“I’m looking for Grady Dawson.”
He knows that voice. He will always know that voice.
“Look, you can’t just show up here,” Nico says. Grady calls his name to stop him.
“It’s trespassing.”
“Nico.”
“Grady has a right to privacy in his own home.”
“Nico.”
“This time I won’t call the cops but—” He looks over his shoulder, the door only open as far at the chain lock will allow. “What?”
“That’s not a fan. It’s my mother.”
11
In the room where no one ever sits, Grady stares out the picture window to the right of their stone fireplace as if he can see more than dark shapes standing out against darker shapes. Nico—who is truly Amy Takahashi’s child in this moment—asks in the span of one breath if she is thirsty or hungry or has a place to stay and does she know there’s a storm on the way because their driveway gets muddy and treacherous in the rain.
“Are you in town for long?” Nico continues.
“She never is,” Grady tells the window.
“I’m… I’m out in Knoxville now,” she says. “Staying with some family here.”
“Family?” Nico perks up. “As in, also Grady’s family?”
Nico’s eyes on Grady are imploring, desperate for this to be something it isn’t. Grady shifts, turning away. The couches in this room are too hard, and the new leather smell of them is too strong. He doesn’t want to be here; he can’t do this right now.
“Oh. Well, Vaughn’s family. Clay? That’s how I—” She knows then, about Vaughn and the wedding both, so either she’s here to capitalize on his current vulnerabilities, or she doesn’t care about having any tact at all anymore. The leather creaks as she shifts on the couch opposite theirs. “I apologize for showing up on your doorstep. I only had the address and I was gonna wait ‘till tomorrow, but I was so anxious I figured I’d go ahead and get it over with. I can go.”
Grady finally looks at her, really looks. He’s not sure how long it’s been. He stopped counting the days of her absences a long time ago. Two years? Three? She doesn’t look much different. Her hair is shorter. “You should go,” he tells her flatly.
Nico slaps his hands on his legs and stands. “I would really like some tea right now. Everyone want tea? Yes. Grady, help me make tea in the kitchen, would you?” Nico purses his lips and darts his eyes to the kitchen and back, silently transmitting his displeasure in a not-at-all subtle way. Well, that makes two of them. Grady glowers all the way to the kitchen.
“What are you doing?” Nico fills the tea kettle with the kitchen faucet on full blast. “I have never seen you act so rudely. I didn’t know you even had that capability.”
“What can I say? My mother brings out the best in me.” When he was a kid, and she would come and then go, Grady would be a hellion for days. He doesn’t know how his grandparents put up with him. He sighs and scrubs his hands through his hair; Nico shouldn’t have to put up with it either. He tries to be more diplomatic as Nico clangs the top of the kettle closed. “She’s gonna put on the charm,” Grady says. “Act like she’s really gotten her life together, for real this time, ask for money just to get her on her feet, and then take off again.”
Nico places the tea kettle on the stove and turns on the burner. “She seemed genuinely happy to see you.”
“Yeah, she’s good at that.”
“Still. I get to meet your mom, that’s something.” He mutters, fussing around the kitchen to gather mugs and tea, a serving tray, and a squeeze bottle of honey. “You don’t look very much alike.”
With her heart-shaped face, small nose, and pointed chin, she looks quite a bit like Memaw. Granddaddy is there in the narrow slope of her shoulders, her hazel eyes, and the shape of her mouth, particularly when she’s sad.
“I look like my father,” Grady says. He shakes tea into a diffuser. “Looked.”
“See? I didn’t know that. And now I do.” Nico’s smile is optimistic in the face of Grady’s pessimism; it’s an interesting new dynamic for them.
“This is not gonna to end well, sweetheart. I don’t want you to get your hopes up here.” Grady helps prepare the tea, trying to be more cooperative now that he’s wrapped his head around his mother showing up out of the blue. He snaps one diffuser ball closed and drops it into a mug. The tea blend is something Amy sent; it has lavender petals in it, and when Nico pours the steaming water over it smells like flowers and lemons.
