I tried to imagine what it would be like to live in that kind of pressure, to feel that kind of innate responsibility to perform and to be perfect. I could not relate.
“So you must be Adam,” came a voice behind me.
I turned and immediately knew who I was looking at. Hollis’s father, the reason half of Amber Lake’s residents were employed, was staring at me from across the room. He wore very neatly pleated slacks and a tucked in dark gray shirt. He was tall, fit, and clean shaven, with an air of wealth that was evident even if you didn’t look at his house. I approached him with a hand out. “Good to meet you, sir.”
After a moment, he pulled one hand slowly out of his pocket and reached for mine, but his eyes were measuring and calculating. “Where's Hollis?” he asked. I turned around, wondering the same thing. It was one thing coming here with Hollis, but being alone with her father made me feel like I was a lobster in a restaurant’s tank and he was eyeing me for his next meal.
“I think she went to look for you,” I told him. I looked around the room trying to calm my own nerves. I hadn't felt as nervous walking up to the house, but then again, Hollis had been beside me and now that she wasn’t, I felt scrutinized. It was like a job interview, but this was a hundred times worse.
“Do you watch sports?”
“No, I don’t.” With the same measured gaze, I watched his response to that. But unlike me, he didn’t betray a trace of anxiety. Why would he? He didn’t have to impress me. “My sister is into gymnastics, so I do watch that from time to time with her, but my interests don't typically fall toward athletics.”
“What interests you?” he asked me. He seemed immensely calm, comfortable, which I supposed I would be too if I had money and power and people who bent to my will.
“I'm a musician. I have a band in Colorado.” But did I? I wasn't really sure that I could call myself part of the band anymore. Not after leaving as abruptly as I did, and I knew at some point I'd have to address that with my bandmates and have them seek out a new keyboardist. Nothing felt real yet. Gram being in the hospital felt like a pause, not a period. It was as if I was under some delusion that she’d come home, be better, and we’d move on about our normal lives. But there was nothing normal about our situation.
Hollis’s dad took in my tattoos, betraying nothing on his face. Unlike his daughter, Mr. Vinke was a closed book.
Just then Hollis came in, accompanied by whom I assumed to be her mother. Her shocking white hair was sleek and stylish, and she had the same measuring look in her eyes when she reached a hand out to shake mine.
“Mrs. Vinke,” I said, and for some strange reason it felt like I should bow. If the air that surrounded her husband spoke of wealth, hers spoke of royalty.
Hollis came to my side, and instinctively I put my arm around her, only to remember where I was and drop it. Fuck. I was supposed to play this part, so I put my arm around her waist and she shifted closer, subtly. I took that as a silent sign that this was okay.
“I left a charcuterie board on the front table,” Hollis said when silence ensued.
“Perfect,” her mother replied. “I will go fetch that. Let's go into the rec room.”
In a house as pristine and showroom worthy as this one, I couldn't imagine what a rec room must have looked like. But Hollis’s hand over mine on her waist squeezed reassuringly, and we followed her father into a room off of a formal dining room.
The room looked opposite from the house, darker with wood on the walls and echoed in the beams that stretched from one side of the ceiling to the other. On one end of the room was a billiards table and on the other was a bar and a collection of plush couches. Everything matched well, but judging by her father’s ease with the room, this was his domain. “Pool?” he asked me, holding out a stick. I didn’t play pool well, but I felt as if I had no choice to agree to something, anything, so that I didn’t become some kind of wallflower.
“You can go first,” he said. He arranged the balls on the table for me while Hollis rubbed my back, reassuringly. She stood beside me and handed me a blue cube of chalk. It was like she was subtly guiding me on what to do without trying to make it overly obvious because she placed the white cue ball on the table for me next. I’d happily let her choreograph the rest of the evening if it meant I did everything right.
“Good luck.” She gave me a small smile, but just like the photos on the mantle, it didn’t reach her eyes.
