Nobody's Hero

by Melanie Harvey

  Walter’s eyes blazed. “How dare you!”

  “Oh, I can’t play the race card? I have one, Walter, it says ‘white.’ And I’ll tell you one thing about this rapper — I’ve seen Aiesha’s picture, and the only woman he ever loved before was blacker than midnight. So maybe you should quit trying to pander to us, because you just might not know us as well as you think you do.”

  Carolyn couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t believe …

  No. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t figured it out. Oh, Rick. Did you even know?

  Walter loomed over Ashley. “You have no right to speak to me like that.”

  “Get out of my office, Walter.” Ashley snapped the printout against his chest. “I have a fucking crisis to manage.”

  “Not anymore. You’re fired.”

  Carolyn jumped from her seat. “No!” They both turned, but she focused on Walter. “You can’t fire her.”

  His features took on the look she’d once thought of as fatherly. “Carolyn, trust me — ”

  “No,” she said. “I trust her.”

  For a second, she thought he’d argue with her, but when Carolyn straightened herself for it, her now-former publicist shook his head.

  “Well, good luck to you, Carolyn.”

  She heard the same condemnation in his voice that she’d heard from Peter. She was picking the wrong side. She hated herself for looking away from him. Ashley merely raised her hand toward the front door. Walter shook his head and started across the silent room, his footsteps echoing off the walls.

  “Walter,” Ashley called when he reached the foyer. She waited until he turned, the contempt crawling over his face.

  Ashley didn’t wither. “You do a single thing to fuck up his deal, and I will bury you.” His mouth opened, but Ashley held up a hand. “And don’t underestimate me this time.”

  The seconds ticked off, the tension humming like a wire strung too tightly between them. Carolyn didn’t breathe until the door slammed behind him.

  Questions and answers flew between Ashley and her crew as Carolyn collapsed into the chair, her head spinning. She traced her fingertip through a drop of champagne on the table. The curve of the ‘C’ glistened in the florescent lights until it evaporated.

  Shoulda brought a Sharpie. So dig it down in there deep.

  Her throat closed, and she pressed her hand against the lump. Voices buzzed in her ears, trying to form a consensus that she couldn’t comprehend.

  She swallowed. “Ashley.”

  “If we wait,” she said, “then everybody’s knocking down the door.”

  “But if we respond,” Marcia said, “it suggests legitimacy. You always said — ”

  “I know what I said,” Ashley snapped.

  Carolyn tried again. “Ashley.”

  “They could be lying — ”

  “There’s a goddamn tape!”

  “Have we heard it?”

  Carolyn cleared her throat. “Ashley.”

  The argument stopped, and Ashley’s blue eyes lit on Carolyn, sharp and clear. This was repairable. All Ashley had to do was figure out how to do it.

  And she would, Carolyn was certain, but to Ashley it was only a problem to be fixed.

  It would never make her cry.

  The strength returned to Carolyn’s legs the moment she stood up. “I need to go home.”

  49: What a Deal

  Zeus called for a break mid-morning, an hour after Rick was ready for it. He didn’t know if it was pressure from Carnage, or Zeus trying to keep down costs, or maybe he’d just decided to finally claim his forty acres, and the reparations were coming out of Rick’s ass.

  He hadn’t changed his number, and he couldn’t stop checking the missed calls, but the only surprise was that Mary hadn’t broken her promise yet. Louis, on the other hand, didn’t disappoint him. More bitching about interviews. If he wasn’t sleeping on Kale’s couch and Kiara wasn’t climbing on him at the crack of dawn, Rick was sure he wouldn’t even be awake to hear it now. He found the lobby empty except for the receptionist and returned the call.

  Louis didn’t even say hello. “There’s a fax waiting for you at the front desk.”

  He turned to the receptionist, who knew this already. She handed him a stack of paper as he tried to process the voice in his ear.

  “Hold up,” he said. “I can’t read and listen to you at the same time.”

  “I’m giving you the nutshell version,” Louis said.

