning his hand over to look at it from both sides. He deposited it back in his pocket. That was that, until somebody needed him to use a guitar pick to disarm a bomb.