Songbird_A Small-Town Romantic Comedy

by Caroline Tate

  Looking down at my clipboard, I total up the number of vendors that had shown up: six beer and wine tents, eleven different food trucks, almost twenty local businesses from Southport and Oak Island, with a few even faring from Wilmington. And it looks like all will be set up by the time Charlie arrives.

  Brooke meets me at the back corner of the park under the shade of an oak tree to eat a quick lunch. She lays out her wares: two glazed doughnuts, a Tuscan sunset snow cone, a funnel cake the size of her face, and a styrofoam platter of pulled pork.

  "Let's update the picture finally," she says, handing me the paper plate with both doughnuts.

  “What are you talking about?”

  "No offense, but I'm tired of looking at you with that pink cotton candy beard from three years ago. I wanted the damn pink beard because it matched my hair better. But you hung me out to dry with the blue one." She rolls her eyes.

  I start laughing when she blows on the funnel cake, sending a plume of powdered sugar into the air in front of her. Bending the hatched treat in half, she bites a mouth-sized hole in it toward the top, unfolds it, and holds it up to her face. A freaking funnel cake beard.

  Oh, my God. I laugh so hard, I feel like I might pee my pants.

  "Dennis," she shouts over the local radio station tunes that are still coming through the

  loudspeakers of the park. "Hey, come here," she waves.

  Jogging over, he's immediately suspicious when he sees our food laid out with a big hole in the fried dough.

  “Babe, take a picture of us,” Brooke says, tossing her phone up to him.

  “What am I in this? Chopped liver?” I ask, surveying the food. “What am I supposed to—”

  “Doughnut eyes,” she spits, readying her beard. “Hold ‘em up.”

  Dennis shakes his head at us with a grin as we both pose with no shame. "This one's a keeper," he says, chuckling.

  "Oh, darling, everything looks amazing!" Charlie says when he finds me handing out the laminated special guests list to a few of the volunteers who are readying themselves to start taking tickets.

  “Yeah, it’s really coming together,” I say with a smile.

  Charlie is wearing a pair of tight-tailored jeans, an incredibly deep V-neck graphic T-shirt, and some kind of a fedora that looks brand new. I have no idea which part of this outfit he needed to have dry-cleaned, but I'm not about to ask.

  "You are just an angel sent from music heaven," he sings, popping a piece of gum in his mouth. "But throw a little makeup on, would you? I'm sure press will want pictures at some point."

  As Charlie walks away to make flourishing small talk with the owners of Flare and Moonwater and the lead bass guitarist of Call Me June, it hits me just how wrong Charlie is. Sad as I am that press will not be here, it's no one's fault by my own.

  "We have a problem," Brooke says, suddenly pulling me toward Howe street.

  A hundred ideas flash through my mind. The bands all quit. Maze already detonated their fireworks leaving us none for tomorrow. Charlie offended the mayor without even trying. Mason did show up, but with another girl. All of these thoughts rush through my head at once. "What is it?" I ask, my chest tightening at her urgency.

  “Three of the underage volunteers are drinking at the beer tent,” she says, drawing a few stares from patrons.

  "Which tent?"

  "Fernweh," she says, pointing toward the river.

  I breathe a deep, wavering sigh of relief and walk past her. "Alright, thanks. That I can handle."

  “Awesome, because I’m totally not cut out for this. You look hot by the way,” she calls behind me.

  The crowds have started growing thick, and within the next fifteen minutes, I handle the beer boozer situation, find the stage manager to hand her the set list to go over once more, and finally make my way to the ticket booths to see how sales are going. To my complete and utter shock, there is a line of people waiting to get in that winds around the block, and it isn’t even time for the first show yet.

  "Holy shit."

  “I know,” says one of the volunteers. “I hope we have enough tickets.”

  The event might sell out? The idea had never crossed my mind that more than 2,000 people would want to attend this little festival, especially in its first year. But by the looks of it, the possibility is a very real thing.

