You should make better decisions, Glory.
Eli’s tone when he’d said that. His expression. As if it was already too late for her. And maybe it was a matter of time before he had her facedown in cuffs, too.
Like he’d never kissed her.
Then whispered her name in a stunned voice.
Then kissed her again.
A great fresh bracing tide of pissed-off-ness propelled her out of her chair. “I’m going out for a bit, Mom.”
She grabbed her jacket from the coat rack. She paused and pivoted. She’d almost forgotten.
She grabbed her stuffed tiger out of her bedroom and put it in the living room window, so it could have a view of the highway into town.
And she bolted out the door before her mother could ask questions.
She walked the whole way, down the unpaved road her family had lived on forever, which needed a coat of gravel now that fall was approaching, and gravel cost money. She knew every tree lining it; she even fondly, with an ache, remembered the ones that had toppled in storms. Every inch of it was the equivalent of a memory cell.
Down round the bend and through a narrow path trampled by decades of local feet and lined by big old pines was a shortcut to unused pasture lands surrounded by a splintered whitewashed fence. Every now and then someone mowed the grass in there so it didn’t become too much of a fire hazard. In spring a thousand different wildflowers poked through that fence. When she was a kid, she’d pretended to be Queen Elizabeth and Eli had been Sir Walter Raleigh, and he’d laid down his jacket for her to walk across. She’d made a crown out of the wildflowers when she was Maid Marian, and she and Jonah and her siblings had pretended to be Robin Hood’s merry band. Eli got to be Robin Hood. Jonah was Little John. They’d made that elm tree their headquarters, their fort, their castle.
Who knew Eli would actually grow up to be the Sheriff of Nottingham?
She paused on the rise and looked out toward the highway. Men in white painter’s coveralls were clambering over the billboard on the highway, slapping up a new ad. The lip gloss ad was vanishing, which was kind of a shame, mostly because someone had drawn a pretty funny clown on it not too long ago, its butt up in the air, aimed at the big shiny lips. Glory was an admirer of subversiveness in its various subtle forms. Up above on the lip of the canyon was Hellcat Canyon’s version of Olympus: a scattering of huge rustic summer homes, windows glinting like change you found in the street, belonging to tech millionaires and other people (none of whom Glory knew personally) who could buy a house and not live in it for huge swaths of the year.
As much as she itched to get out of town, every time it expanded into view as she emerged from the woods it was like hearing a familiar, beloved old song: meticulously maintained Gold Rush–era homes and storefronts glowing in dusty pastel shades unwound sinuously down tree and lamp-post-studded Main Street. More signs that fall was beginning to supplant summer: gerbera daisies and marigolds and sunflowers and mums, oranges and reds and golds, were now bursting from the little baskets hanging on hooks and the terra-cotta pots flanking storefront doorways. Hellcat Canyon was hardly a tourist destination, but rents were pretty modest and all of the businesses were small enough to survive any monkey wrenches the economy might throw. Some of the merchants, like Kayla Benoit who’d named her boutique after herself (and wasn’t that just like Kayla, everyone said) and whose clothes weren’t in Glory’s budget (she preferred jeans and snug tops, anyway), even owned their buildings.
Glory traveled two blocks down Main and was halfway down Jamboree Street like a homing pigeon even before she realized she’d hooked that left. That wasn’t her ultimate destination, but she decided she might as well check in with the mothership, aka Allegro Music, and she needed strings, anyway.
The big bulletin board on the side wall outside Allegro bristled with decades of staples, which was all that was left of flyers from bands and shows that had come and gone. But a new and blindingly pink flyer currently flanked drummer Monroe Porter’s “lead singer wanted for death metal band” flyer. It was always there. When rain, dust, wind, and snow finally battered the last one into tatters, he put another one up. He’d done it for years. Hope did spring eternal. Especially in music stores.
“Good luck, Monroe,” she muttered, because she really did wish him well. She might be queen of the open mic here in Hellcat Canyon, but it was harder than hell to pull a band together here in the sticks. Let alone areliableband. Glory had played with Monroe once or twice, and he knew her usual open mic set pretty well, but she thought theRAWWR RAWWR RAWWRway death metal singers felt obliged to sing was really funny, which rather hurt Monroe’s feelings. Different strokes was all. Over the years, she’d played a few gigs with rounded-up musicians in nearby towns like Black Oak and Whitney, but the nearest largish city was Sacramento, and that was nearly two hours away, and reliable transportation was another thing altogether. Currently she and her mom took turns driving their rattling old truck.
She peered at the bright pink flyer.
One Night Only!
THE BABY OWLS
Misty Cat Cavern
1 Main Street, Hellcat Canyon
Saturday, November12th
Show starts at 8 p.m.
Glory gave a short laugh. “I’ll be damned.”
The flyer featured a photocopied image of three guys sporting woolly neo-lumberjack beards, heavy black hipster eyeglasses, and plaid flannel shirts. Their arms were crossed over their chests and they looked full of themselves, as rock stars ought to.
It just so happened that the Misty Cat Cavern was her original destination.
And then she froze.
Another inspiration had popped into her head like a quarter dropped in a slot machine.
And her heart picked up a beat.
