Page 155 of Levi

“I can ask her if you want me to. Or I can research lawyers and bring you back a list to interview first. You need counsel in your own corner.”

He nods. “I agree with you. Ask her if she’ll take me.”

“Okay, I’ll call her back today. I doubt it will be a hard sell. You’re a big client. If she takes you on, she would be able to tell you exactly where you stand. What you do after that is yours. I looked into it because you asked me to. The next step needs to be from someone you’re paying to stand on your side.”

After a while his eyes drop back to the folder. To the first page. To his father’s name on the binding line.

“He signed me over,” Levi says. “I was seventeen, scared of him, and I signed where he told me to. Then he signed the part I couldn’t, and I never once looked at what it was.”

“I know,” I say. “Anyone would have done the same thing. You were only a kid.”

“Same handwriting as the belt and the box,” he says.

I move my hand across the table until it’s covering his.

Covering his father’s name.

Chapter 61: Levi

Nobody orders me to walk back out on stage for a makeup performance. That’s the point of it.

The Saturday storm ate the back half of my set. It gave the internet a clip of me standing there looking stupid at the mic. There’s a hole in the Tuesday schedule, a dropped acoustic slot, and I do what I’ve never done. I call the stage manager and tell her to put me in it.

I want the stage tonight, so I take it.

Except it isn’t only mine to take. Two songs means the band needs to back me up, and the band never signed on for a Tuesday that was never on the sheet. I make them an offer they can’t refuse. Big Tex’s Roadhouse after, the night on my tab, food and drink till they run us out of the place. That buys me every ‘hell yes’ I need.

The performance is nothing special. Two songs and a wave, a make-good for the people who stood in the rain to watch their headliner walk off into it. I give them the tailgate single they scream for, then the slower one off the second record that always floats the phones up like lighters. I tell them I’m sorry about Saturday, that the weather beat me fair. That it would’ve been dangerous for us all if I’d kept singing. That I couldn’t hear what the stage manager was saying into my earpiece so I stopped singing.

They forgive me. I’m up here because I decided to be. I picked the night. I picked the slot. For nine minutes, under lights I chose to stand in, Freddie’s leash has so much slack I can’t feel it on my neck.

I climb down off that stage lit up and still buzzing.

There’s a bus full of musicians I owe a night, and a Tuesday night wide open to pay it. I could take them to any bar on this coast. The label would clear it, comp it, post a story about it before we ordered.

But that’s not what I promised them. I promised them the one place on this coast that’s ever felt like belonging instead of business. I pull the burner phone, and text Dante.

Levi: Think Tex would let me land a tour bus of degenerates on him tonight? Or is that too much even for the roadhouse?

The answer comes back fast.

Dante: I’ll ask to give him a heads-up. He’s going to say yes before I finish the sentence. You’re describing the happiest possible evening.

Levi: Ask him for real. I’m not Lee Streeter showing up to bless the locals. I’m asking if there’s room.

Dante: Done. I texted him. His words…tell him to bring every last one of them. They’d better show up hungry.

Levi: We’re on our way.

Dante: Can’t miss this. Heading there now.

I sit in the back of an idling tour bus grinning at the phone like a fool. The bus rolls up to the Roadhouse twenty minutes later, and through the windows I can see Stormy and Benji have already been at it. The tables aren’t where they were the last time I came. They’ve dragged every four-top into one long line down the middle of the floor. Chairs robbed from every corner and crammed in mismatched and tight, enough seats for a busload of musicians.

A couple of red-checked cloths thrown over the seams like they planned it this way all along. The pool table’s been recommissioned too, draped and reborn as a buffet station. In the twenty minutes it took us to drive over, they turned a calm Tuesday bar into a banquet hall.

Benji meets us at the door with both arms open, already counting heads. “There you are! How many did you bring? Never mind, doesn’t matter, I built for more. Everybody inside, grab a seat. No one stands around in here, we’re not savages.”

Sheila’s three deep at the bar and laughing about it. Out the propped back door, Big Bertha’s breathing smoke into the dark like the bar’s got a dragon chained behind it. The place smells like brisket and beer.