“Tea. That’s it. Then we can toss her out by the scruff of her neck.” Nico presses his hands flat together in the center of his chest, as if pleading with Grady—as if Grady would ever deny him anything.
Nico and his mother get along like two peas in a pod, naturally. They first bond over the tea and then how much she loves their house: “It’s fancy, but not like Elvis fancy.” Bonding continues over Nico’s career, and how she could use a good stylist, and then Nico is giving her tips and complimenting her shape and how she clearly has an eye for patterns. Grady’s calming tea is completely ineffective.
“So, Lily. What are you up to in Knoxville?”
“Oh, it’s Lillian. No one has called me Lily in a quite a while.” She blinks as if remembering something difficult.
“Harder for people to track you down if you change your name, right?” Grady says, setting his mug back in the wooden serving tray.
“Grady…” Nico smiles with his teeth clenched tight.
“I mean it’s true, right, Lillian? You owe someone money. Or you screwed them over. Made promises you never intended on keeping and skipped town. Don’t want to make it too easy.” Grady’s right eye ticks twice.
Silence stretches out until Lillian scowls down into her empty mug, and Nico says, “Oh. Yeah, now I see the resemblance.”
Grady can’t take another second; he’s heard enough. “I’ll be in the garage. Nico’ll write a check for however much you came here for.”
He yanks out wires and belts and starts unscrewing bolts, not knowing or caring what works still. He hates this. He hates the anger he can’t control; he hates that it still gets to him, she still gets to him. After all he’s accomplished, all he’s done, the life he’s built for himself without her, without anyone, goes sideways and upside down the second she comes breezing back into his life. He’s a stupid little boy again, waiting for his mama to come back for him.
“She left.” Nico approaches him as if he’s made of broken glass; staying a safe distance back, he inches his way across the cement floor.
“Good.” Grady cranks the handle of a ratchet wrench, trying to loosen a stubborn bolt.
“I think maybe you should hear her out.”
“It’s not worth it. Trust me.” The car shakes with his efforts, and still the dammed bolt refuses to budge. “It’s the same thing every time with her.”
Nico hesitates, coming closer and then moving back again. His voice is so soft, so hesitant, so unlike him; it’s not right, not Nico. “Your father is gone, Grady. She’s not. You can still have a relationship with her, you know. You could try.”
Wrench in hand, Grady moves to face him—as if he hasn’t tried, as if that isn’t exactly what he’s wanted his whole life. “For once, Nico, can you let something go when I ask you to let it go?” He’s too loud, he’s shouting. It sounds so cold and hollow, and he hates it; god, he hates this.
Nico has never been one to cower, and, just like that, the gentleness is gone, replaced with a sudden snap of anger. Good. “Sorry for fucking caring about you, Grady. What is with you tonight? Why are you shutting me out when all I want to do is help?”
“Stop. Helping.” He goes back to that goddamn bolt, pushing and pushing. And the more stubborn it is, the more anger spreads like acid in Grady’s belly. “Stop acting like you always know what’s best for me. Stop going behind
my back and doing things I asked you not to do. Stop treating me like your client or your child or some idiot who can’t even figure out how to dress himself in the morning.” Grady growls a curse at the goddamn stuck bolt. “I was doing just fine before you came along. Just fine.”
Nico doesn’t shout back. He’s very quiet, says nothing when he leaves, and closes the door whisper-soft. That makes Grady even angrier; he doesn’t get to just walk away, not again—
Then Nico’s absence is a sudden vacuum, as if all the air in the room and in Grady’s lungs has been sucked out. He could scream and act out with his grandparents because he knew they were safe, that they weren’t leaving. No matter how awful he was they would be there—until they weren’t. Now Nico is his safe space, which means Nico has signed up for more than he bargained for.
