Glenn hollered from across the Misty Cat, “You’re exempt from the mopping tonight, kiddo. See you in the morning!”
Chapter 15
“Bye, Glory! Thank you! I mean, Thank you, Hellcat Canyon! Good night!” Annelise paused in the doorway of the Misty Cat with a hand planted saucily on one hip and blew her a kiss.
Glory laughed and blew one back.
Eden Harwood, whether she wanted it or not, was going to have her hands full with that little girl. She was blazing smart and quirky, and the lucky little thing was surrounded by people who loved her.
She didn’t know how it had happened—maybe Eden had unbent all on her own, which given how many times Glory had said the “F” word in the throes of concert adrenaline last night seemed unlikely. Maybe Annelise badgered her into it—because how could anyone say no to that face?—but Annelise had shown up with her mini guitar today after Glory’s shift.
And together she and Annelise had turned “Gregory” into an actual whole song, with actual chords. She’d eventually like to teach them to Annelise one by one. Today, however, was all about G.
Glory knew Annelise was going to go home and drive her mom nuts by strumming G all night.
As she sat on the edge of the Misty Cat stage and rested her chin on the soothing curve of her guitar, Glory thought about what Eli had said about Eden being a single mom, with hurts and secrets of her own.
Eli, who noticed so much by virtue of being quiet and observant and just, dammit all, by being good.
Given Annelise’s age and given the fact that music was pouring out of her and given the bands that not infrequently cycled in and out of Hellcat Canyon, Glory had a hunch who her dad might be and how that might have happened.
But that was Eden’s journey, and she had her own reasons for keeping that entirely to herself.
On a whim, Glory tuned her low E a whole step down to D and strummed it. Ahhhhhh. She could feel that chord right between her ribs. That little primal thrum of a bottom D was like therapy.
She picked out a snatch of Fleetwood Mac’s “Never Going Back Again.”
She wondered if that’s how Eli thought of her.
She’d awakened to close to two hundred new likes on her Facebook page and wiggly camera phone video posted to it by one of the concertgoers, who had tagged The Baby Owls, thus opening her up to the possibility of hundreds of thousands of views.
She still looked and sounded amazing in that video, and she could critique a dozen things about it, but it was simplicity itself, that performance, with the stripped-down rawness of something like The White Stripes.
And she’d drawn in a shuddery little breath. Finally, things were moving forward. It was just one gig and one wobbly video, but it was infinitely more and infinitely better and more than she’d had yesterday.
She’d made the Hellcat Canyon Chronicle:
Local Musician Brings Down House
After The Baby Owls Fly the Coop
And the tagline was “Crowd Sings Hallelujah for Glory Greenleaf.”
Glenn had framed it and hung it on the wall where The Baby Owls flyer used to be.
Below that article online was another article:
The Baby Owls Guitarist Busted
for Possession of One Tiny
Marijuana Cigarette
It was pretty clear they let college interns write the headlines, because the headline just dripped with reproachfulness.
The article went on to describe how the band had been surrounded by the California Highway Patrol and sheriff’s deputies with guns drawn on I-5 outside of Prentiss, and their bus had been searched pretty thoroughly. Marijuana smoke tended to cling to bushy beards and apparently the fact that they all reeked of it was probable cause.
Rough night for The Baby Owls, all in all.
Glory was mildly sympathetic. That’s rock and roll, as they said. Most musicians didn’t get through entire careers without at least a few headlines like those. They’d get off with a fine, no doubt.
She had a sneaking suspicion Eli had a little something to do with it. Whatever phone call he’d made in that back room, it hadn’t resulted in tenderly sympathetic law enforcement personnel bent on rescuing the owlets.
He’d been bent on rescuing her.
Now that Annelise’s sparkling self had gone out the door, she understood that, despite last night’s triumph, there was a sense of tense disquiet about the day. A waiting feeling. She wasn’t certain she’d taken a full, deep breath today.
