I hauled a post over to the porch, then dropped it with a bang. I sure felt like I was living my dream back in Nashville. It was just too bad the rest of Twice Shattered couldn’t feel the same way.
Grunting, I warmed up the circular saw, anchored the post, and carefully sliced off the end, the blade whirring and screaming the whole time.
It wasn’t even worth it to be mad at Mario and June. Twice Shattered was their band to start with. If they wanted to try to go big and sell out, I wasn’t going to stand in their way.
But that’s exactly what they had decided. Live music at local venues wasn’t going to cut it for them. They wanted radio hits and world tours, the whole rock star experience. And they invited me to come along for the ride, too.
I just didn’t want to play that game myself. Living by someone else’s schedule, playing music the label says you should play, and all that without any sort of guarantee you’d even go anywhere. Even after signing, most bands just flatlined anyway. That life wasn’t me, and I never really was able to pretend to care about bullshit I didn’t actually care about.
It was my best and worst quality, I thought, part of the reason I was always such a loner. The only problem was this time, it had cost me a job because the second I told Twice Shattered my decision, they’d cut me off from all the upcoming gigs, saying they needed to find a replacement who was going to stick around.
Hauling some more tools from the truck a minute later, my thoughts drifted from the band to Monica. She hated that I had left Twice Shattered. She already thought I was a drifter without any real goals, and maybe she was right. Maybe I should have been more ambitious, but that didn’t give her the right to kick me when I was down. And some of the things she said about me, they were just cruel.
Lazy bastard. Spineless. Good for nothing.
I could still hear her cursing me out that last night, both of us drunk as skunks.
The fight didn’t really matter. We’d been together for a little over a year, but Monica had never approved of me, not really. She always just wanted me to be someone else, the drummer god of her fantasies.
I dropped a crate of tools onto the porch with a grunt. Monica had tried calling me a couple of times the night before, and in the light of day, I decided I owed her a call back. We didn’t end on a good note, but we had given a year of our lives to each other. I grabbed my phone, then squatted at the edge of the porch as I looked over the lush green hillsides.
“Cass, I didn’t know if I’d hear from you. Thought you might have drifted away already.”
I brushed over the comment. “How’s the salon?”
“Busy,” she answered. “I’ve got more regulars than I can handle all of a sudden.” Monica and her best friend co-owned a hair salon that was popular with some of our music scene.
“That’s good,” I said, bouncing in my squat. “The business is growing even faster than you expected.”
She sighed. “Thanks, but I’m not calling to catch up, Cass. I wanted to give you some news before you heard it another way.”
All my muscles tensed as I stood, my brain on high alert. “What’s up?”
“Twice Shattered signed a contract a couple of days ago. The official announcement is coming this week, but the label is all in, Cass.”
“All in?”
“Major publicity budget, big tour, and lots of zeros.”
“Oh,” I said, blinking. “Well, good for them.”
It took a minute to fully hit. Monica filled me in on some of the details and let me know that Mario and June would be leaving town in a month and bringing the rest of the band with them.
But then, slowly, I started to fill in the blanks. With the contract they’d been offered, they weren’t going to struggle for years playing the studio game. Twice Shattered wouldn’t have to go on shitty, underfunded tour after shitty, underfunded tour, playing empty venues and scrapping by on even less than they had now.
If the label had chosen to invest in them, they were going to be loaded. Set for life, probably, and treated like royalty on the way.
And I could have been right there. I could have had it all, the dream that everyone else strived for, if only I had wanted it.
I could have been fucking rich.
“Cass, you there?” Monica asked.
“Yeah, sorry,” I grunted. “Just taking it in.”
“You could try to go back, you know. Mario and June would almost definitely take you. You’re one of the best drummers I’ve ever heard.”
“No,” I answered quickly. “That’s fine. I made my decisions already.”
