Dirty Little Secret Read online

  My shift ended at six. When I drove back to my granddad’s house, he had dinner waiting for me, and we made small talk over the pot roast. At my parents’ house I would have stayed sullenly silent, just in case they’d forgotten how I felt about them, but my granddad was only trying to help.

  “How was work?” he asked. He’d stressed to me when he got me the mall job that I couldn’t blow it off. A professional musician knew playing music was a job and viewed it seriously. In referring to my afternoon at the mall as “work,” he was warning me against treating the job as I’d treated everything else in the past year: like shit.

  “So much fun.” I was lying like a dog. “Thanks again for getting me this gig, Granddad. And, oh—Ernest Crabtree was in my band today.”

  My granddad’s eyes widened through folds of old skin. “How did he do? He’s gotten deaf as a doornail.”

  “He did great!” We laughed about poor Mr. Crabtree, and then I steered the topic away from work. The thought of Elvis made bile rise in my throat.

  I washed the dishes, then sat down with my granddad to watch Antiques Roadshow on PBS. This was the life of a girl doomed to spend the summer between high school and college living with her grandfather. After it was over, he got out his guitar, I opened my fiddle, and we played together for a few hours. Our music wasn’t electric, like performing onstage with Julie, or such a part of me that I hardly noticed, like practicing by myself, but a relaxing way to pass the time, like lying on my back in a warm lake, staring up at the sky.

  At ten, the phone interrupted us: an actual phone plugged into the wall in the kitchen, because my granddad didn’t see the need for a cell. I could tell from his “Heeeeey, sugar pie, how’s Minneapolis?” echoing around the old house that he was talking to my mom. My parents were with Julie on the final and most important leg of her pre-album tour before they came back to Nashville next week for the debut of her first single.

  “What?” my granddad asked. “Trouble? No, she’s been an angel.”

  I settled my fiddle under my chin and played softly enough that I wouldn’t disturb my granddad but loudly enough that I couldn’t hear what he said.

  “Bailey,” he called over my tune. “Come talk to your mom.”

  I could feel an ugly expression tighten my face as I packed up my violin and closed the case. In the kitchen I took the receiver my granddad held out to me and leaned against the 1960s wallpaper printed with dancing forks and spoons. “Hello.”

  “Hey, sweetie,” my mom said. “Behaving yourself?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m five years old and I’m behaving myself.”

  “If you feel you’re being treated that way, maybe you should ask yourself why.” My mother’s voice thinned out, pitching into the same guilt trips and threats she’d laid on me for a year. I wasn’t listening anymore. I didn’t need to. I knew what she’d say because I’d heard it a million times, and because, nauseatingly, I was exactly like her.

  I’d inherited her high-strung anxiety about success, along with my dad’s easygoing willingness to practice his music dogmatically—the terrible combination that had made me a proficient has-been before I was old enough to vote. Julie was unlike either of them. She loved music, she wanted to be successful, and she’d enjoyed the bluegrass festivals that had made up our childhood. But privately to me, she often said she longed to quit it all so she could go to the movies with her friends on Friday night, or get a job at the Gap. In short, she was the only one in the family who was normal. That’s probably what the record company saw in her when they tapped her (and not me) to become famous.

  When my mom took a breath, I asked, “May I please speak with Julie?”

  “Julie is not ready to speak with you.”

  “She doesn’t want to talk to me, or you won’t give her the phone?”

  “She’s sitting right here, shaking her head no.”

  I believed it. For the past year, every night that Julie had been out of town, I’d called her around ten. But she’d told me the night of my accident that she wasn’t speaking to me anymore. Last night, for the first time, she hadn’t answered when I called.

  “Here’s your father,” my mom said. They murmured in the background. Then my dad said brightly, “I miss you, Bay.”

  My stomach twisted into a knot, my nose tickled, my eyes watered, and suddenly I was sobbing silently, turning my mouth away from the receiver so I didn’t gasp in my dad’s ear.

  “Bay?” he prompted me.