  “Damn big nuts you got there.” Then he saw the letterhead on the second page of the fax. “This for real?”

  “Spoke to the man this morning. It’s a done deal.” The New York accent sounded satisfied. “All you do is sign.”

  Rick looked around for an empty space to set the pages down, and the receptionist cleared clutter from an eleven-inch square. The phone rang and she turned away as he flipped through it again. He hit the third page, the hand inked numbers in the center.

  With respect to the First Album, a recording budget not to exceed …

  “Somebody move the decimal point on this?”

  Louis chuckled. “That’s nothing to them, Rick.”

  A quarter million dollars. “I’ll be in debt for the rest of my damn life.”

  “No, you won’t. They’ll want their money back, and the only way they’ll get it back is to sell units.”

  “They can’t guarantee that.”

  Another chuckle. “Who do you think you’re dealing with?”

  Hypothetically … if Interscope signed you …

  Rick took another breath. “What about Zeus?”

  “Top of the fifth page,” Louis said.

  Rick flipped over and spotted the strike-through on the last four words:

  … produced by a producer selected by Artist and approved by Company.

  “They’re buying out your contract,” Louis said.

  It was fucking Interscope, distributing this album through Universal. The print from the fax was fuzzy, but not too unclear to read. “What is this about, re-recording costs are the responsibility — ”

  “I told them you’re almost done. They’ll cover the costs. We’ll have the amended agreement by the end of the day.”

  Rick leaned against the counter, rereading the paragraphs.

  “Where’s the love, Rick? This is the golden egg.”

  Hypothetically. Rick flipped through the pages again. “Lemme ask you something, Louis. Did you call them? Or did they call you?”

  * * *

  At the lunch break out in back of the studio, Terrance and Jesse were splitting a pizza with Zeus’s engineer. Rick shook his head when his brother started out of his seat. Zeus was on the other side of the patio, alone, making notes in a binder, dealing with wages and hours and labor laws and everything else he was responsible for. Rick dropped the contracts on the round glass table. The breeze rifled the pages the receptionist had bound with a heavy black binder clip before he left her desk, probably because Rick couldn’t seem to do it for himself.

  “You hear about this?”

  Zeus glanced at the clipped pages of the fax. “Rumors.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Zeus leaned back in the chair without responding.

  “How you don’t even mention it?”

  “Wasn’t sure it’d go through,” Zeus said. “Just talk for a while.”

  “I seen you every day. You should have talked to me.”

  “Didn’t want you to quit working and start dreaming.”

  “Dreaming?” Rick stabbed a finger onto the contract. “This is a fucking nightmare.”

  Zeus’s eyebrows shot up.

  Rick looked up to the thicket of trees waving in the breeze behind the studio and counted to ten. “This ain’t about you.”

  Zeus nodded his acceptance of the apology. Rick flipped to the paragraph, ran his index finger under the words.

  Zeus scanned it. “That’s standard. You got that in your contract with Carnage.”

  “Loui
s said they willing to cover any re-recording costs.”

  “Generosity from a label? Interesting.”

  A burst of laughter drifted from the other corner of the patio. Rick barely heard it and Zeus’s gaze didn’t flicker.

  “What do you think about that?”

  Zeus leaned back in the patio chair. “Tell me what you think.”

  “I think,” Rick said. “That Carnage never had any content issues.”

  “Surprisingly,” Zeus said, but he was being … facetious.

  “This ain’t about me, either. You know that, don’t you? This about her — and they willing to pay out a quarter million so I’ll keep my goddamn mouth shut.”

  “You’re offended.”

  Rick leaned over the table. “Now why the hell would I be offended by that?”

  Zeus’s eyebrows lifted again, and Rick stood up, filling his lungs with air.

  “You know,” Zeus said, “if I heard everything you got, I can’t see them objecting to anything. Sounds like you’re being real careful.”

  Rick shoved his hands in his pockets. It was fucking intentional. “About all I got left is my word.”