Hollis’s mother returned with the charcuterie board and placed it on top of the bar. “This looks lovely.” She uncovered the plastic wrap and looked over each chunk carefully. Maybe I imagined it, but Hollis seemed to relax a little bit at my side. Was she really this nervous over a damn cheese and meat board?
“What have you been up to?” her mother asked. “I’ve been trying to call you, but you haven’t returned my calls.” Well, if Hollis had been relaxed before she was stiff as a board once again. So, we were already going to launch into the inquisition, I realized as I struck the cue ball and watched all the other ones go flying.
“Stripes,” Mr. Vinke announced.
“Well, I’ve been pretty busy with my tutoring schedule and my schoolwork and I've been looking up the LSAT.”
“Oh really?” Mr. Vinke turned to her, his voice deeper than it’d been when he’d been talking to me. “That's good to hear because you didn't reply to my messages for me to know one way or another.”
I could already tell that it was going to be hard for me to be quiet and to not say anything to her father. The passive-aggressiveness was already a little bit over the top in just the five minutes we were there, and we were supposed to be here for hours more? At least long enough to enjoy a charcuterie board as well as dinner. It was going to be a long fucking night.
Hollis turned to her father and I could just see how she worked to hold herself tall, with pride. Shoulders back, head straight. That posture and elegance or not just innate to her, but expected. “Yes. I'm sorry. I've been very busy.” I wished I still smoked, if only to use it as an excuse to seek relief from this torturous tension.
Hollis waited for her dad to reply, but I decided to butt in first. “Hollis has started tutoring my sister.”
Whatever her dad had wanted to say, he’d abandoned for now. I was luring him in, so that his attention and his passive aggressive remarks could be lobbed at me instead. “How old is your sister?”
“She's going to be thirteen this weekend.”
“We had her birthday party on Sunday,” Hollis added.
“Is she your only sibling?” he asked.
“No, my brother Caleb is in Boise.” I almost left it there, but it felt necessary to validate myself somehow by using my brother. “He’s going to medical school.”
“And what about your parents? What do they do?” I was deeply regretting changing the subject to my family. I glanced at Hollis’s father, wondering if he already had made the connection about my dad or if perhaps she had told him. “My mother is gone.” It was always such a weird thing to explain and the pity and looks I often received didn't make it any easier to say. “And my father is in Utah.” Better to leave it at that, than explain what he was doing in Utah. I was sure my father’s current exploits would scandalize them both.
“Then who takes care of your sister?” Mrs. Vinke asked.
“My grandmother does, but she's in the hospital right now, which is why I'm back in Idaho.”
“Where were you before?”
I could feel sweat along my spine and wanted to loosen the collar of my shirt. “I was in Colorado with my band.”
“Oh,” Mrs. Vinke said. “Well, have we heard any of your music?”
“That's unlikely. It’s a small band—mostly local—but we do okay. Mostly shows Denver and the surrounding areas, festivals, that sort of thing.”
“Are you the singer?”
I laughed, feeling ease in talking about the band. “Oh, no. I’m not on the vocals.”
“Oh, Hollis told us yo
u were a musician.”
“Yes, I play the piano. I’m not really good on the singing bit. So, the piano is it for me.”
“And,” Mrs. Vinke said, “your grandmother is in the hospital. Will she be coming home soon?”
“Yes, but she has a weak heart and as of now, my plan is to stay in Idaho indefinitely. At least until Casey, my sister, has graduated and moves off on her own.”
“That must be very hard for you.” For the first time, Mrs. Vinke’s facade of sleek perfection cracked enough for me to see a sliver of genuine compassion. Hollis’s father, on the other hand, still eyed me like a lobster in a tank. “But what about your older brother? Will he come and help take care of your sister? Or maybe your father?”
Hollis’s fingers entwined with mine. I could feel Mr. Vinke’s gaze on me as I addressed his wife’s questions and I wondered if I should tell him who my father was. Already, he was forming an opinion of me and it didn't seem to be a good one.