  I couldn’t talk to him, but I didn’t want to hang up on him, so I leaned through the doorway and stretched the spiral cord to hold out the receiver in the direction of my granddad.

  He jumped up from his chair, surprisingly spry for an old guy, and took the phone from me. As I walked into the living room to grab my fiddle case and escape up the stairs, I heard him saying, “Mack, I think she’s really tired right now. I worked her pretty hard around the shop today . . . .”

  I closed myself in the bedroom I was using and dealt with my feelings the way I had for a year. I rummaged in my purse, pulled out my now-battered notebook printed inside with music staffs rather than blue lines—my fifth notebook since I’d started over without Julie—and wrote a song. This one was about crying suddenly, unable to speak on the phone, and afterward wondering why. As always, I wasn’t so sure about the words, and I would continue to tinker with them, but I was dead sure about the melody and the crazy chords that held it up like pillars under a highway.

  As I considered the song, playing it over in my mind, I decorated the edges of the pages in doodles of hearts and flowers, shading them with delicate strokes in colored pencil. I’d never had the urge to do that in the notebooks I’d filled with songs as a child. I’d played those tunes with Julie. I’d gotten her to sing them with me when they weren’t even done so I could hear where I was going. But for these new notebooks, I had nobody to play with. I might spend a lifetime as an anonymous costumed fiddle player at the mall and never hear my own compositions—not in real life. The drawings of hearts and flowers were a strange compulsion. I felt better when I added them, as if they were a consolation prize, a sympathy card after a loss.

  It wasn’t until I rolled into bed that I realized my granddad had been half-right when he made an excuse for me over the phone to my dad, saying I was tired because I’d worked hard. I was so upset with my mom and Julie and myself that my dad’s kindness had been too much of a shock. But I probably wouldn’t have reacted that way if I hadn’t had such a hard day at work with Elvis.

  I was afraid Elvis would turn me in for ruining “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” I suspected he wouldn’t dare. Musician jobs were too hard to come by in Nashville, which was chock-full of wannabe’s. Elvis would prefer to fly under the radar. He wouldn’t want to cause a stir at the casting office by complaining about a coworker.

  Even if he did, it would be his word against mine. My boss would believe him, though, because he’d worked in the tribute band longer. I would be fired. My granddad would be disgraced because he’d put in a good word for me and I’d let him down. He would report my failure to my parents. They would carry through on their threat to withhold my college tuition. For the rest of the summer I would spend not just the mornings but the afternoons, too, helping my granddad in his shop, sanding guitars and sweeping up wood shavings as if they were pieces of my own soul that had sloughed off my body and fallen onto the floor.

  Or, if my parents were cutting me off anyway, I could buy a bus ticket to L.A. Wasn’t that where runaways went? Out there, passersby probably didn’t even throw a dollar to rock guitarists on the street, but a bluegrass musician from Nashville might be a novelty. Playing my fiddle would keep me out of prostitution for a whole day before I had to pawn it.

  Or I could be proactive and tell on Elvis before he told on me. He was the guilty one, after all. I had to keep reminding myself of this. He was the one who’d made lewd comments. I’d only played in the wrong key in response.

  The
next afternoon, I parked in the mall’s vast lot, walked around to one of the loading docks, and swung through the employee door of what used to be a Borders bookstore. My plan was to let Ms. Lottie make me up like a demure 1950s teenager, then march into the casting office and file my complaint against Elvis. I’d rehearsed my speech in my head so many times that I’d memorized it. And I’d strategized that I should complain in the squeaky-clean ponytail wig Ms. Lottie pinned on me rather than my normal bad-ass hairdo, so my boss would more likely believe me.

  The bookstore was too big to be this empty, books long gone. Only a few comfy chairs and a couch remained where the café used to be. Now it was a lounge area for musicians to tune their instruments and wait for the rest of their group. But nobody had their instruments out today. Willie Nelson watched and occasionally interjected a comment while Elvis argued with Dolly Parton. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Elvis’s tone and body language were a lot like what he’d used on me the day before. Good—at least I knew he wasn’t really a king around here. I likely wasn’t the only fiddle player who’d ever pissed him off.