12
The bed in the guest room is too soft. It’s not firm-soft like their bed in the master bedroom: comfortable yet supportive. It’s squishy-soft, as if Grady is being slowly swallowed whole by a giant man-eating dandelion fluff. He can’t get comfortable, turning and shifting and curling, then uncurling. When he does finally get comfortable, he’s too hot. Then, after he violently kicks the covers onto the floor, he’s too cold. Grady never sleeps well when one or both of them is crisscrossing the globe for tours and press: Grady on his own and Nico with Clem and occasionally someone else. Being ten feet down the hall from the closed door of their bedroom, where, he hopes, Nico is getting a much better night’s sleep, is so much worse than being across an ocean from him. He’s too embarrassed to face him, to share a bed with the shame of Grady’s outburst heavy between them, so Grady tosses and turns and sleeps in fitful, frustrating bursts.
Nico is up early and gone the next morning—no note, no breakfast or outfit laid out for Grady. This is what they do; they hurt each other and then run to the farthest corners they can find to lick their wounds alone. It was a necessity for Grady before, when he was the only person there to pick himself up and dust himself off, and he forgets; he acts on instinct, and it’s only after that he remembers he’s not alone anymore.
While he’s stretching his calves for a run, he texts Clem: Meet me at stairs, and takes the paved greenway path that leads to that park. She’s there when he arrives soaked in sweat and panting. Her hair is in a cute messy bun, and she’s wearing designer workout gear and pink sneakers, as glam as always. Clementine Campbell knows to be photo-ready at all times. “My mother’s back in town,” Grady tells her. They jog up and down opposite sides of the wide cement staircase built into a hill.
“Yikes,” Clem hits the bottom, then pivots to run back up. “You okay?”
Grady runs up the steps two at a time, keeping pace with Clementine. She’s been on this merry-go-round with him before. Though he’s never wanted to trouble her with it, she does at least know what it looks like. “No, not really.”
At the top, they pause, pivoting to go down the staircase. “I know what you need,” she says, pulling her phone out of a hidden pocket in her compression pants. She slows on the stairs, but doesn’t stop, and Grady’s phone buzzes in his armband. He stops on the third step from the bottom to watch a video of two otters holding hands while they float down a river.
“Thanks, Clem.” Grady presses play again.
“I got your back, sugar.”
Grady grins and sends her another text. Be my best woman?
“Duh,” she yells, running back up the stairs.
After they finish, someone snaps a picture of them doing cool-down stretches. Grady can see the headline plastered over his sweaty red face: Grady Dawson Struggles to Breathe! Is it drugs again? Lover’s quarrel with a jilted Clementine?
Clementine still looks perfect.
He runs back home; his head is clearer, and his body is flushed with endorphins. He steps out again, showered and shaved and nicely dressed, feeling hopeful, a little, as if maybe he’s shaken off all of the frustration and anger and embarrassment, or maybe he’s just found somewhere to shovel it aside. He stops by that organic farm-to-table sandwich shop Flora likes.
“I brought lunch.”
Flora is on summer break, home full-time for a few months with Cayo for just a little longer now. “Oh, you are my favorite.” She kisses his cheek and steps aside to let him in. Cayo dives for Grady’s arms. “I was just trying to get him settled for a nap, give me… fifteen minutes.”
Grady hefts Cayo’s weight into his right arm. “I’ll take him.”
She blinks at him, and Grady notes how her usually neat braid is coming loose, with tufts of hair pulled out in random places down the length of it. There are at least three mystery stains on her shirt, and, he notes, unsure if it would be rude to point it out, a Cheerio is stuck in her cleavage.
“You are a life-saver. I was starting to think there was no world outside of toddler music class and Sesame Street and cleaning up Cheerios from literally everywhere.” She shakes her head, and Grady decides to pluck out the Cheerio for her, since she sorta did mention it. From Grady’s arms, Cayo reaches for it, and she smiles. “This is a very strange game you silly boy.” Flora kisses Cayo and strokes his hair before taking the proffered bags of food.
In the wooden rocking chair next to a window, Grady softly sings a lullaby until Cayo’s body goes limp and heavy against his chest, the tiny fist grasping Grady’s sleeve relaxes, and his back rises and falls in slow, even breaths.
