Dirty Little Secret (19 page)

The next second he was singing “Remember When” after all. He’d smartly taken the key up half a scale because his voice was higher than Alan Jackson’s. One thing I had to give Sam: he knew his own voice and how to box his weight.

While his voice urged me forward, the lyrics of the song gave me pause. The narrator was a teenager, losing his virginity with the girl he loved. I backed through the second row and then the third, my hand going sweaty on the handle of my fiddle case.

In the next verses, he and the girl got married. Their parents died. They fought. There was supposed to be a guitar solo here with a gradual modulation from the key of G to the key of A, which in Sam’s version went from C to D. The original song was full of expressive violins, and he could have used me here. But he didn’t have me. To his credit, he didn’t try to replicate that slow solo but marched quickly through the chords to land at his destination, never losing his audience, and resumed his lyrics. In these verses, he and his wife had children and mellowed out. They grew older and their children moved away, but they vowed never to have any regrets about their lives coming to an end because they were so in love.

At this point tears stung my eyes. For once I hadn’t been concentrating on Sam’s notes and whether he was in key. I’d been listening to his words. The people all around me had, too. Middle-aged women’s eyes filled with tears. Men put their arms around their wives’ shoulders, all for a song so vague that it applied to everyone—everyone in a joyful relationship, that is—because even the happiest couple experienced sadness as time passed. And all this was sung by an eighteen-year-old who couldn’t possibly know what he was talking about, and who was treating this public street and free audience as practice. Yet I was moved, and so were they.

I wanted to listen to the rest of his performance, but I couldn’t stay there in the crowd. His song ended and only a handful of people moved away down the street. The rest would leave eventually, though. The bodies in front of me would shift, and he would see me. I didn’t want that anymore.

I ducked into the nearest bar, which doubled as a restaurant during the day and didn’t start ID’ing until later. I ordered an iced tea—I meant to pay for it, but the bartender nodded to my fiddle case and told me there was no charge. He must have been a down-and-out bluegrass reject himself. Then I headed up the stairs to the open-air balcony, empty in the late afternoon. Sliding into a seat at a table overlooking the sidewalk one story below, I watched Sam. His cowboy hat was gone. His plaid shirt and cowboy boots, gone. He wore a T-shirt and shorts like an eighteen-year-old headed for the mall, dressed to be himself.

He never looked up at me. But on his third song since I’d sat down, I noticed someone leaning in the shade of a nearby building, waving. It was Ace, saluting me. I put my finger over my lips.

He pushed off from his resting place and headed for the spectators. I hoped he wouldn’t call Sam’s attention to his admirer with a
deck seat. Ace skirted the edge of the crowd and disappeared under the building where I was sitting. A few minutes later he reappeared with his own tea, coming toward me across the second floor of the restaurant.

He slid into the seat facing me, surprisingly nimble for a huge guy, not even swaying the ice in my drink as he tucked his knees under the table. He didn’t disturb me, either. We watched Sam cycle through another impeccable performance of an old favorite, then look up at the crowd in astonishment at their applause, like he’d forgotten all about them.

“I feel better if I come with him,” Ace said quietly. “He ought to be able to take care of himself. But sometimes he forgets where he is and what he’s doing. A sociopath would kill him over the couple of hundred dollars in that guitar case right now.”

I nodded. “Is that why you want to be in the band? Because he wants you to be?” I was fishing for information about myself more than Ace. I knew I couldn’t be in Sam’s band, but I desperately wanted to be. And after Charlotte’s warnings, I wondered whether this was an idea that Sam had put in my head, a conclusion I never would have reached if he hadn’t kissed me.

Ace poured a packet of fake sweetener in his tea and stirred it with his straw. “Like I told you last night, Sam and I played football together.” I recognized this phrase as boy code for
We are very close friends.
“I used to play bass for my brother’s R & B band, but after he moved to Chicago, I put it away until I happened to mention some of my past gigs to Sam at football practice. He got all excited and wouldn’t leave me alone until I agreed to jam with him. And we sounded great together. Sam would sound great with anybody, really, but he made me feel like I was holding my own. It was this really strange mix of James Brown and John Denver, but we made it work, you know?”

