Dirty Little Secret Read online

  “Doing what?” he asked quietly, like he was sure by now he didn’t want to hear the answer.

  “Touring with her while she opens for bigger acts, and letting her get a lot of practice.”

  His mouth dropped open. “She has a development deal with a record company?”

  Of course he would guess. He might even understand more about the music business than I did. I said, “Yeah.”

  “Is it working out?” I could see in his eager expression that he hoped it was working out, like Mr. Crabtree was eager for another Elvis song to play at the mall, a dog waiting for someone to throw a ball. If Sam had his way, he would network with my parents and my sister, around and then right over me. And he would ruin me in the process.

  “So far, so good,” I said, understating by several hundred thousand dollars.

  “Did she get discovered on the bluegrass festival circuit?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “But you were on the circuit, too.”

  I swallowed. “Yeah.”

  “So she got discovered, and you didn’t.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  He sighed in frustration and gestured with his hands on the steering wheel as he exclaimed to the broad, dark street, “Too late. We’re talking about it, and you owe me an explanation.”

  I almost said, I don’t owe you shit. But I thought back to my week at the mall. The anticipation I’d felt before I played with a group for the first time in ages. The way my hopes had been dashed when the group didn’t measure up to Julie. The elation I’d circled back to when I discovered Sam. The way the roller coaster had crashed to the bottom again when he and his father fought.

  I knew how excited he’d felt when the band came together tonight. I’d felt that excitement myself. I was dashing his hopes now, as mine had been dashed repeatedly. I shouldn’t have agreed to play with him in the first place. I should have refused like a good girl and let his hopes lie there in the dust. So I did owe him an explanation now.

  “The record company agreed to sign Julie,” I began.

  He nodded his acknowledgment, face tight with barely controlled anger.

  “My parents tried to get the company to sign me, too, and keep us together as a duo. The company flat-out refused. Single teen girls with pop crossover potential are what’s selling right now. But Julie and I had been playing together forever. We’d never played apart. The record company thought it would be terrible for their public relations, and for Julie’s, if it got out that they’d snatched her from an inseparable sister duo and shunned me.”

  “It would.” Sam’s grimace had relaxed a little. He was beginning to see where I was coming from.

  Not that I cared. I was offering him this explanation to detangle myself from this mess, not to involve myself further with a manipulative playboy.

  “The record company told my parents I should disappear. They didn’t want Julie to mention me in any of her interviews, because reporters might come looking for me and discover that ugly past. They made me get off social media so I couldn’t post stabs at Julie that everybody in the world could copy and paste. And they specifically said they didn’t want me to pursue a music career that might distract from Julie’s, or embarrass her, or advertise the fact that they’d left me behind.”

  Turning off the broad street and onto Music Row, Sam looked like he was squinting into the streetlights, but I could tell he was really thinking hard, coming up with a way to talk me down. “You say the record company wanted you to do this stuff. But their contract wasn’t with you, surely. It wasn’t even with Julie. She’s too young to sign a contract. Their deal was with your parents, so how can the record company tell you what to do?”

  “They can convince my parents to say that if I get in any trouble, I can’t go to college.”

  “Oh,” he mouthed, but no sound came out. He recovered from his shock to say, “And by trouble, they mean a gig.”

  “They also mean going to a drunk graduation party and getting into a car with my tweaked-out boyfriend, who drives into a lake.” I was back in my parents’ kitchen, talking with them around the table rather than in the more comfortable den, because I was still wet from the lake and my mother didn’t want me dripping on the carpet. My thigh throbbed and swelled, the discoloration visible below the short hemline of my sequined dress. I hadn’t complained about it, and my parents hadn’t asked. They told me I had better be damn glad this had happened now. What if it had happened a week from now, on the day Julie’s first single dropped? Did I think the tabloids wouldn’t be all over me like stink on shit?

  Julie had stared at me from the kitchen doorway, her face contorted with an expression so anguished that I couldn’t even read it. Julie and I loved each other. We were there for each other. And she walked away from me.

