At the door, she stops me with a hand on my forearm. “Thank you for telling me about Troy. How you feel.”
“If you’re going to sit in our rooms, you get the mess. No point pretending we’re tidy.”
“I don’t need tidy.” She squeezes once and lets go. “I need real.”
“Same here.”
I head back down the service hall toward the venue, passing the framed photos of acts that came through before us. Some smiled too hard. Some looked tired. The ones I respect look like they’re on their way to work.
Onstage, backline is set, cables taped, mics ready. Houston tunes without looking at the tuner. Salem argues with a monitor like it’s a person who owes him money. I step into the center, and the room settles the way rooms do when someone who pays attention walks in.
I count us in for a warm-up take. We play the bones of a song that isn’t a song yet and find a pocket that could be something ifwe keep our heads. It’s there. Not magic. Work. We push it twice more and then cut before we ruin what we found.
On the break, I check my phone. The headline is still there, still loud, still wrong. I put the phone face down. I don’t need it to tell me what the day is.
There’s a part of me that still tries to make excuses for the kid I carried through backstage halls when he fell asleep. I think about the man who looked at family accounts and decided short-term shine mattered more than loyalty.
Will he recover from the Lou situation? From getting kicked out of his family’s band? Maybe. Maybe not.
I’ve spent years wrapping worry around him like bubble wrap. He kept pulling it off. He liked the attention of the wound more than healing it. He proved it when he reached into the drawer we don’t touch and came up smiling.
I’m the one who’s supposed to keep track of what matters. The band. The work. The crew. The rooms we leave better than we found them. The people who trust us. Lou too, if she lets me put her on that list.
I don’t have to keep Troy’s feelings on the pile if he won’t add ours to his. That’s not cruelty. That’s life.
I used to think worrying about Troy was part of loving him. I used to think love meant carrying what someone drops and never asking them to pick it up. He taught me different when he chose himself over all of us. He made his choice look easy. He chose himself over his family. Maybe that’s the part that hurts the worst.
11
HOUSTON
Sagebrushin the morning is quiet enough to hear the air conditioner. I unlock the front, let Lou in first, and flip the breakers for the live room. Dust lifts and settles. She sets her tote on the couch and looks around like she’s measuring the space for a new idea.
“I like it better in daylight,” she says.
“Me too.” I check the red light over the door, then the talkback. “We can start in A. B still hums.”
We lay out the day. Two hours to sketch a demo. An hour to listen to old takes. Lunch, if we remember it. She flips her sketchbook open and sketches the room. I boot the rig and patch the mics that always behave.
The front door opens without a knock. “Who forgot to invite me?” a voice sings.
I turn. “Mom?”
Talia Turner sweeps in like she owns the place, which she could if she wanted. Long blond curls, warm brown eyes, short andfull-figured in a bright dress that shows she knows she still looks good. Bangles clink. Her smile is the same one that got us out of bad contracts and into better rooms.
I’m surprised she’s here. Between her home in Los Angeles and her home in Vegas, she usually picks the beach over the desert.
“You didn’t think I’d miss my boys when I was passing through, now did you?” she says, kissing my cheek, then holding Lou at arm’s length to look her over. “And you must be Lou. Honey, look at you. You’ve got the hunger in your eyes.”
Lou laughs, startled. “That obvious?”
“To me.” Mom winks. “I’m Talia. I cuss a little. I hug a lot. My boys tell me I’m too much, and that’s just fine by me.”
“Hi,” Lou says, a little smile on her lips, and her shoulders drop a notch.
Mom sets her purse on the piano and looks around. “This place raised you. You remember sleeping on those rugs?”
“I remember Salem snoring,” I say.