  I slipped into the restroom to scrub off my makeup, plus the fine sawdust that had stuck to it during my morning of helping my granddad build guitars. Then I returned to the wardrobe area set up at the front of the store, near the floor-to-ceiling windows onto the mall, now covered in brown paper to protect us from the curious stares of shoppers. I plopped into Ms. Lottie’s chair.

  “You know, hon,” she said, peering at me over the tops of her rhinestone reading glasses, “you could come in without makeup. Then we wouldn’t have to go through so many steps.”

  “I never leave the house without makeup,” I told her. “I’d feel naked.” All of which had become true in the past year. I’d been hiding behind inky black mascara and a scowl since I cut off my long hair. Nobody messed with a tough-looking chick like me. I’d felt like I was surrounded by a force field when I’d passed Elvis in the lounge area just now. I got in trouble only when I washed my makeup off and Ms. Lottie made me up nicely to look like the high school portrait of my now-dead grandma.

  “Um,” I said as Ms. Lottie fitted a wig of long, straight blond locks over my head. With my hair color back to natural and no makeup, in the mirror I looked more like myself than I had in a year, which made me uncomfortable. “Does this hair go with Elvis?”

  “You’re not with Elvis today, hon,” she said, wrapping the wig with a bandanna printed like the American flag. “You’re with Willie Nelson.”

  “Why?” I asked her reflection. Even without mascara, my blue eyes looked huge. I tried not to seem so obviously panicked. Elvis must have complained to the management about me already. I’d been transferred but not fired. Not yet.

  “Elvis only works a few days a week,” Ms. Lottie explained. “He bartends the rest. We couldn’t put you with him all the time. Everybody’s schedule is real irregular because nobody can make a living doing this. And then, of course, sometimes we have people out sick. Or they lay out of work, more likely.” She placed her hands firmly on either side of the flag bandanna and gave the wig a hard jerk to straighten my fake scalp. “Even if you were all here every day of the week, we’d switch up the bands so you didn’t kill each other. You musicians are impossible, and Elvis is the absolute worst. Didn’t he come on to you?”

  I was so surprised that another “Um” was all I could manage.

  “Didn’t he ask what was under your circle skirt?” Ms. Lottie insisted, leaning forward to find the foundation she used on me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Sounds like Dolly is telling him off, though,” Ms. Lottie pointed out as the noise of their argument rose over the empty bookshelves.

  She came in close to work on my face and coaxed me to relax my jaw. I couldn’t let go. My mind whirled with the speech I’d rehearsed for the last twenty hours. Now I didn’t need it. I should have been relieved. Elvis wasn’t going to tell on me. He’d insulted me and then had an argument with me because he did that to everybody. I could still tell on him if I wanted. Other employees and Ms. Lottie would probably back me up.

  Instead of relief, though, I felt let down and exhausted. All my hours of scheming and plotting were a big departure from my usual routine of boredom and apathy. I was left with that buzz of adrenaline, and now I had nowhere to put it.

  I was even a little disappointed to hear that Elvis came on to anything in a circle skirt, not just me. When I’d thought I was something special to him, at least I’d felt adult and sexy. Now I pined for this pervert to have eyes only for me. There was something seriously wrong with me.

  “Hon, we can’t have tears. I’ve already done your eyeliner.” Ms. Lottie dabbed the corner of a tissue at my lash line, then stood back to look at me. “What’s the matter? Boy trouble?”

  “I wish.” How delicious it would be to get this upset about a hot guy who cared about me instead of any of the hot guys I’d hung with that year, who would throw me to the piranhas rather than get their feet wet.

  “I don’t know about that,” Ms. Lottie said, feathering mascara through my lashes to replace the thick mascara I’d just taken off. “Be careful what you wish for.”