  I caught myself rubbing my eyes and forced my hands down. “But yeah, gigs are included in the bad behavior, too. My granddad said he would work on my parents so I could keep playing at the mall. He is not going to work on them if he finds out I played this gig in the District tonight after I lied to him. I shouldn’t have let you talk me into it. This has to be the end.”

  Sam pulled to a stop in front of my granddad’s hill of a front yard. I hoped I could just bail out of the truck. No such luck. Sam wasn’t done with me. He turned off the ignition and placed one hand on my knee.

  “Here’s what I don’t understand,” he said. “Your parents put you and your sister on the bluegrass circuit and tried to get you a deal. They got one for your sister, and they kind of gave up on you.”

  No, that wasn’t right. I clarified it for him. “They totally gave up on me.”

  Without lifting his hand, he shifted his whole body toward me. The soft light from the porch touched his hair but left his eyes in darkness as he asked, “Why have you given up on you?”

  “Because they did,” I said shortly. “Everybody did.”

  “You are part of everybody,” he pointed out. “As long as you have faith in yourself, you still have someone’s support.”

  He sounded like the tail end of a TV gospel show, or a fortune cookie. “That is cockamamy.”

  He squeezed my knee. “You have my support.”

  Done with him, I knocked his hand away. “Of course you’re going to say that. You want me in your band.”

  “Why would I want you in my band if you weren’t good?” he protested. “I’m not operating a charity mission here. You are in my band. Our band. You heard how good we sound together. No professional musician would walk away from that.”

  “I guess I’m not as professional as you thought.” I opened my door, slid out of the truck, and waited for him to slide out, too, so I could retrieve my fiddle.

  He stared across the seat at me. I still couldn’t see his shadowed eyes, but I could read the outrage on his parted lips. I thought he might refuse to move, holding my fiddle hostage.

  Slowly he slid out and even bent the seat forward for me. But as I reached in for my case, he said, “This has to be about what Charlotte said to you. There’s no way you would turn this gig down unless you were mad at me. Come on, Bailey. You have to be bigger than that.”

  Jerking my case free, I shoved the seat back into place and slammed the door, then backed a few paces to stand on the concrete staircase up the hill. “I have to be bigger than that?” I shouted at him over the roof of the cab. “You should have been bigger than that when you decided to make out with both of us. Unlike you, I don’t take just any gig I’m offered.” I whirled around, the thin skirt of my dress failing to make as dramatic an exit as my heavy circle skirt that afternoon. I jogged up the stairs.

  As I fished the key out of my purse and opened the front door, all my attention was on Sam’s truck behind me. I listened for him to rev the engine and tear off down the street, but he didn’t. Maybe he wasn’t as mad as he’d seemed. He’d only feigned anger to try to get what he wanted, but he didn’t care as much about having me in his band as he
’d claimed. Tomorrow night he’d be feeling up another fiddle player in the parking deck.

  More likely, he had no place for negativity because he was too busy thinking, plotting out how to manipulate me next. I’d met Sam half a day ago, but already I knew when he wasn’t done with me.

  I closed the door behind me. Only then did Sam’s truck start and move down the street.

  As the noise faded, my alarm grew. I’d been so focused on Sam that I’d completely forgotten about my granddad. All the lights were on in the living-room-turned-showroom with shiny finished instruments hanging in rows from the ceiling. I was totally exposed with my bra straps showing—my shrug must have been behind Sam’s seat, crushed under two guitar cases—and I was holding my forbidden fiddle. I’d just taken great pains to walk away from the dangerous lure of my life’s goal, only to get busted.

  But as I paused and listened, I heard my granddad snoring softly in his bedroom. I hadn’t asked him what my curfew was, if I had one, but it was way past midnight and he wasn’t waiting up for me.