  When the gates officially open, Franklin Square Park and the surrounding block is flooded with local and tourist traffic like nothing I've ever seen. I have to assign five volunteers just to empty the trash cans, one of the more popular breweries has to get a second delivery of booze brought in, and the barbeque and the shish kebab food trucks almost sell out before the first set has even started.

  The Quirks take the stage without a hitch, and I allow myself one brief moment of rest under the oak tree on the perimeter of the park. Closing my eyes, I let the breeze of the afternoon wash over me and the edgy, folk sound of the Quirks lull me into a state of peace. I smile in a way that feels more natural than anything I've experienced in a while. And with a single, lingering pang of sadness, I wish Mason was here to experience the glory of this with me.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Ellie

  At least it’s way too late for the Boxley Brothers to back out now. That's what I keep reminding myself. It's Saturday morning just before noon when they arrive late for soundcheck. They pull up in a commercial van, and Cole had been right on the phone. His brothers and the band are nowhere in sight. It's only Cole and— Holland.

  My heart aches for Mason as I wish I could call him to tell him. The show where we met was headlined by the brothers, yes. But Holland had opened for them. And now they're performing together? God, what a dream.

  I lurk backstage as Morris works to set the audio up again this morning. Soundcheck for the other bands has already ended, but with Cole and Holland having arrived later than planned, we're fitting them in before we start to draw a crowd.

  "Ellie Stone?" Cole asks, holding his hand out for me to shake. "Girl with the kickass name?"

  I grab his hand with a huge smile. Most band members won't even initiate a greeting aside from a lazy nod. "Hey, that's me," I say. "You made it."

  "No brothers, but Holly and I have a set we'd like to try. Purely acoustic," he says, throwing his head behind him. I follow his direction and wave at Holland who is messing with her earpiece over toward the water cooler.

  Tucking my hair beyond my ears, I shake my head. "That's not a problem at all. Sounds like it'll be magical," I say, feeling a thread of nervousness shoot through me. Cole isn't a conventionally handsome man. He's a little wider than I remember him being up on stage, and his face is more scraggly with a haphazardly-grown beard. But the coolness of his gray eyes pull me in, and he radiates a fire that is incredibly charming and engaging. In fact, I'm so taken by his presence, that I'm nearly speechless.

  “Thanks for having us. This is a pretty sick place,” he says.

  "Thank you so much for coming. You have truly saved the day. Your music is sincerely an inspiration."

  Morris walks up to us and hands Cole an earpiece and clips his portable mic to his shirt. "Should be good, man," he tells Cole.

  "Inspiration is bullshit." Cole shakes his head at me and scoffs. "People always say that about the music. But it's not true. You do it ‘cause you love it. Occasionally it pays the bills, but," he shrugs and grabs his acoustic guitar from the stand beside us. "Fuck anything that doesn't get your blood pumping. And that's the real secret to life," he says just before walking out onto the stage with Holland in tow.

  My heart jumps out of my chest, and I feel my face go pale with realization.

  Fuck anything that doesn’t get your blood pumping.

  As Holland and Cole take the stage for a ten-minute soundcheck, I pull my cell phone from my back pocket and dial Mason. He doesn't answer, and when his voicemail greeting starts to play, I hang up.

  He doesn't want to hear it. I've apologized. I've told him everything
there is. Almost everything, at least. And then I remember.

  Be the storm, Ellie.

  As I dial his number one last time, I'm eager for the voicemail to pick up. When it does, I can't help but tell him every inch of how I feel.

  "Hey, it's me. Hi. I'm just— Well, I'm calling to tell you how important you are to me," I say, a weird emotion welling up in the back of my throat. "I miss you and can't imagine not having you and your— your nerdy jokes in my life." I pause, not sure of how any of this will even go over with him now that we're nothing but long-lost friends. "Cole just said something. ‘Fuck anything that doesn't get your blood pumping.' And Mason. This may sound completely weird, but you do that to me. You make me feel all sorts of ways— happy and loved and cared for and also a little pissed sometimes. But mostly you make me feel alive." I pull the phone away from my ear at the sound of Boxley and Holland crescendoing across the park, and it makes me want to just full on bawl my eyes out. Pressing the phone back up to me, I sigh wishing he could hear this. "Anyway, I hope you can make it to the show tonight. The Boxley Brothers set. Minus the brothers. Plus Holland though, so... I don't care about the press, Mason. I just want to be with you. Call me back, okay?"