  “Well, that, plus a quarter million dollars.” He reached back for his binder and his pen.

  Rick paced off the paving stones in the patio. He was fighting over irrelevancies, because no way was that song going on this or any other album. Not now. He watched the trees blow for a half a minute. “What do I do?”

  “I guess you make a decision.”

  “You’re completely neutral on this?”

  Zeus tapped his pen on the clipped fax pages. “That’s your name on there, looks like.”

  “Don’t give me that. You’re involved.”

  Zeus looked up. “Contract says that’s up to you, too.”

  “Goddamn it, Zeus!” Rick sent an empty chair crashing across the stones. “You been carrying me for five fucking years!”

  No reaction, not even an eyebrow.

  When Rick turned around, he saw Terrance rising from his seat a few yards away. He eased down when Rick raised a hand. How the hell he wound up surrounded by all these black men without a thread of temper was something he would never understand. Forget the damn pizza, somebody needed to order in a stereotype before he went insane.

  Behind him, Zeus finally spoke. “Just doing it for the gratitude, Rick.”

  Rick closed his eyes for a second before he turned back to the table. Zeus glanced up from the paperwork, maybe the slightest hint of amusement on his face. What Rick would really like was to have the genuine object of all his fury sitting there instead.

  He reached for the faxed papers. “You know that after Comin Down dropped, Louis was still out hustling me. There was a couple offers.”

  Zeus looked up, and Rick didn’t see any surprise register. He hadn’t expected to.

  “Sony sent him a decent deal. They wanted another producer, though, I guess Dre and Ye been fighting over who gonna get to … ” He hadn’t meant to be funny, but when Zeus grinned, Rick couldn’t help smirking. “Guess you heard about that, too.”

  “I heard.”

  “I don’t know who they wanted, just not you.” He shrugged. “But you knew that.”

  Another nod.

  “I don’t want some kinda ass-backwards loyalty,” Rick said slowly. “Because I don’t deserve that.”

  Zeus looked at him for a long time. Then he tossed the pen onto his open binder. It rolled down the slope of the pages and pinged against the table. “You want to sit down for a minute?”

  Rick wasn’t sure he could bend that far without snapping. He managed and waited while Zeus lit one of his five cigarettes for the day. The first exhale drifted away on the breeze.

  “What do you want, Rick?”

  “What do you think I’m asking for?”

  “How would I know what you want?”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “So figure it out.”

  “Zeus — ”

  The burning cigarette pointed over the table. “It’s your life. Do you want this? Or not?”

  “I don’t want it like this.” Rick shoved the clipped pages down the table. “Because of this bullshit about her.”

  “So you turn it down because of your pride?”

  “That ain’t it. Not all of it.”

  Zeus drew on the cigarette waiting for some further explanation.

  Rick just shook his head.

  Zeus’s smoke ring broke up in the breeze. “You want to worry about my finances, you go ahead, but I ain’t never worried about yours. Now that’s what I call ass-backward, but I can’t fix everything that’s wrong in the world.”

  Rick looked away. He could only hear the creek in the ravine behind the patio. A glance over his shoulder confirmed that the pizza party had broken up and gone inside.

  The scraping of metal on glass pulled his attention back, as the binder clip dragged across the table’s surface. Zeus tapped an index finger on the cover sheet. Re: Ricky Rain.

  “This is your life,” Zeus repeated. “All twenty-six years of it. And I ain’t your daddy gonna tell you what you should be doing with it.”

  Rick started to grin, but Zeus leaned forward, unsmiling.

  “Grow up,” he said. “You know this isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. You’ve seen — you’ve heard — what happened to Guillotine, and they didn’t need to get rid of me because they knew he’d spit guns, bitches, and crack as long as the benjamins kept flowing.” Zeus shook his head. “You want this, talk to your lawyer and take it. You don’t, talk to Louis about how to play it. But in the end, the only thing that matters is that you choose what you can live with.”

  He leaned back in his seat, his gaze steady and firm.