  I slipped off my boots at the bottom of the stairs so I wouldn’t wake him with my clomping. Then I walked into the kitchen and opened the pantry. My grandmother’s mason jars were still there, though she hadn’t been alive to can tomatoes from the garden in ten years. I unscrewed the lid of one, opened my fiddle case to extract my share of the night’s wages, and plopped the bills inside, where they unrolled and expanded against the glass. It seemed like a fittingly redneck place to keep the money from a rockabilly band.

  I lugged my boots and fiddle and the jar to the top of the stairs. In my room, I slid the jar onto the dresser, collapsed on the bed, and stared at the money. It was so much money. I’d made it all from playing my fiddle for two hours. I couldn’t quite believe it.

  Yet Julie with her high-powered contract made that much money every second.

  I stayed in that strange in-between place for a long time, wanting to be ecstatic that I was a professional musician, not wanting to be jealous of Julie, saddened all over again that the two always walked hand in hand. I thought about hiding the jar in a drawer so I wouldn’t see it constantly and feel that wash of jealousy over and over again. But the sense of accomplishment was too good and too strong. When I received my first paycheck from the mall next week, I could deposit it in my bank account, but I knew I would cash it and stow it in the mason jar like an idiot hiding money in the mattress, just so I could see it.

  And I knew that, angry as I was at Sam, and much as he probably hated me right now, we would be playing with each other again tomorrow.

  Pulling my music notebook and colored pencils from my purse, and rubbing my eyes to my heart’s content, I sat down at the desk and wrote a song about that.

  8

  The next afternoon, my granddad and I rocked in chairs on his front porch, lazily playing our instruments. He strummed along with me, agreeing to whatever sleepy oldie popped into my head, while I tried to enjoy the sound of my fiddle, the touch of the bow against the strings, the way those sounds seemed like a natural accompaniment to a breezy summer day.

  I tried and failed. I played songs as familiar to me as my own fingers, but different possibilities cropped up stubbornly in my mind, places these tunes were never intended to go. I could add a seventh to the bass line in my head. I could slide from a bluegrass tune straight into a startlingly similar R & B standard. I was awake and alert and out of my comfort zone. Sam had done this to me.

  “Phone’s ringing,” my granddad said.

  I stopped fiddling and listened and sure enough heard my Alison Krauss ringtone, faintly. At least my granddad wasn’t in danger of losing his hearing anytime soon.

  “Probably Sam,” he added unnecessarily.

  I gripped my fiddle tightly to keep from flinging it away as I jumped up from my chair, leaving it rocking wildly. I ran through the showroom, dashed up the stairs, and shoved my hand into my purse. But the number on my phone wasn’t labeled.

  Not Sam.

  “Hello?” I snarled.

  “Hey!” a girl said brightly. “It’s Charlotte.”

  I felt my nostrils flair in distaste.

  “Cunningham,” she added when I didn’t say anything. “The drummer.”

  “Uh-huh.” Whatever message she’d called to deliver, I was going to make it as difficult as possible for her. “How did you get my number?”

  “Sam asked me to convince you to come back to the band.”

  “I was never in your band,” I said.

  “Whatever. Sam is mad at me. He thinks you dropped out because of what I did last night. I just wanted to apologize. I shouldn’t have dragged Ace back to Sam’s truck and opened the door. I knew what was happening, but you’re a big girl, and I should have just let it happen. And I didn’t mean what I said.” Her tone was super-friendly and, therefore, ironic, just like last night.

  I started to rub my eye, then quickly pulled my hand away. Charlotte wasn’t worth rubbing my eyes over. “Yes, you did mean it,” I told her. “Girls don’t say ‘This guy is making out with you like he just made out with me’ without meaning it. That’s pretty specific.”

  “Well.” Stumped, she took a deep breath. “Look, I wasn’t trying to be rude. I just felt like you should know what was going on. Sam has had a different girlfriend every week this year. He has literally had, like, fifty-two girlfriends. He wears his heart on his sleeve. He will make you feel like the world was made for the two of you while he’s with you. He’ll convince you to do anything he wants, and he’ll make you think it was your idea. With Sam, two and two doesn’t always equal four. Depending on what he’s trying to convince you of that day, two and two might equal five. He’s so convincing that sometimes he seems like he doesn’t know himself that he’s manipulating you.

