Cash closed the book and placed it in his lap, then cocked his head at me. “Did you read a lot growing up?”
“All the time! My mom used to take me grocery shopping with her after school, and I would walk alongside her cart with a book held in front of my face. She had to take me to the library at least once a week.”
He smiled at me. “Same. Do you still read?”
“Not as often as I’d like. Before this, the last book I’d read wasKing of Ashes,a thriller that takes place in Virginia. I just don’t have a lot of time, you know? Audiobooks help, but sometimes I can’t concentrate while working on my art and listen to music instead. And it’s too easy to plop down on the couch at the end of the day and watch TV instead.”
“Do you usually read thrillers?”
“I’ll read anything if it’s good. Fiction, non-fiction, biographies, educational stuff.”
Cash opened his backpack, rummaged around, and came out with another paperback. “This was the last thing I read, if you’re looking for something new.”
The book was a biography titledMark Twain, by Ron Chernow. A photo of the mustached man filled the front cover.
“Might be too dry for you, but give it a go.”
“I know very little about him, actually,” I said.
I ended up devouring the book in a single day. Cash and I split a bottle of wine that night and spent two hours discussing the book and all the interesting parts of Mark Twain’s life.
After that, we sort of formed our own two-person book club. Cash picked a book for us and read the paperback—he said he preferred having a physical book in his hands—while I preferredlistening to the audiobook version. Then, when we were both finished, we split a bottle of red wine and discussed it.
“You have no idea how nice it is to have someone to talk to,” he said late one night. Everyone else had gone to bed, while the two of us sat together on the bus loveseat long into the night.
“You have your bandmates,” I pointed out.
“I mean someone to talk to aboutbooks. Milo and Riot never read for fun, and the only thing Vi cares about it romantasy. She’s currently obsessed with some dragon book series where the main character is also named Violet.”
“Happy to be your partner in reading,” I said with an intoxicated smile. “It feels good to read again! I forgot how much I love it.”
“Real life gets in the way of our true passions,” Cash agreed.
“What do your parents do?” I asked. “Aside from turning their noses down at rock music.”
Cash snorted. “They own a crematorium.”
I sat up a little straighter. “Holy shit, really?”
“Calm down. It’s not nearly as interesting as it sounds.”
“They make money by turning dead bodies into ash. That’s metal as fuck.”
He barked a laugh. “I guess so. But it’s really quite boring in practice. They wanted my sister and I to take over the business some day.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t want to spend your whole life taking care of dead bodies?”
“God, no,” he replied. “Dead bodies don’t bother me, but I wasn’t interested.”
“So your sister is stuck with it?”
“Not quite. She went to medical school, which was enough to make my parents happy. I wanted a different life from all of that.”
“But not the MIT life?”
He grimaced. “That was never my dream. It was my parents’ dream for me when they realized I didn’t want to take over the family business. They took my rejection of the crematorium and segued it into a new plan without ever asking me what I wanted.”
“Parents are good at that.”