“You must be the luckiest little boy in the whole world,” Grady says, placing him carefully in his crib. “Two mamas who’d do anything for you.” He gives Flora a little more time to sit down and eat in peace, he tidies up the toys littering the bedroom floor, rights the books on their shelves, then tiptoes out.
“Are you staying for a while? We can sit outside.” Flora is placing a sandwich in a container, for Gwen, Grady figures.
“I had some other stops to make,” Grady says, as the friendlier of their two cats rubs against his leg. Crackers. He stoops over to pet her. “My mom is in town.”
The cat hops up onto the kitchen counter. Flora nudges her back down. “Is that hard for you?”
Grady stays crouched on the floor even though Crackers has wandered off to the living room. “It is. She comes in with all these promises, and I should know better by now, but—”
“She’s your mom,” Flora fills in, her voice kind. “You want to believe her. I can understand that.”
“You don’t think I’m stupid,” Grady says, standing. “For getting my hopes up every time?”
“Grady.” Flora sets her hand on his arm in a gesture that is comfortingly maternal. “Not at all, no.”
“Hey, Flora,” Grady says, holding her hands in his and looking deep into her eyes. “Would you be my best woman at the wedding?” He leaves with hug and sealed yes! and a promise to return for dinner soon and a book Flora thinks he’ll like and a finger-painted masterpiece by Cayo: a large sheet of paper covered nearly corner to corner in thick smears of blue paint, with a little yellow handprint mashed on the bottom. Flora says she has a drawer full of them, because, of course, that boy’s favorite thing to do is make a mess. Grady’s gonna frame it and hang it on the wall.
At his next stop, Grady stands in front of the bakery below the Style Studio as if he can’t recall what he’s doing there, but really he just can’t pluck up the nerve to go to him. In the end, he skips to his last planned stop and walks around the corner to see Spencer at The Station Pump.
“I hear your so-called mother is in town.” Spencer sloshes water from a pitcher into his glass. Has he been promoted to water-pourer? Is that a promotion? “How did you hear about that?” Someone in the park overheard, maybe? Great, more fuel to the gossip fire.
“I helped Gwen and Nico pack up some boxes and ship them.” Spencer moves the dripping pitcher away from Grady’s table.
“Oh. Well, that’s promising.”
Spenc
er scowls and cocks his hip sharply. “He said I was already on the payroll, so it was slightly less annoying than the hassle of hiring someone new.”
“Ah.” Grady bites down on a smile. That’s his Nico. Spencer moves on to spill water at other tables, and Grady scans the menu. The hour is odd, early afternoon between the lunch and dinner rushes, and the restaurant is quiet. Just a handful of tables are filled, and no band is on stage.
“When’s the live music starting?” Grady asks the waitress after ordering a salad and a soda; gotta balance things out.
“There should be one on now, but they had to cancel.” She takes his menu. “Anything else I can get you in the meantime?”
Grady shakes his head. He stares at the stage. It never has been just the music that felt like a gravitational pull; music and stage were what he knew he was meant for, even when he fought it. He fights it now, turns away and unwraps his silverware from its paper napkin, puts the napkin on his lap, then smooths it out. He arranges the salt and pepper and hot sauce and ketchup in order, smallest to biggest, then biggest to smallest, then least favorite to most favorite. With the song and the album on hold, he doesn’t know when he’ll be on a stage. Maybe everything will be on hold, and the thought makes his brain and body twitch and tremble, as though the jumping, loud static is taking over again.
“You want to be up there so bad,” Spencer says, making Grady startle. He sets down his drink and a straw. Maybe Spencer’s new job is just Drink Boy. “You’re practically vibrating out of your skin over here, and this is only your first Mello Yello.”
“Nah.” Grady leans back in his chair, casual-like, sipping the drink and wishing his attention would stop drifting to the empty stage. Spencer rolls his eyes.
The stage here reminds him of the stages he played on before anyone knew his name and no record label put demands and pressure on him. It was just him, a guitar, and a platform. He’d get payment in the form of drinks or food or games of pool. Sometimes people listened and sometimes not, and that didn’t matter much to him. He had a stage and a song, and that was where he found his salvation.
Blended Notes Page 7