  After all the drama of Elvis Tuesday, Willie Nelson Wednesday was laid-back. Ms. Lottie costumed me in a tight tank top and a denim miniskirt with a frayed hem. I passed for a member of Willie’s bedraggled 1970s entourage, I guessed. Either that or a girl from the boonies dressed in her finest for a tourist trip to Nashville.

  Our quartet moseyed down the loading ramp to pile into a van, which drove us to the state capitol building. After the governor signed a tax bill into law on the marble steps, we entertained the lawmakers and lobbyists sipping punch with “Always on My Mind,” “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” and “Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” each song in the key of D. I’d never noticed that everything was in the same key.

  Yeah, maybe Willie Wednesday was a little too laid-back. I should have loved this field trip because it got us away from the mall, outside in the sunshine. The huge capitol building was a fake Greek temple set on a grassy hill at the edge of downtown, with skyscrapers in front of us, and hints of country music wafting to us on the breeze from the tourist district on Broadway. But whenever I got close to Willie to confer about the next few tunes, he reeked of pot. So did the guitarist and the mandolin player in similar hippie garb. I thought about asking them for a toke, joking that it went with the outfit. But if I could smell it on them, my granddad would be able to smell it on me when I returned to his house that night. Which meant no toking up behind the bushes on the grounds of the state capitol.

  On Thursday, because God did not love me anymore, I played in a band with Hank Williams at a ribbon cutting for the city’s new sewage treatment plant. At least it didn’t smell yet. And to their credit, unlike Willie’s band, these guys hadn’t imbibed Hank’s poison of choice. The bass guitarist was a talented musician who looked—and smelled—sober. Hank played guitar reasonably well and sounded fine when he sang in his normal range, but the yodeling. Oh, the yodeling. For a musician like me burdened with perfect pitch, being deposited in a band with a pitchy Hank Williams singing “Long Gone Lonesome Blues” was torture, pure and simple. I’d thought I needed to concentrate to play in D-sharp when Elvis was playing in D, but that was nothing compared with the Zen-like place I retreated to in my mind and the deep, measured breaths I took to keep the look of distaste off my face while Hank yodeled.

  Friday I thought I was prepared for anything, but Ms. Lottie threw me a curveball and announced I was playing at the tenth anniversary of a steak house out near the airport with Dolly Parton. Dolly was the version of Ms. Parton from her most popular, glitzy 1970s era. That meant cleavage, and not just for Dolly. For all four of us in her band.

  I’d dressed up in costume from age seven to age seventeen, looking more like a pageant toddler than a bluegrass musician. Julie and I had worn matching “country” outf
its that nobody out in the country could ever pick beans or herd cows in: custom-made dresses with knee-length skirts standing almost straight out like we were square dancers. When enough sequins sparkled around our necks and our blond curls were sprayed stiff underneath our cowgirl hats, people noticed only how alike we looked, not how different we were. They feigned astonishment that we weren’t twins even though I was two years older. I found this fun at seven, nauseating at seventeen.

  But no country costume could have prepared me for dressing up like Dolly Parton’s right-hand girl a few weeks after I’d turned eighteen. I’d been wearing sexy clothes in the past year—provocative clothes, my mom had said with distaste—but to me that had meant choosing a body-hugging minidress for the homecoming dance, or slicing a deeper V in my threadbare White Stripes T-shirt. I’d never shown this much boob in public.

  Ms. Lottie acted like it was nothing. Costumes were part of showbiz, after all, even the steak house version of showbiz. She pinned my bouffant brunette wig in place—only Dolly got to wear a platinum wig. Ms. Lottie had already taken in my spangled maxi-dress a few inches before I arrived. All she had to do was pull it, shift it, give up, and make me add some padding to my bra, then pull and shift the gown again and shove my precocious fake cleavage into place. She stood back with her hands on her hips to survey her work, then reached out to coax one of my baby boobs a little higher. “Sorry, hon. That’s the best I can do with what you’ve got. Just stay behind the others.” She gave me an encouraging pat on my sequined ass as I staggered on high heels into the bombed-out Borders to find Dolly.