“My father will not come home.” It was the most honest thing I had said aloud about him in years. I was never even that frank with Casey, lest I break her heart. “He hasn’t been home in years.”
I sunk one ball, then two, then three.
“Well,” Mr. Vinke said, lining up his stick for his shot after I had missed.
“Want some goat cheese?” Hollis asked from beside me. “It’s great with a little bit of the jam.” She made a motion with her fingers, like she was drizzling something with them.
I nodded, and she let go of my hand with a squeeze. When her father missed his shot, I lined up for the next one. I sunk three more balls, leaving me facing the eight ball. As I looked at the table, trying to decide which hole to aim for, Hollis returned.
“Here.” She held up a cracker up for me. There was a smear of goat cheese and a dollop of jam on top. She motioned for me to open my mouth, so I did, and with exquisite care she fed it to me.
I chewed, staring at her, willing her to keep staring at me. Something was shifting between us, redefining us inside of this relationship. I had been feeling it since Casey’s birthday, but it’d been building since then. I didn’t have many memorable relationships, but they’d all started from a place of straight-up lust. This thing with Hollis had begun with a lie but had been built by respect, patience, and attraction. My hand found her waist and squeezed. “This is good.”
She stepped closer, closing the gap between us. “It is, isn’t it?”
“The tangy cheese is balanced by the jam.” Words I never thought I’d have ever said, but there they were, spilling from my mouth anyway. Hollis had that effect on me.
“Are you going to call it?”
I turned to the interruption. Mr. Vinke was pointing at the eight-ball and he looked more uncomfortable than he had the whole night.
“That corner pocket,” I said, and bent over the table, aimed, and sunk the final ball.
Hollis made a funny little half-cheer, half-whoop sound behind me and I turned to her, proud that I had won a game against her dad, feeling for the first time like this night might be okay.
25
Hollis
After the game of pool, my dad left us to take a phone call and my mom disappeared into the kitchen. Adam and I picked at the charcuterie tray until I finally said, “Want a tour?”
“Sure,” he said, popping one last cracker with goat cheese into his mouth. He grabbed my hand before I reached for his, and that connection was everything I needed to ground me to him, to convince myself that whatever this was, it might be something real after all. It hadn’t been long, but we’d spent every day together since.
“This is the rec room,” I said, holding my hand out like I was a game show model showing off a brand new car.
“Oh wow,” he said, playing along with my cheesy tour guiding. “There’s a pool table in here.”
“I know, amazing right?”
“And even a board with cheese and meats and shit.”
“No shit on this board,” I corrected him. “Though some of the cheese is kind of stinky.”
“You said a bad word.” It pulled me out of my fake spiel.
“I say bad words.”
“Not to me you don’t.”
I looked over my shoulder, half expecting to see my mom spying on us. “I guess I just don’t say them as often as I’d like to.” I lifted a shoulder. “Come on, the tour doesn’t end here.” I led him out the doors opposite from the ones we’d come through, into the family room where my dad watched his sports every night.
Adam paused in his steps and when I followed his line of sight, I saw what captured his attention.
“That’s a Steinway, isn’t it?” He left my side to approach it.
“It’s my mom’s.”
“Does she play the piano?” he asked, running a hand over the gleaming rosewood.
“No, but this one has been in her family for a couple of generations.”
“I can tell. This is early nineteen hundreds.” He looked at it reverently, like I imagined some guys looked under the hoods of muscle cars. “Beautiful,” he said, and it was like I didn’t exist for the moment. Which I didn’t mind. Seeing him like this, awed by something I took for granted, gave me a new appreciation for it myself. He walked all around the grand piano, his hands roaming over the keys. When he finally looked at me again, there was a smile on his face I hadn’t seen before. “I want to play it.”
“It would be a shame if no one did.” I approached the piano and patted the bench in invitation.
“Sit with me.” He slid on the left side and gestured for me to sit on his right. “Do you know if it’s been recently tuned?”
“She gets it done at Christmas every year, that’s when she hires a pianist for one of her parties.”