  My momentary rest is short-lived in the midst of the soundcheck when Brooke finds me.

  "Emergency," Brooke whisper-shouts, as she rounds the corner of the stage. "One-hundred-percent emergency," she says, her voice bordering on panicked. "One of the food trucks needs a serious jump!"

  I find a set of jumper cables in the pop-up utility shed stuffed back behind the tree line down from the portable potties. As soon as Cole and Holland finish up with soundcheck, Morris meets me on the side street with his vehicle to jump the food truck in the afternoon sun.

  For the rest of the evening, I walk the festival staying alert for any problems that arise. Bumping into a group of volunteers playing frisbee by the grass in front of the church, I encourage them to hand out paper cups of water to the crowd in their downtime. With everyone full of food and alcohol while being drenched in sun, dehydration is a serious concern about which Charlie had warned me. Aside from making myself available for on-call help by roaming, I also keep an eye out for Mason. Wondering if he'd gotten my voicemail, I check my phone at least twenty times throughout the afternoon. But I end up hearing nothing from him. "It was a good run," I whisper the line he'd said to me Tuesday, finally coming to grips with how awful I treated him on our way back from Raleigh. Lack of sleep and a sea of insecurities will do crazy things to a person.

  Yes, my heart aches. The only spot of sun left in the darkness of missing out on a relationship with him is the fact that Mason didn't disappoint on the press front. I know this because I run into a woman, not much older than me, who's wearing the laminated guest press badge I'd left at Mason's house.

  "Hey, I'm Ellie," I say, handing her a bottle of water from the cooler by the first aid tent. "You're here with The Anchor?”

  “Yep, I’m Leda,” she says, smiling. “Thanks. Mason said this thing would be awesome. I just didn’t realize how awesome.”

  “Can I get that in type for press?” I joke, nearly causing her to spew her water. “Is he coming, by the way? Mason?”

  She shrugs. "I think he was asked to cover some other event at the last minute, but I'm not sure. I know one of our guys is out sick so he may have had to step in for him."

  Leaving Leda to interview Isla Verde, who's just about to take the stage, I stop by Helen, my right-hand man and stage manager.

  “One more set after this,” I say to her.

  Smiling, she gives me a look of pure relief. “Hella grateful for that! Don’t think I’ve ever been more stressed in my life,” she laughs.

  "Yeah," I hum, thinking the same. "But we'll miss it when it's over, right?"

  “Oh, it ain’t over yet, sister. Much more to come with these two sets,” she grins.

  It's eight o'clock now, and people are surrounding the stage in clusters waiting for the opening song by Isla Verde. I can't help but grow melancholy at the thought of Mason missing Cole and Holland's set later on, but I feel deeply touched that he still sent Leda to cover it. I consider sending him a simple text with a thank you just to let him know I noticed his effort. But I decide against it. Either way, he knew how much it would mean to me. And whether he just doesn't want to see me or if he actually did have something else to cover, at least he cared enough to stick by his word.

  The sun has finally dipped down over the horizon leaving us with a deep shade of navy coating everything. The crowd is big and grows rowdier by the minute, but our security team is on top of it. Wandering around toward the back of the park, I grab a bottle of beer to nurse and search for an empty place to stand. Finding a spot back by the oak tree where Brooke and I had eaten our junk-lunch yesterday, I settle against the chain link fence. This space is now cast in a deep, lonesome darkness with the only light provided by the glare of the occasional stage lights that pass over the sea of audience once every few minutes to the beat of Isla Verde. Looking up at the stars, I remember the way Mason had held me that night at the pool. The strength in his desire for me. The way we made love without a care in the world when everything felt perfect for those few hours. Lost in thought, I smile at my time with him. Taking a long sip of my beer, I hear someone call my name from the darkness to my left.

  “Ellie.”