  Rick spread his hand over the stack of paper. What he could live with. Two weeks earlier and the pages would have felt like vindication. He would have signed it and cut the line to the anchor that had threatened to drown him. Now the fine print on the pages looked like an accusation, the letters of every word rearranging themselves into what they really meant.

  She was buying his silence. Because she didn’t trust him.

  The weight reformed into anger that he’d ever opened himself up to such a monumental betrayal. Rick turned as the door opened onto the patio. The rest of the crew wondering why the hell Zeus would be sitting on his ass for more than fifteen minutes.

  Zeus lifted his eyebrows.

  “Okay,” Rick said. “I’ll call Louis.”

  Zeus nodded and put the cigarette between his lips to collect his paperwork. His words blew out on the smoke. “I do like you better afraid of me.”

  Rick picked up the contract. “I was never afraid of you.”

  Zeus glanced at his watch. When Rick jumped up, he smirked.

  50: Threads

  The flight was late, and the other passengers were eager to be off the plane. Carolyn didn’t have the strength to insert herself into the fray, so she waited until the last of the overhead compartments snapped shut. She merely nodded at the flight attendant’s well-wishes because if she opened her mouth, she was sure she would scream.

  The Akron-Canton airport closed at ten, and the gates were almost deserted. Carolyn headed for the baggage claim. When she was a girl, she’d sat in this gate with her father, waiting for out-of-town relatives. No one could wait here anymore, and she felt a fleeting sadness for all the kids who would never press their noses to the windows. Is that Uncle John’s plane?

  She left the gates behind a woman who threw her arms around a man waiting outside the restricted area. Carolyn’s hands tightened on her bags. Her car was in the long-term lot; she needed to catch the shuttle out there. But she couldn’t tear her gaze from the couple in front of the sandwich shop. It was a Subway.

  Christ, Carolyn.

  He was right. She needed to get a grip.

  “Sweetheart.”

  Her father’s voice, then his face when she turned, melted her resolve complet
ely. He gathered her into his arms, but his whispered murmurs did nothing to stop the tears, changed nothing of her circumstances, fixed nothing at all. But for the first time in more than a week, she felt safe. Her words spilled before she could censor them.

  “Oh, Daddy. He reminded me of you.”

  Dale Coffman nodded. He didn’t ask how or appear to be the slightest bit insulted.

  She disengaged from his embrace and tried to compose herself. “My car’s in the lot.”

  “We found it.” Dale transferred her carry-on to his shoulder. “Mom’s driving it home now. You shouldn’t leave the ticket on the dash.”

  “I’d lose it otherwise,” Carolyn said.

  He smiled as he slipped his arm around her to steer her toward the baggage claim.

  She rested her cheek against his shoulder. “You didn’t have to come get me.”

  Dale kissed her forehead. “Oh, yes, I did.”

  * * *

  It was past nine that night before Rick turned onto Chagrin Boulevard. He’d always wondered who would name a road Chagrin, but now he thought it might be the perfect address. Out of his price range, except for a five-minute window of possibility this afternoon.

  He made the last turn onto Jesse’s street. “What you been so quiet for?”

  Jesse shrugged. Probably Rick’s fault. He’d been pre-occupied, unable to determine the real motivation behind his decision. He hated settling for 85 percent sure it was the right one.

  He hated Louis, again, too. The hours since the pizza were filled with PR bullshit instead of anything that resembled accomplishment. On top of that, he’d hit an infuriating impasse with Zeus. Just artistic differences, Zeus said. As if Zeus was the goddamn artist.

  And he’d been looking forward to a late start tomorrow even though Kiara didn’t know from Saturday, but Louis ordered him back to the studio at seven. Rick had made him repeat the number, certain he’d heard wrong.

  When he pulled into the driveway, Jesse finally looked over.

  Guilty, Rick thought. “What’s up?”

  Jesse shook his head and got out of the car. He took a step away, then he returned to the open window and dropped a folded piece of paper on the passenger seat. Before Rick could even open his mouth, Jesse was inside his house. Safe.