He pressed down on one key and closed his eyes as the sound reverberated in the empty room. “Ahh.” It was a treat to experience the piano through Adam’s eyes. “You hear that? It’s so fucking cliché, but they don’t make pianos like they used to.” He played another note. “During the Great Depression, so many piano makers went out of business. But they were in decline before then, thanks to the phonograph and then the radio replacing them in the home.” He played another note. “Just listen to that. There’s nothing like that sound.” He turned to me, a smile on his face. “I paid thousands for the keyboard I have, the one I play with my band, and it’s great, but this sound.”
I wanted to listen to him talk more about the piano, about why it was so great. “How is it different?”
“Well, first of all, the keyboard doesn’t have the hammer that strikes a string to produce this sound.” He pressed down on a key. “On a digital piano, it’s actually a digital file, so it doesn’t have the same effect. It’s warmer, it’s a deeper sound on an acoustic piano. And this kind of piano is touch sensitive.”
“What do you mean?”
“I wish I had my keyboard to show you the difference, but here.” He took one of my hands and placed it on the keyboard. “Let your fingers go lax, so I can show you.” He covered mine with his and then pressed down on my forefinger. “Hear how loud that is? That’s due to the pressure of our fingers.” His finger pressed down over mine again, but with a lighter touch. The sound that it produced was less powerful, lighter somehow. “On a keyboard, you get don’t get this kind of range from the pressure of your fingers. You can’t control the sound as easily as you can here.” He played something that sounded somewhat upbeat for a minute. I was so lost in watching him, watching his concentration as his head moved to the beat.
“‘Someone Like You’ by Adele?”
He smiled and stopped. “Yeah. It’s pretty unmistakable. Notice how the louder parts are more pronounced than the rest of the melody. That’s not due to the tone necessarily, but the pressure I’m applying to the keys.”
He played something else, something that initially sounded more like a nighttime lullaby. It took me a minute to figure it out. Without the lyrics, it wasn’t as recogniza
ble, but then it built up to where I guessed the chorus was and I knew it instantly. “‘Against All Odds.’”
“Good ol’ Phil Collins,” he said, grinning.
“Do another one,” I said, hoping not to sound too desperate. Casey had asked him at dinner if he’d played for me and considering that was one of the things I found most attractive about him, the fact that he hadn’t played for me had stuck in my head.
“Okay, but you have to sing the lyrics or else I stop.”
“Oh, okay,” I said. “So this is a game?”
“Yeah. I stop when you get it wrong.” His smile was infectious. I wanted to stay here, next to him on the piano bench as long as possible.
“I won’t get it wrong.”
“Let’s see.” He winked, took a breath in and out and then placed his hands on the keys. What erupted from his fingers was completely unmistakable.
“You’re making this too easy,” I told him before I started to sing along to Bohemian Rhapsody.
“Am I?” he asked.
“Why does it sound so good like this? It’s so unique.”
“Freddie Mercury spent years developing it. Years of work for this song. Okay, next one.”
I knew it immediately after the first notes were played, but since the lyrics took a minute to come through anyway, I just enjoyed watching him. He might’ve been halfway in love with this piano. His eyes were closed and his head moved to the beat. From time to time, his arm brushed against mine, bumping into me, and I wanted to lean into it. But I let him enjoy, pouring himself into the song, before I joined in with the chorus to ‘Drops of Jupiter.’
“That one took you a minute.”
“No,” I said. “I just liked watching you play.”
We were so close, sharing the same breathing room. Our legs were inches apart, and he didn’t seem so much taller than me when we were seated, side by side.
The attraction I felt for him was a persistent hum, nearly to the point of distracting, but it swarmed when he looked at me the way he did. I was never more intimidated than when he stared deeply into my eyes, deep enough to see all the way through. Like he knew my secrets, without me saying a single word. Without taking his eyes off of me, his hands returned to the piano and he played another unmistakable tune.
One Little Lie: a hate to love rom-com Page 22