Portentously, a shadow fell over her hand.
She looked up.
“Hi, Glory. Your boss said I could find you here.”
It was Bethany.
Glory stared up at her, examining her for any evidence of having been kissed senseless or otherwise sexually satisfied last night.
Bethany gave her head a little self-conscious toss and her hair spilled over her shoulder like a butterscotch and saffron tassel.
“Hi. Bethany, right?” Glory scrunched her brow a little.
That was indeed bitchy and very unlike her. She was sorry and not sorry.
“Yeah. Bethany. I think Glory is such a cool name. It’s like you were born to be a rock star.”
“Yep.”
She was aware she was being obnoxious, and she didn’t much like herself for it, but if there was one advantage to being a rock star it was that no one would be surprised if you showed a little attitude.
Bethany was working up to something, she was pretty sure.
“Your gig was amazing. I’ve never seen a woman jam on a harmonica like that. I guess I always thought of it as a sort of a guy’s instrument.”
“Yeah, the mouth organ is a masculine instrument, all right.”
She watched unblinkingly and guiltless as perfectly nice Bethany slowly turned scarlet.
“Ha ha,” Bethany said uncertainly.
Glory was beginning to enjoy herself in an entirely unworthy way.
She wrapped her hands around her knees and stared up into Bethany’s brown doe eyes and waited for the next thing Bethany intended to say. Like a chess prodigy deciding upon which strategy she intended to use to decimate her opponent.
“You and Eli grew up together, didn’t you? You’re kind of like a sister to him? You guys seem to know quite a bit about each other.”
This was either a fishing expedition, a very subtle declaration of war, or actual innocence on Bethany’s part.
Whatever it was, the “sister” thing was pretty unpleasant to hear.
“Is that what he told you?”
She didn’t think he’d say that. Eli wasn’t one to tell a lie. Not even a placating white lie to the woman he’d just started to date.
And the undertone of the relationship between her and Eli was so deafening to Glory that it seemed inconceivable that Bethany couldn’t hear it. It was, in fact, kind of like that low D tuning. It thrummed through every word they said to each other; it thrummed in the silences, too.
“It’s just you guys seem to have grown up together and you seem comfortable with each other. What with all the, um, teasing, and so forth.”
Maybe Bethany was just quite nice and not terribly complicated because life never hacked chunks out of her and so she thinks, poor fool, that what she sees is what she gets.
“Yeah. I’ve known Eli my whole life,” she admitted finally.
She wasn’t going to cop to “comfortable.” Comfortable was the last thing they were these days.
“ANYways . . .” Bethany bravely continued. “You probably know his birthday is coming up,” she said brightly. “Of course he’s a Scorpio. No surprises there, am I right?”
Glory greeted this sentence with a pitying, incredulous stare designed to make Bethany feel like a whimsical fool.
She privately thought the same thing. Boy, if there ever was a Scorpio, he was it. Still waters run deep, the stare, the sizzling, the whole nine yards.
Bethany soldiered on, still faintly pink.
“So
ooo . . . I kind of wanted to get him a present. You know, something small, but not something dorky or jokey. I thought maybe I’d ask you for ideas. Wasn’t sure who else to ask. I’ve only gone out with him twice, but we’re going out again tomorrow, and . . .” She lifted a shoulder in a shrug, and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “It’ll be our third date, kind of.”
Glory’s stomach suddenly and violently cramped into a pretzel knot.
Everyone knew that the third date was supposed to be the sex date.
And Bethany didn’t strike Glory as at all prudish. She looked like a girl unopposed to having a good time.
Glory looked up into Bethany’s face and for a moment didn’t see her. Her own had gone bizarrely hot, and the backs of her hands fuzzed over in heat. Somehow knowing that it hadn’t happened yet, and knowing when it would, was worse. The notion of Eli sleeping with Bethany—his hands in her blond hair, his mouth touching hers—made her want to lift open the top of her head and shot-put her brain far, far away from her, somewhere her imagination couldn’t torture her.
