by Lisa Suzanne
“All of the above.” I let out an uncomfortable chuckle, and he laughs.
“Thanks for your honesty.” He shrugs. “It’s fine. Not every band is for every person. Everyone fucking loves The Doors, but they’re not my thing.”
I feel a bit like I’m seeing a different side to him as he gets a little passionate about music. It feels like he’s opening the gates, even just infinitesimally, as he starts to let me in. I just don’t know if I want to be let in.
“What is your thing?” I ask.
His brows push together as he asks what I mean without words.
“What’s your favorite band?”
“G N’ F-in’ R.”
It’s my turn to give him the what in the world are you talking about look.
He laughs. “Guns N’ fucking Roses, man.”
My mouth makes that smile motion again, this time a little bigger than before. “Now there’s one we can agree on.”
His brows shoot up. “Yeah?”
I nod. “I like classic rock, though you’re dead wrong about The Doors.”
“You like classic rock but you don’t like Capital Kingsmen?” he challenges.
“You’re more heavy metal than classic rock,” I say. “Besides, you tell me if you like listening to a band where the drummer knocked up your sister and left her to raise him on her own with nothing when he has everything.”
I slap a hand over my mouth once the words are out in shock that I let them slip, and he looks equally shocked by my outburst.
I try to backtrack, but the truth about how I feel is out there. “I’m sorry. I don’t know where that came from. You’ve been so nice to me, and that was uncalled for.”
He shakes his head. “It’s all right,” he mutters.
“You didn’t know. She didn’t know how to get in touch with you. She was planning to go to the meet and greet that night...” I let that hang in the air between us.
“But you had to come instead,” he says flatly.
“Yeah,” I murmur. “She worked at the company as a research assistant. When we saw on the anniversary party invitation that your band was playing, she told me it was fate.”
He doesn’t say anything, so I fill the silence.
“She played your music all the time for him,” I say, my eyes trained out the window as I think how hard this entire situation is for all three of us. “I think it was her way of letting him know his dad.”
He presses his lips together as he seems to retreat back into himself. As quickly as the gates started to open, they’re slammed shut again.
CHAPTER 16: BRETT
“You hungry?” I ask, changing the subject.
She nods, and I walk over to the fridge to rattle off our options. “Salad, sandwiches, hummus and veggies.” I look through the contents of the freezer, too. “Creamy potato soup, chili, or mac and cheese.”
“Any of that would be lovely,” she says.
I narrow my eyes at her. “We ordered enough food for three, so don’t be shy. And don’t give me that noncommittal crap. What do you like?”
“Mac and cheese,” she says. “And a small salad. And I hate potatoes.”
I freeze where I’m standing then slowly turn to look at her. “You hate potatoes?” I can’t mask the awe in my voice. “Like even French fries?”
She lets off a soft chuckle. It’s rare to see a smile out of this girl, and I’ve yet to hear her laugh, so it feels like a real win when I get one of those little grunts. “Fries are okay. Tater tots are fine, too. But just regular old sliced up, cubed, baked, or mashed potatoes?” She wrinkles her nose. “No thanks.”
“Who hates potatoes?” I muse as I pull out the bowl of salad and the mac and cheese.
“A girl who had to eat them for every meal in her third foster home before she’d be excused from the dinner table,” she says, and it’s hard to imagine what her childhood must’ve been like. “Sausage potato hash for breakfast, mashed potatoes with lunch, baked potato for dinner. Every night for the entire nine months I lived there.”
“Oh,” I say dumbly. This girl...she just keeps throwing me for a loop. She keeps saying things that I have no idea how to respond to, things I’ve never even thought about, things she’s lived through that have never once been on my radar. I pull the woe is me card with the fucked-up relationship I had with my parents, but she didn’t even have parents. “Seems like a valid reason.”
She grunt-chuckles again, and my chest pulses with an unfamiliar feeling.
I knock it dead away as fast as I can.
“Do you keep in touch with anyone from foster homes?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “Nobody worth keeping in touch with.”
“Was there anything good about it?”
She tilts her head in this way I’m already starting to get used to. “I made some friends at the time, I guess. Each house had their own good things and bad things.”
“How many homes did you live in?”
She sighs. “Five. My first house was hard because I’d just lost my parents and my sister. I was scared. The second house was the worst. There was an older boy who bullied all the younger kids, so I just tried to stay out of his way. Then there was potato house, and then the fourth house had six kids. The fifth one was the one where Brie and I were reunited, and by that time she was sixteen. We stayed together there until she aged out, and then she legally adopted me.”
“I can’t even imagine,” I muse. I hated my childhood, hated the home where my parents raised me, but at least I had a home. It’s easy to take that shit for granted when you don’t know anything else.
“What about you?” she asks, deflecting. “Do you have any siblings?”
I shake my head as I grab some paper plates down from a cabinet and use the tongs to make a pile of salad on each one. “Nah. My parents knew they couldn’t do better than the first, so they didn’t bother trying.” I shoot a wink at her, but let’s be honest: I’m using humor as a self-defense mechanism.