  For a second, I think it might be Dennis. But then my heart surges. Mason?

  Looking up, I narrow my eyes into the dark and see a form walking toward me silhouetted only by the stage lights. But when he's only a few feet from me, I smell the pungent cologne, and like a train about to derail, it hits me hard. My blood runs cold, as I realize it's John. Stepping sideways to move away from him, I end up dropping my beer to the ground. And then I feel his stiff hand on my shoulder.

  “Ellie,” John says, his thick fingers sinking down into my arm.

  "What are you doing here?" I ask, trying to calm my frantic energy. My ankles are soaked from my spilled beer, and my eyes dart side-to-side searching for someone to intervene. But in this mass of community and booming music, we are nearly secluded under the oaks.

  “I’m here for you,” he says, pressing his sweaty cheek to mine into something of a forced, unreciprocated hug. He’s heavy against me, and his breath smells like pure whiskey, sickly and sweet. “I miss you, Ellie.”

  Putting my hand up, I push his face off of me with a grunt. When he turns his face back to look at me, his blue eyes look black in the dim light, and his sharp features cast stark shadows on his swollen face. I force myself not to cower in front of him, but I don’t want him to grab me again.

  Be the storm, Ellie.

  “I don’t care, leave me alone,” I say, taking a step back.

  "Come on, El." He holds a hand out to me. "You don't mean that. I know you don't. You know how sorry I am, baby. You know I love you— I always have. I want to come home. I want to be back in our house together, baby," he says, closing what little distance I'd put between us. "Just like we always were."

  Looking down, I notice both his hands are clenched into fists now, so taking another step backward, I ram into the chain link fence and realize this is all the space I'll have. "You're drunk, John. Go away," I say, trying to keep my voice strong.

  He smirks. "I know you like it like this. A little rough. Let me come back to our bed, Ellie.

  We can have all the babies you want now. I'm ready for them. I know you want it just as bad as I do." He lands his fists on either side of me on the fence with a wicked grunt. Pushing his heavy body against me, his jolting actions send my heart pumping out of my chest.

  “John,” I whisper, panic starting to set in. “I will scream if you don’t get off of me.”

  At my words, his expression changes as if I've challenged him. And suddenly, he reaches up and presses his large hand to my neck, the other moving steadily up my thigh. "You wouldn't do that, baby," he says, his voice full of pain. "I know this
is what you want. I know you. You used to love it before."

  My vision starts to go dark, and I open my mouth to yell for help when I hear someone approach us from behind John.

  “Take your fucking hands off her,” the voice growls.

  John releases his grip on my throat and pushes me to the ground in one quick motion. Hitting the grass and nearly landing on the beer bottle I'd dropped a few minutes earlier, I gasp for air.

  “Who the fuck are you?” I hear John say.

  Regaining my vision at a frustratingly slow pace, I can't make out who it is until I recognize the orange press badge dangling from his neck. Mason.

  Bending down, Mason offers me a hand, putting his body between John and me. "Walk the fuck away," he says to John in a voice I've never heard him use before. It's not just the commanding, confident Mason I know— there is anger and pure, unadulterated hatred bottled up in that voice.

  “My baby and I are having a fight,” John says, puffing out his chest. “None of your goddamn business, man. Now get out of here. Go on, get!”

  “I’m not your—” I begin in a raspy voice.

  "Shut up!" John yells, wielding back at me with a raised hand.

  Not expecting this, I yelp and flinch away which makes him laugh.

  “Leave her alone,” Mason says through gritted teeth.

  “Is this the guy who’s fucking you, Ellie?” John asks, the madness in his voice high and terrifying. “This is my replacement?”

  “I’m not going to say it again,” Mason continues.

  “You fucking slut,” John hisses. Taking half a step toward me, he clenches his fists and draws back an arm, but then, as if in slow motion, Mason bolts forward and deftly knocks him in the left side of his jaw with the loud crack of his fist. John’s knees buckle and he falls to the grass groaning, his hand clutching his face.

  "Oh my God," I say, as Mason recoils his hand, his knuckles split and seeping with blood.