  “And then, when he’s gotten what he wants out of you, it’ll be over. You’ll be having the week of your life, and out of the blue he’ll say”—she switched into a lower voice that was supposed to be Sam’s—“‘I’m messed up right now, and I can’t give you what you deserve.’ And then he’s on to girl fifty-three. Wait, this isn’t convincing you to come back to the band, is it?”

  I let the silence fall between us, like a security gate rolling shut over a storefront at the mall. Surely she could hear how passive-aggressive she sounded. But as the seconds dragged on, I decided she might be so socially inept that she didn’t understand her own passive-aggression, or the meaning behind my silence. I said, “I don’t know what your plans are for higher education, but you should probably rule out law school.” I hung up.

  The triumphant feeling lasted about two seconds, and then I was alone in the quiet room that wasn’t really mine, listening to the breeze in the oak trees outside, staring at the phone in my hands and feeling numb.

  I was determined to stay strong and put an end to my relationship, such as it was, with Sam. From the very beginning, I’d suspected him of something like what Charlotte had described. It was hard to turn my back on him. Better now than later, when his claws had sunk further into me.

  But I couldn’t help a little flight of fancy, the memory of his hands on me. I put one hand up to cup my breast and thought of the way he’d touched me. The most endearing thing about him had been the way he seemed bowled over by me, like he’d never met a girl so sexy and beautiful. Was it good to treasure the memory of a few perfect hours together? Or would I have been better off never meeting him?

  I wasn’t getting married, but I was as bad off as that girl Sheila at the bar last night, marrying David and thinking of Sam while she stared at the ceiling.

  There was definitely a country song about this.

  I pried my hand away from the phone and galloped back downstairs to my granddad. We had just launched “Wildwood Flower” when he said, “Phone’s ringing. Y’all can’t bear to stay away from each other?”

  “Nope.” It was probably Charlotte again. It definitely wasn’t Sam. Even if it was Sam, I wasn’t excited about talking t
o him. Yet strangely, I made it up the stairs in record time. The number wasn’t labeled. Not Sam. “Fuck,” I said, then clicked the phone on. “Hello?”

  “Hello, Bailey. It’s Ace.”

  I sighed heavily, directly into the phone so he would hear it, and didn’t say anything.

  After the silence stretched on, he added, “Hightower. The bass player. From last night?”

  “Hello, Ace,” I said, letting him know from my tone that I understood why he was calling, and it wasn’t going to work. But even as I unleashed that sarcastic barb, my voice faltered. I thought I heard Sam singing, like he was serenading me. I walked over to my windows. Nothing was beneath them but grass dappled with sun and shade.

  “Listen,” Ace said. “Sam asked me to convince you to play with us again tonight. We’re all so sorry about what Charlotte said to you. She and Sam dated before, but it was nothing serious. Just a week. She’s not quite over him, I think—”

  “You think?” I interjected.

  Ace went on as if I hadn’t interrupted. “—and she wanted me to drive back to the parking deck last night and find you with him. I knew I shouldn’t have done it, but I did it, and I’m sorry.”

  I couldn’t concentrate on a snappy comeback. I still thought I heard Sam, and he was drowning out Ace’s apology. It was like talking to Julie every night for the past year, asking her to repeat herself again and again over the din of the entourage surrounding her. “Where are you?”

  He paused between it’s-none-of-your-business and what-would-it-hurt-to-tell-her. “Broadway.”

  “Sam’s singing on Broadway?” I exclaimed. He’d finally gotten the gig he wanted! And he hadn’t needed me after all. My heart raced with elation and pain together.

  “Oh,” Ace said. He realized that I could hear Sam, and he should have walked to Georgia to make this call. “Well, he’s busking.”