I nodded. Just like I could make it work when some crazy old lady wanted me to play Reba McEntire.

“Sam and I played with anybody who wanted to start a band in high school,” Ace said, “but most guys aren’t serious about it. They want to be in a band so they can impress the ladies, but they don’t want to practice, and the band lasts a week. Then Sam started dating Charlotte.”

He took a sip of his tea. It was just a pause in his story, and after swallowing he would go on with the story of Sam dating Charlotte. But he drank and drank, the seconds stretched on, and most of his tea was gone in one pull.

He dabbed his lips almost daintily with his cloth napkin and went on as if he hadn’t strangely stopped. “They didn’t date long. Ever since, we periodically have these knock-down, drag-outs about whether Sam decided we should all form a band because he was dating Charlotte, or whether he sought Charlotte out and started dating her so that she would join his band. I don’t know the answer to that myself.”

“It sounds like you’ve given it a lot of thought,” I pointed out.

Ace’s face wasn’t expressive—he was the opposite of Sam in that regard—but now that I knew him a little, I could tell from the slightest tightening of his jaw that he was upset. “Charlotte asks me about it all the time. She comes up with a new theory, a new angle, and wants to discuss it with me. You’re not helping.”

Without meaning to, I sat back in my chair. I didn’t like being blamed for this. Whatever problems the band had, they’d definitely had them before I showed up last night. I’d only brought them to a head.

“Sorry,” he said, holding up his hands in a show of truce. “It’s not your fault. Anyway, they were still dating when Sam came to me with this idea of a band. I did not want to be in a band with Sam and his girlfriend.”

“Because he’s had fifty-two girlfriends this year,” I guessed.

“Oh,” Ace said, shoulders sagging. “Charlotte said that to you.”

With my stony silence, I told him yes.

“It hasn’t been fifty-two,” he said carefully. “That would be one per week. Don’t get me wrong. There have been a lot. Maybe more like twenty-six.”

“Now you’re just rubbing it in,” I said, hinting that it would be okay if he shut up about this now.

He eyed me uneasily, thrown off by my protest, and unsure where to take this argument from here. He said awkwardly, “Well, so, and, Charlotte was girlfriend number twenty or thereabouts, so he was pretty far along in this pattern. I knew they were going to break up in a week or two, and then I’d be in a band with Sam and his
ex
-girlfriend.”

“And besides the awkwardness anybody else would expect, that was a special problem for you, because you were in love with her.”

I don’t know what made me say it. I’d suspected she had a thing for him—besides her more obvious thing for Sam—by the way she’d sat protectively beside him onstage last night and watched other women jealously as they passed. I’d thought he had a thing for her because of the way he watched her flirt with Sam without ever commenting that he was tired of it or it was gross, just taking it with a carefully composed blank face. I’d deduced the feeling was mutual because they’d ridden to the gig together. Who’d set that up, and what excuse they’d used, I didn’t know, but they’d both allowed themselves to be assigned to that minivan together, and to work as a team against Sam when he seduced a fiddle player later in the night.

I could have stayed quiet. Should have, maybe, if my goal was to get
out
of this band. But the longer we’d talked and listened to Sam singing below us, the more resigned I’d become to the fact that I
was probably stuck with them, at least for tonight. At least until I got my fill. And I needed Ace’s confidence now, because that way he might help in my exit strategy later.

“I was
not
in love with her,” he said so loudly that several people at the very back of the crowd around Sam looked up at us curiously.

“I see,” I said smoothly. “You only had the worst kind of crush on her, then. You felt guilty that you had a thing for your best friend’s girlfriend. Then they broke up, and you and she became friends, and the crush only got worse, and you fell in love with her more gradually, later.”

“We’ve ridden together to all these gigs for months, and we
are
friends, and that’s all,” he said self-righteously. I didn’t believe him, and I was pretty sure he knew that, but there was nothing he could do about it but brush it off. He sat back in his chair and tried his best to relax his shoulders so I wouldn’t notice how antsy he’d gotten. Too late.