The truth is that they shouldn’t have had any kids at all. I don’t know if they ever really wanted kids or if I was an accident. I never asked. It’s a lot for a person to know, I guess.
Nothing I ever do is good enough for my father, including the Grammys and the platinum records. Instead of a congratulations, he wanted to know how many more we needed to sell to hit diamond status. He wanted to know why we didn’t get that fourth Grammy we’d been up for.
And my mother is too busy with her little society clubs and making sure she has the perfect image to care what the fuck I’m up to. She was always strict with me as I grew up, but mostly when it came to appearances. My top button was undone. My hair was messy. My tie wasn’t straight. And she had a damn hernia when I was caught smoking in the parking lot in seventh grade.
Yeah, the kid who smoked cigarettes and was hospitalized for alcohol poisoning at fourteen grew into a man who gets caught with his pants down in public and made headlines when he was arrested for possession.
I may have some great accomplishments under my belt, but my parents have only ever seen the faults.
And that’s exactly why I swore I’d never have kids.
I have no example to follow to know how to raise a kid the right way. It’s not just that I’m selfish and I like to party. I’m physically missing the elements that make up a parent. I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I was an accident, and here I am trying to make things right for something I didn’t even know I did until a few nights ago.
“Seems like they gave you a healthy dose of confidence,” she teases.
If she only knew the truth...the confidence is a ruse. Just like mommy dearest pretends everything is perfect in her little housewives club, I do the same. I pretend my history is untainted. I paint the picture of an idyllic childhood. The only one who really knows the truth is my best friend...the guy who knows everything about me. The guy who knew it was a bad idea to invite my kid and his aunt with us onto our tour bus, but he all
owed it anyway because deep down he knew it was the right thing, too.
“Something like that,” I say, and I can’t help but wonder what she thinks my childhood was like. It was vastly different from hers, but in the end, neither of us have any family left in our lives...except for one little boy who we both share now in very different ways.
And somehow that instantly bonds us even though it’s not a bond I ever wanted to share with another human.
Tommy joins us for lunch, which takes our conversation back to the shallow end.
“Gummy bears?” she teases him when he sits. He claims the chair across from her, leaving the one next to him as my only option since some child seat contraption is strapped down to the one next to her.
“You don’t fuck with a man and his gummy bears,” he says.
She holds up both hands innocently. “I won’t touch them, but you better stay off my Twizzlers.”
“You’re both disgusting,” I say. “Who eats candy with no chocolate on it?”
“Chocolate dipped gummy bears,” Tommy muses. “You might be onto something there, kid.”
I laugh. I appreciate the ease of the conversation between the three of us as we eat lunch. Tommy can get along with anybody even though he can also be a total asshole. We’ve had some knock-down, drag out fights, too. It’s not all unicorn glitter and rainbows, but he and Tyler and Dustin are my family now, and I appreciate the fuck out of those guys.
Which is why this change has been particularly difficult on me. We’re opening our family, allowing it to grow and expand, and it’s not something I was prepared for.
And something else I’m not at all prepared for is the territorial feeling that washes over me in waves as Tommy gets that tiny smile out of Hannah.
My hackles rise.
I want him out of here. I want him back in his room, sulking on his bed as he watches a movie by himself. He isn’t allowed to make her smile, no matter how small it is.
I shake out the thought.
It’s completely ridiculous. I’m glad anybody is lightening her load, no matter how small. I just wish it was easier for me to figure out how to do that when it comes so naturally to Tommy.
CHAPTER 17: BRETT
When we hear crying over the monitor, I walk with Hannah toward the bedroom. She flicks on the light, and Chance is standing in the crib looking sleepy. The crying stops as soon as he spots Hannah. I watch her bend over the crib to pick up the baby, and I get another peek of that ink on her back as her shirt lifts. But this time, it’s more than a quick peek. This time, I make out the entire thing.
It’s a feather, and woven into the shaft of the feather is the word strength in a beautifully simple script font.
I commit the image to memory.
I clear my throat. “Can I do anything?”
She glances at me and shakes her head. “Why don’t you just watch and maybe you can give it a try another day?”
I nod as she lifts the baby out of the crib and carries him over to the changing pad on top of my dresser. She straps him in for safety then gently peels off his pajamas. She grabs the shirt he was wearing earlier and puts it on him before changing his diaper, and then she finishes dressing him. She unbuckles him and lifts him into her arms with a quick kiss on his cheek.
“And that’s how we get up from a nap,” she croons softly as she bounces Chance in her arms, and he smiles at her.
Their dynamic is nice, but I can’t help but be reminded that she isn’t his mother. She’s forced into that role now anyway.
“Want me to hold him while you wash your hands?” I ask. It’s the first time I’m voluntarily asking, and her eyes seem to light up just a little at that.
“That would be great,” she says, and she hands him over to me. I try to hold him the way I see her do it, with him sort of on my hip and my arm under his bottom for support, but I still feel like I’m doing it wrong.
“That is a much better hold than the one earlier,” she says, and her tone is teasing but her implication is sincere.
