“It is,” I agree, and I let it go, because it is sweet, but it sits with me a little longer than it should.
The piano player starts something slow, and I do a thing I haven’t done in longer than I care to remember. I stand up, hold out my hand, and ask my wife to dance.
She looks at the other couples, none of them dancing, and then she looks at me, and she takes my hand anyway. She learned a long time ago; we don’t want to waste time being shy. If we can, we set an example for others to follow. There’s no floor, really. Just the space between the tables. We use it. She fits against me easy, my hand at the small of her back and hers up around my neck, and we turn slow to the song. Part of me’sbraced for the fan to join in with her date or ask to cut in. I mentally prepare for what I’ll say or how I’ll react.
Thankfully, we aren’t interrupted and it’s just us and a piano man playing a song neither of us knows the words to, and all I can think is there nowhere I’d rather be.
After dinner, we decide to walk. Josie tucks her arm through mine and we walk the little main street with our shoulders together, no place to be, the shop windows dark.
“You going to tell me what you and your mother talked about the other morning,” she says. “Or are you going to make me guess. Because I’ll guess, and I’ll be right, and then you’ll be annoyed I didn’t let you say it first.”
“How’d you know we talked?”
“Because she stopped by the café and said I may need to be a sounding board.”
“And you’ve waited all week?”
She shrugs. “I figured if you needed to vent, you would. I’ve been patient, now I’m asking.”
I walk us another half a block before I answer.
“The man that called,” I say finally. “The one where you texted me to come home.”
“I remember.”
“My mother thinks it was my father.” The word comes out of me strange. I don’t use it much. I don’t have much use for it. “She’s sure, actually. The voice, the way he talked around the hard parts. She lived a lifetime with the man. She’d know.”
Josie stops walking.
I keep her arm in mine so she has to stop with me, face to face on the empty sidewalk under a streetlight buzzing overhead, and I make myself say the rest, because she’s the one person, I don’t get to give the short version to.
“If it is him, he called my show, Jojo. Sat somewhere and dialed a stranger because he couldn’t dial me and asked how aman comes back to a son he threw away. And I didn’t know him. I gave him the kindest answer I had. I told my own father how to find the door. A door I don’t know if it’s open or not. The shit he did . . .” I shake my head and look to the ground.
She doesn’t reach for my face or tell me how I feel. She just steps in and puts her forehead against my jaw and her hand flat over my heart and stands there with me in the cold on an empty sidewalk.
“Okay,” she says, finally, into my collar. “Okay. So now I know it too. Whatever it turns into, you’re not the only one carrying it anymore. That’s the deal. That’s always been the deal.”
“I know.”
“Do you, though?” She leans back to look at me. “Because you’ve had all week to tell me and you waited until I asked. If this is the result of one caller, your father or not, I don’t like it. Maybe this show isn’t for you.”
“I vowed a long time ago to never let that man ruin anything for us.”
“We’re too strong for him. He’s never known the kind of love we share, the kind we have for our children. He’s an afterthought and taking advantage of the vulnerability you’re putting out there for your fans. He’s not a fan.”
She takes my face in both hands. “You are so much more of a man than he could ever dream of being and you owe him nothing.”
“I hate not knowing if it was him.”
“Then we don’t know together and now you’re sharing the burden.” She tucks back into my side and turns us toward the truck. “Come on. Walk me to the truck, rock star. Take me to the water tower and you might get a second date out of this yet.”
“I don’t know,” I tell her as I help her into the truck. “If I remember correctly, you want to do some things that probably shouldn’t happen on the first date.”
“It’s a ritual now.” she winks as I close the door.
FOURTEEN
Bex comes in early and finds me in my production room, listening to a new singer Elle found. She brought him to Beaumont to lay down a track and asked me to air it this week during the show.