“To answer your question,” he said, “no, I didn’t want to be in this band just because Sam wanted me to, but that’s part of it. He’s had a really hard year.”

Because of the fifty-two girlfriends? Poor baby.

Ace went on, “Anybody who knows him, even all the girls, will tell you he’s a great guy, and they’ll do anything for him, right up until they want to kill him.”

I nodded. We were on the same page there.

“He literally got down on his knees and begged me to be in his band. I’m sure he’ll do this to you, too, at some point, if he hasn’t already. In public. When he did it to me in the football locker room, I said yes. And now . . . God, we’re all fighting like cats and dogs, but I can’t imagine
not
playing in this band. I mean, I loved playing in my brother’s band. But the bar last night had an energy, you know?”

“I think that was from the bachelorette party.”

He eyed me like he didn’t believe me, waiting for me to admit the truth.

After a long pause, I admitted, “Fine. I felt it, too.”

Watching me over the rim of his glass, he drank the rest of his tea, then glanced at his watch. “It’s time for Sam to wrap up. I have a family reunion to get to.”

“Oooh,” I said. “Good food?”

“You got that right.” He stood as carefully as he’d sat, stirring not a single wave in my tea. “Do you want me to tell him you’re up here?”

Applause broke out below us. Sam had ended a song. He said a brief thank-you and started the next tune as if impatient with the crowd’s response. All he wanted to do was play some more.

I said, “Yes.”

Ace returned to his post next to Sam, and I passed another quarter hour there by myself, listening to Sam’s voice, contemplating how little he needed me and how long it would take him to realize that whatever I contributed to his band wasn’t worth the trouble. Finally he nodded to the crowd and started to scrape and stack the money from his open guitar case into his pockets. Ace glanced up at me once more. They both disappeared under the deck where I was sitting.

I made my way back down through the building and onto the sidewalk, where Sam was waiting for me.

“Hey,” he said, half smiling.

“Hey,” I said.

He nodded to my fiddle case. “Why didn’t you come play with me?” Immediately he rolled his eyes at himself. “That’s not what I meant.”

I didn’t point out that if he was constantly hearing double entendres
in his own words, he had a dirtier mind than he wanted to let on. Sam having a dirty mind was okay with me. It was adorable, actually, as long as his mind was on me. “You didn’t really want me to play with you. You were a soloist today.”

He shrugged. “I didn’t have to be. I always like company. I always like
your
company.” He leaned down and, before I could protest or remind him I was still mad at him, kissed my cheek. “You look beautiful.”

I smiled demurely and said, “Thank you.”

“I hope you’re not planning on wearing that to the gig tonight, though. You look like L.A., not Nashville. Where are you parked?”

Without a word, I pointed up the street toward both our cars. I didn’t really think he assumed I was playing with him tonight. He just hoped so. He thought that in saying it, it might come true. Now that I hadn’t protested what he said, he would use that against me later. And I didn’t care. His arguments worked on me only if I let them.

Seeming to sense that he’d overstepped his bounds, he eyed me as we moseyed up the sidewalk. “Ace said you talked a few minutes ago. He said you might play with us after all.”

“Hm,” I said noncommittally.

“Charlotte said she called you, and that conversation didn’t go over as well.”

“Hm,” I said again, finally relaxing my hauteur to glance over at him. Beads of sweat balanced at his hairline. To make him sweat a little longer, I changed the subject. “Charlotte said you wear your heart on your sleeve.”

He craned his neck to peer down his arm and lifted his sleeve up with the other hand as if to get a better look.

“You sang all those songs this afternoon with such emotion.”

“Thanks,” he said, as though I’d complimented him on his confident stage presence or the mellow tone of his voice, something he’d worked on.

“I was confused by that,” I said. “Those songs were about getting married. Getting divorced. Stuff that older people have been through and you haven’t. Take ‘Remember When,’ for instance.”

He looked surprised. “You were listening that long?”

I brushed his question off. “What were you thinking about when you sang that? You said last night that you had to be in the right mind-set to sing. I didn’t
think
you were saying that just to sneak a kiss.”