Dirty Little Secret Read online

  6

  I expected Sam to drop my hand as soon as we entered the building so Charlotte wouldn’t see us and pitch another fit. But he didn’t, for whatever reason—maybe because he thought he might lose me in the crowd that had packed the place while we went missing. The sidewalk outside the bar had been just as empty when we walked in this time as when we first walked in. I had no idea where these people were materializing from. They crowded the floor and overflowed onto the ramp we struggled up.

  I was happy to walk behind him. Happy, for the first time in a long time. I felt my cheeks glowing with pleasure that he was still holding my hand. I loved looking at the back of his head. Everything about him seemed perfect and positive. I was going insane.

  He hopped up onstage and pulled me after him. Settling his hat on his dark waves again, he surveyed the crowd as he said in my ear, “The natives are restless. Let’s get tuned up quick and get going. I’m not going to try to butter them up with a ‘How’re you doing, Nashville?’ I’ll just jump right into it and hold Alan Jackson in front of me like a shield. I signal Charlotte and she starts first, so listen for her.”

  Nodding, I knelt and opened my fiddle case against the wall and plugged my pickup into the available amp. While my back was turned, I heard Sam hollering over the noise, but I couldn’t make out anything he was saying except “Perfect pitch.” When I stood, Sam and Ace both crowded me and tuned their guitars to my long, low E. Then Ace backed up all the way to the window onto the sidewalk.

  I set my bow against my strings, ready to start, and looked over at Sam for the signal. I shifted uncomfortably with my elbow against the wall. Even with all the room Ace was giving us, Sam was too close on my left side. I wouldn’t have room for full strokes of my bow. If it came down to it, the lead singer was a more important member of this band than I was. I would give him my place and stand on the floor, and possibly be groped by the frat boys currently leering at me and inching closer to the stage in the hope of seeing up my dress.

  Glancing over at me, Sam saw me shifting and solved the problem. “I’ll go over here,” he said, making one wide step to straddle the space between the stage and the end of the bar. He shifted from a wash of blue light into a flood of bright white. The bar waitress only glanced casually up at him like he wasn’t the first lead singer to arrive at this solution. Ace waited until a couple of newcomers passed by, then handed Sam’s amp across the space to him, then his mike stand, then his guitar. Ace acted like this wasn’t the band’s first concert in cramped quarters, either. As Sam and the bar waitress got the cords situated, I wondered what the facilities had been like at the Lao weddings.

  I half expected Charlotte to give me a dirty look for holding her boyfriend’s hand and stealing her tip jar and existing generally. She only had eyes for Sam, though, and this time she wasn’t gazing at him moonily but watching him closely with her sticks raised, an experienced drummer with her head in the game, waiting for her signal.

  The music on the loudspeakers suddenly diminished and died as the bar waitress dialed the volume down. Voices swelled, and someone whistled. Every face turned to us.

  Sam looked over his shoulder at Ace to make sure he was ready.

  He looked at me. I winked at him like I played gigs in bars every night of the week. Adrenaline flooded my arms and made my fingers tingle.

  He glanced over his shoulder at Charlotte.

  That must have been his signal to her, just meeting her steady gaze. Before he’d turned back around, her drums burst into life, Ace played the bass line and Sam the melody, and I was waiting for a place to jump in, feeling like I was running to catch up.

  I found my slot and laid into my lick exactly as the audience burst into applause and cheers as they recognized the song, an oldie that pleased the moms in the audience, but popular enough that the college girls up front knew it, too, and raised their bottles and whooped. I couldn’t laugh. My chin stayed glued to my fiddle to keep it steady under the sawing of my bow. But I wanted to look over at Sam and exchange a chuckle with him at the appreciative response of the crowd to such a hokey old tune.

  Sam was smiling, too, but not at me. When he pulled off a complicated riff and the crowd clapped, he beamed at them like he was a kid on Christmas and they’d just given him exactly the toy he’d always wanted.

  That was all before he started to sing.

  After the first few words, a cheer went up again as the audience expressed their relief that Sam wasn’t just a pretty face and he had the chops to go with the hat. As I began a few measures of staccato notes, backing him up with chords in the verse until I bowed along with him in the chorus, I had time to look out at the crowd. The college girls stared up at him on the bar in awe. I could tell from the occasional hand raised above the crowd that someone behind the rail on the upper level was doing the Texas two-step. Everyone was smiling.

  Including me. My jaw was aching already. I tried to relax it and return my expression to my usual neutral. I couldn’t have my face sore when I needed to secure the fiddle with my chin for the next two hours.

  But it was hard not to smile when the crowd seemed so enthralled with us. I glanced over at Ace to see if he was as wowed by the experience as I was. He hadn’t smiled at me before now, but he flashed me an understated grin that let me know the big football player was moved. Thick fingers nimbly picking the metal bass strings, he closed his eyes and lost himself in the groove. Sweat along his neat hairline glistened in the blue light. On the other tiny stage, Charlotte was a whirling dervish of drumsticks and arms and brown wavy hair, such a flurry of energy that it was hard to reconcile the crazed sight of her with the precise beat she was putting out.

  We sounded good together, I was realizing. The first song was a bit early to hand down a verdict, but so far we sounded like we’d been playing together forever. The groups at the mall had sounded like that, too, since we were all seasoned musicians, more or less interchangeable. But at the mall, we’d been imitating something great and bygone. Right here, right now, Charlotte and Ace and Sam and I might have been playing a cover, but we weren’t imitating anybody. We were the young, hip thing to see in a Nashville dive on a Saturday night.

  As the song drew to a close, I knew what was coming. There was a money note at the end, and I was afraid Sam wouldn’t be able to hit it. It seemed too high for him. But he made it, as if he’d calculated the key of this tune carefully to play up his voice to advantage. After the abrupt ending, there was a half second of silence before the crowd screamed. Now Sam did ask, “How’re you doing, Nashville?” in an exaggerated drawl worthy of the most down-home, country-fried musical savant. The audience didn’t have time to respond with another howl before he took a quick look behind him at Charlotte and she kicked off the next driving beat.

  Sam had engineered this song, too, transposing it into exactly the right key to make his strong voice sound as good as it could without going over. During the first verse, he glanced over at me, pointed at me, and touched his mouth. I assumed he meant I should sing the prominent harmony on the chorus. If the band had been performing this song in the past—and they must have been, since they sounded this good now—they’d been doing it without the harmony. Now that Sam had me, he wanted me to make the song sound more like the original.

  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.