My chest warms at her praise. “Practice makes perfect, right?” I look down at the boy in my arms, and he looks up at me. And then I carry him through the bus, past Tommy, who ignores us both as he watches something on his phone (probably porn), and toward the front cabin, where she washes her hands at the sink.
“Has he been around a lot of strangers?” I ask out of the blue when she’s done wiping her hands on a towel. She takes him from me.
“Not a lot, but he hasn’t been sheltered, either,” she says.
“He just doesn’t seem afraid of me.”
“That’s because you’re his daddy,” she murmurs.
Is that true? I’m not sure, but the word sends a ripple of fear down my spine.
* * *
The rest of the day passes like all days on a bus with the addition of a chick and a kid. Snacks, movies, TV shows, planning the next meal. A little time for work, a little time for play.
Hannah pulls out some contraption from the wardrobe in my bedroom and pops it up in the front cabin between the couches. It has a bunch of kids toys on it and a little seat for the kid in the middle of it, and she sets him in there. He bounces around and plays with all the shit for hours, which gives us a bit of a break and keeps him entertained, too. And, according to Hannah, it’s great for his fine motor development and critical thinking skills, whatever the fuck that means.
I get in touch with Tyler to plan dinner, and we order some food for delivery to the rest area where we’ll stop. We go with some local Italian place, and I get pepperoni pizza and spaghetti with meatballs for our bus. We stretch and get off the bus for a while, and Tyler’s daughter loves seeing my kid. She’ll make the perfect older sister someday, and I wonder if that’s on Tyler’s radar yet. Probably. The guy goes on and on and on about how great fatherhood is. I haven’t exactly experienced enough of it yet to form an opinion. So far, it’s not really my thing, but maybe time will change that.
The kid goes to bed right after dinner, which is close to eight, and then the three adults hang at the kitchen table as Lou starts the bus back up and we’re back on the road toward Salt Lake. It’s another five hours on the road, and we’ll roll into town a little after one in the morning. The plan is to sleep on the bus tonight.
“Movie or poker?” Tommy asks. He sounds tired.
I’m tired, too, and I haven’t really done anything today. I can’t imagine how Hannah’s feeling considering how change after change plows into her on the same day as her sister’s funeral.
I glance at Hannah, but her eyes are down on the table. “Poker,” I say. There’s something about playing cards with another person that lets you see a little bit into their psyche.
She glances up at me while Tommy moves toward the kitchen cabinet where we keep our poker chips and a few decks of cards. “I’ll just watch.”
I shake my head with a little gleam in my eye. “Oh, no, my friend. Poker on a tour bus is a rite of passage.”
She shrugs as she gives me one of those grunt-laughs, and I take it. “I’d hate to show you up my first night on the bus,” she says casually, and I can’t help but find her confidence appealing.
“You think you’re going to beat Brett the Shark Pitzer?” Tommy asks.
I laugh. “Brett the Shark?”
Tommy shakes his head. “The dude’s ruthless when it comes to cards.” He thinks twice about that statement. “He’s pretty ruthless in general, actually.”
Hannah raises a brow. “Looks like we’ll be seeing new sides of one another, then.”
Tommy starts divvying up the chips, and usually we keep a running total on a tour and payout when we get back home, but we haven’t actually started playing yet this tour. “Divide evenly for three and I’ll cover her,” I say.
“What does that mean?” Hannah asks.
“Standard values are a dollar for white, five for red, ten for blue, twenty-five for green, and a hundred for black,” Tommy says, holding up each
color as he explains. “We add a zero to the end of each of those.”
She glances at the pile accumulating in front of her. “So fifteen white is one-fifty, ten red is five hundred, six blue is six hundred, six green is fifteen hundred, and four black is four thousand...” She trails off and does the math. “So six thousand, seven hundred fifty dollars?”
My eyes widen, and Tommy’s do, too.
“How’d you calculate that so fast?” Tommy asks.
She lifts a shoulder. “I’m smart.”
I laugh. We might be in trouble here.
“But I can’t afford to join you,” she says, shaking her head. “That kind of money is life-changing for me and I can’t risk it on a silly game.”
“You’re not risking it,” I say. “I am. And we’ll keep a running tally for the next three months. We start fresh each night with the same number of chips. I’ll cover you and if you win, you keep it.”
Her brows dip. “If I win?” She shrugs. “Okay, then. You’re on.”
Three hours later, all the chips are on Hannah’s side of the table and you want to know what I’ve learned about her psyche?
She has one hell of a poker face.
Apparently she picked up this talent in one of the foster homes where she lived. At the tender age of twelve, she was learning how to bluff. That was only a decade ago.
A decade ago, I was twenty. I was already in the band that would eventually go on to see all the commercial success we have today, but at the time, it was only a dream.
My life has changed dramatically in the last decade, while dramatic changes have been the only real constant in her life.
Maybe that all ends now. Maybe she fell into my life so I could find a way to provide a little stability for her.
Financially, I mean. Because I’m just not in the market for providing any other sort of stability.
It’s not late, but we’re all yawning—a side effect of nursing a glass of whiskey rather than shot after shot, I guess. For me, anyway. She didn’t have a drop, and Tommy stuck with beer.
