I’d meant it wouldn’t go over with the band. “We don’t have any originals, uh, fully rehearsed,” I said.
He wasn’t fooled. “Get some worked up,” Bern said. “For now, try to put a little bit of guts into this next set. You know what I mean. And you might be thinking of some questions for me. You’ll want to see my bona fides, check me out.”
“Who else do you work with?” I asked.
“Excellent question. I work with Riverfront Landing, Teek and the Mayfair Sound. Roscoe Branch.”
I knew Roscoe Branch. He’d gone sorta big in the last year, opening up for some visiting singer-songwriter types and touring solid venues beyond the Midwest. “Those aren’t country acts,” I said.
“Nowyou’re acting like someone negotiating a business relationship,” Bern said, rocking on his heels. “None of my current performers are country, but I’m willing to learn. You and I could teach each other something.”
With butterflies in my stomach, I watched Bern walk away, all the way across the room and back to the side booth he’d commandeered. And then the break was over and his money was in the jar.
9
With the incentive of a talent manager in the audience, I made sure the second set was a barn burner.
With Marisa gone, I had no trouble keeping control—and within that control, I could let my voice out to play a little, extending a note here, bending and embroidering there. I worked every corner of the stage. The light reflecting off the sparkle of my dress seemed to hypnotize the audience into willing submission. They gazed up at me, but they’d all gone somewhere else, remembering the first time they heard this song, who they danced with, who they loved or wanted to love them. Remembering sweet times or how things ended, or wondering where the dang years went. We sent them through time, to the moon.
I hadn’t told the girls about Bern, but they picked up on my energy, and the connection between us sizzled and zapped. We were tight, together, and the crowd was there with us, jumping in on choruses and singing for the rafters.
Audiencesloveda chorus.
After the final note, I looked behind me to find Suzy panting at her drums with her kitty ears askew. Rooster, leaning on her bass, had a mild, self-satisfied smile. Lourey rested her guitar on her hip andlaughed. Sweaty strands of her dark hair had pulled from her braids and clung to her neck. “That was okay, wasn’t it?” Shanny said, more to herself than any of us. Broken strings hung from her fiddle. “That was okay.”
It was more than that and people rushed up to tell us—Rooster’s boyfriend, some friends of Lourey’s, a few new fans. The tip jar filled up.
After the crowd cleared a bit, we began packing up our equipment. Lourey cornered me with her back to the room again. “So? Who was that all for? That roller-coaster ride?”
Bern had already slipped out, nodding to me over the crowd. The promise of his attention felt fragile, too delicate even to bring up with—
Joey hadn’t showed, I realized.
“Ah,” I said. “My mother. Had a few things to prove.”
The girls exchanged glances. “I didn’t know you had one of those.” Lourey said.
“It’s a dad I never had,” I said.
Suzy’s eyes shifted past me to Alex, resetting the back bar.
“I have a question,” Shanny spoke up, rattling the tips. “Anyone know how Benjamin Franklin got in the jar?”
“A hundred dollars?” Rooster yelped.
They all turned to me.
“You guys have time for a burger?”
Suzy raised her hand.
“Or whatever meatless substitute you’ll accept,” I said.
She lowered it. Shanny looked around anxiously. “I can’t stay too late. The kids…”
“And I have work in the morning,” Suzy said.
The encore of every show were the excuses—the kids, the job, the boyfriend, the whatever Lourey did when she wasn’t grinding her ax on my teeth. But tonight, they were all curious enough to stay.