It was as excruciating a moment as she’d ever experienced.
But it was a valuable moment. Because the shock of it burrowed like a bullet down through all the various strata of hurt and anger and finally struck an unshakeable bedrock truth that made all the hurt and anger pointless.
She sat with that truth for a silent moment.
And all at once she knew what to say to Bethany.
“Is twenty-five bucks too much to spend on a gift?”
“Of course not.” Bethany sounded surprised. “That’s about what I had in mind.”
Of course not. Glory and her mother could have heated hour-long Kitchen Table Summits over how they could spend twenty-five extra dollars if any should show up.
And in a flash Glory kind of understood why Jonah might had done what he had done. Because that chasm between wanting and having was sometimes unbearable. It took a strong person to patiently build a bridge across it, stick by stick. Jonah wasn’t that person.
It took someone like Eli.
“I know what you should get him,” she told Bethany.
Eli’s entire body was clean scrubbed and he smelled like a crisp Irish spring, which he knew because he’d given his pits a good sniff. He’d trimmed up his privates and inspected his nose hairs and shaved his face until it glowed. His house got the same treatment: it now smelled like bleach, Lemon Pledge, and the Air Wick candle he’d chucked into his basket at the supermarket, and he could see himself in the surface of his coffee table. He’d thrown out all the expired food in the refrigerator, replaced it with a few grown-up things like wine, cheese, and a head of broccoli so that he didn’t look so much a bachelor, and he’d pummeled his sofa and bed pillows into plumpness and changed his sheets to the high-thread-count ones his mom had given him last Christmas and which he hadn’t seen the point in, because weren’t sheets sheets? They were pretty soft, granted.
Eli of course knew what traditionally happened on a third date.
And so he did all this stuff ritualistically, as if in so doing he could summon the desire.
But he’d slept badly last night.
He’d kissed Bethany when he’d dropped her off last night after The Baby Owls show. A brush of his lips against hers. Which probably puzzled the crap out of her. She was the kind of woman men would normally love to paw.
He’d done it to be polite.
And then he’d asked her out to dinner tonight, in both defiance of how he felt and retaliation for last night’s show, and as an apology to Bethany for not wanting to paw her. Bethany didn’t know any of this, of course. She just knew she was going out to dinner at a nice restaurant with a sheriff’s deputy.
Because he’d left the Misty Cat feeling as though Glory had essentially whaled on his soul like a cowbell.
He was still reverberating, feeling bruised, and swinging between the poles of quietly, coldly furious about it and . . . damn, but it was also just so funny. It was so . . . Glory. She’d been spectacular. And awful. And brilliantly, capriciously punishing. He’d been so proud it was nearly painful, watching her take wing like that. And he’d been horny as fuck.
That incredible new song. “Badass Rose.” What did it mean? Had she just used the image for inspiration, or was she trying to tell him something she just couldn’t say out loud?
He just didn’t know what she wanted.
If the game was simply torture: mission accomplished.
But enough was enough.
And the smoothly tan, sweet-smelling, very pretty woman now sitting across from him at Cafe Elegante was sophisticated enough to know what should happen on a third date, too. And judging from all the little touches she’d been sneaking in—a hand laid on his arm to ask if she could change the radio station in the truck, another lingering touch that transformed into a light caress when she was pointing out the billboard of The Baby Owls on the highway, a lingering look and a small smile at the stoplights—she was into it.
“What I’d really like to do is work on a, say Pirates of the Caribbean type of movie,” she was saying. “Something like that. Something where I can really transform a person into someone else entirely, rather than just prep their face for camera work. I’m fortunate to have a steady job right now, though. I’m hoping The Rush gets picked up for more seasons.”
That would mean she’d be around more, but neither of them pointed that out.
“Say I’m an actor, getting ready for a scene. What would you do to my face?” he asked.
She tipped her head and studied him. “Well, we’d start with moisturizer, of course.”
Of course? Did he look like a catcher’s mitt? “Sure. Of course,” he repeated dryly.
“And your eyebrows—” Suddenly she leaned forward and she reached across and lay her finger like a sextant over his brow bone.
His eyes crossed involuntarily. Her fingers smelled like some light floral lotion.
“Everything beyond my finger toward your temple would have to go. Yank.”
She was touching his face. Which seemed awfully intimate, if not innately sexy at the moment.
He’d never thought minutely about his eyebrows before. Occasionally a few hairs would spring up between them but the unibrow never seemed to threaten. The Barlows weren’t an inherently hairy people.
She took her finger away as the waiter sauntered over with a basket containing a variety of hot little bread rolls.
“Tossed a couple extra in there for you, Deputy Barlow. The ones with seeds that you like.”
Bethany reached for a roll speckled with little seeds and leaned toward him confidingly, her eyes sparkling. “In this town, it’s like you’re a celebrity. Everyone knows you’re a cop. Do you shake them down for protection money?”
He smiled. “Yeah, I get paid in bread rolls and special tables by the window. The bread here is great, by the way. They make it in SON OF A BITCH.”
Bethany jumped and her roll shot straight up in the air, landed three feet away, and rolled across the floor.
That *$!#! blue Porsche had whipped by going at least sixty miles per hour.
It was all he could do not to chase the guy and rip his bumper off with his teeth.
He whipped his head back toward Bethany.
“Oh God. I’m so sorry about that, Bethany. Cop instincts. Francone. That guy is a menace.”
Someone at a table down the way toed the roll back toward them, as if he’d friskily invited them to play soccer.
The waiter gracefully strolling down the aisle swooped upon it and took it away as though flying bread rolls were only to be expected.
Bethany shook her head. “Franco and his Porsche.”
“Yeah,” Eli said blackly. “Franco and his Porsche.”
“You know, I still can’t believe I’m actually working with Franco Francone and John Tennessee McCord. Can’t believe I call him Franco. ‘Franco, hold still and let me pluck your eyebrows.’”
“I
can think of a few other things you can call him.”
She smiled at that. “Let’s talk about you. Did you always want to be a cop?”
Damn.
A seemingly simple question, and the kind he ought to expect on dates. But he dreaded it. Because he didn’t like to lie. And leaving stuff out sometimes felt like a lie.
He considered his answer. The easy thing to say would be “yes.” Not, “no. I was going to college on a football scholarship and my dad was shot and killed during a routine traffic stop and then I suddenly felt like I needed to be a cop. It was like I could undo that injustice every day one person at a time, but of course that’ll never happen because people will keep on being people. But I love what I do and I’m good at it.”
And then he’d have to talk about his dad.
He understood fully, now more than ever, what a luxury it was to simply be known. Not only for the details of his life, but all the subtle parts of it, too. Being with someone who knew you was like unbuttoning that top button of your pants the minute you got home from work.
He missed Glory so much right now it felt like the air was being squeezed out of his lungs.
He missed Jonah, too.
That asshole.
And a date with a pretty woman shouldn’t feel like a slog.
He settled upon “It was kind of my calling” to keep things light. “How about you? Did you always want to learn how to, um . . . contour?”
Good God, how his colleagues would mock him for knowing that word. But she’d used it again as they were driving here. She’d pointed out Rebecca Corday’s bus bench ads and said, “nice contouring.”
She laughed. “I just always liked to play with makeup, and I love fashion and the idea of transforming people into maybe not their best selves, but . . . like an HD version of themselves. It’s been a dream come true, this job on The Rush. Some actors won’t give makeup artists the time of day. But the cast has been very kind. Franco and Mr. McCord are respectful and pretty amusing. I’d always heard Franco was kind of a womanizer but he’s been a gentleman.”
Wild at Whiskey Creek Page 20
