To his surprise, it’s Spencer who greets him. Gwen is busy working at her desk, and Nico is talking to a man with slicked-back blond hair wearing an ill-fitting polyester suit. If he’s a client, he is not taking Nico’s style expertise under advisement.
“Hey, Grady, look. You were totally right about flipping off the paps.” Gwen turns her computer screen so he can see; it’s a picture of them in the car. And below that, one of him and Nico on their way to Knoxville. “Oh, yeah,” Gwen says, when he frowns at the second one. “Everyone is all abuzz about where you were going and if you’re still together. And they were just starting to lose interest, too.”
Grady moves the screen away. “Great.”
“Don’t worry,” Spencer calls from the reception desk. “I’ve gotten them completely off the trail of your wedding. They all think it’s been cancelled.” Grady doesn’t have the emotional reserves to tell him that it just might be. Spencer grins and adjusts his glasses. “I’ve been using the name Ocin Ydarg. Get it?”
Gwen answers him first, “Spencer, that is the worst fake name of all time.”
Spencer stands in challenge. “I’d like to see you do better.” Then Gwen stands, too, and they spend the next several minutes coming up with louder and more random combinations of Nico and Grady’s names, until Nico’s meeting is finished and the blond guy in the cheap baggy suit leaves. “Nico, what’s your middle name?” Spencer asks, after Nico closes the office door.
“I don’t have one.” He holds Grady’s elbow and kisses his cheek; he looks amazing today, and smells incredible, and Grady’s stomach goes tight. “How was your briefing?”
“Bad. What was that about?” He recognizes the churn in his gut; he’s suspicious. Something about that guy and the secretive way they were talking and the side glances in Grady’s direction have raised his hackles. He’s early. He was supposed to meet Nico after lunch. “Who was that?”
“Oh.” Nico blinks too fast, then steps back. “Maintenance guy. There’s uh. Plumbing.” He gestures vaguely to the ceiling. He walks away before Grady can ask what sort of plumbing problems they could be having in the ceiling, and Spencer pipes up again. “Grady, what’s your middle name?”
Grady doesn’t answer. He follows Nico to ask again who that guy really was, then he spots a business card on Nico’s desk with blond guy’s face on it. He slips it into his pocket when Nico isn’t looking. “Vaughn,” he finally answers Spencer. “My middle name is Vaughn.”
When he’s back at home by himself, Grady goes right to the office, where he sways back and forth in the office chair picking at a corner of the business card with his thumb. The guy’s name is Chet. He’s a real estate agent, and Grady can’t decide if he’s Nico’s type because Nico’s type before Grady was decidedly not-Grady: serious, mature men with serious mature jobs that didn’t come with paparazzi camped outside of their houses or fans digging up his personal business or record companies asking him to hide his relationship. Grady types Chet’s name and waits for the search results to load. He’s tense with brittle jealousy, and he hates— Why can’t he just temper his emotions? Why can’t he feel things in a reasonable way? Why is he so much?
Chet sells rural properties, retail spaces mostly, some land available for development. His “about” page says that he and his wife Jessica have two kids: Brylie and Chasen.
Reasonable, rational: Maybe Nico is looking for a bigger office space, maybe they’re looking to expand. Why rural he doesn’t know—for storage? Grady goes down to the garage, trying to get a grip on his cyclone of thoughts. Don’t lose hope. It was for you. You look just like him. Just one more person who left you. He rips out upholstery and engine parts, busted lights and rusted handles. The car was abandoned, left to rust and rot. Grady has two options: strip it bare and start all over, or painstakingly replace broken bit by broken bit and hope it may someday slowly come back to life.
He’s dripping with sweat and dizzy from the stifling heat in the garage. He takes his shirt off and uses it to wipe his face and neck and leans over the open hood of the car to catch his breath, slow his thoughts, take the dangling, frayed ends of his life and figure out how to pull his way back up again without music and with Nico and so many other people counting on him, believing in him, wanting things from him—
His phone rings with Amy’s ringtone: “If Mama Ain’t Happy.”
He fumbles the phone in his grimy, sweaty hands, then presses it to his ear to hear, “Great news, the snapdragons came in after all.”
Grady props himself on the edge of the hood. “I’m glad. Only had to give ‘em a little more time, right?” He sounds breathless to his own ears. Amy picks up on his rough voice right away. “What’s the matter, my darling?” That’s all it takes, her kind, motherly tone. He breaks, sobbing like a little boy over the phone to his maybe, hoped-for future-mother-in-law.
26
Grady busies himself under the car, which he’s put up on blocks. He’s removed the flat, worn-out tires, the shredded brake pads, and the cracked fuel tank. All of those parts should be easy enough to replace. His life is another story entirely, but it’s fine, he’s fine. As long as he’s focused on the car, he’s fine, even if a little embarrassed over his breakdown. He’s relieved and somewhat unburdened; he didn’t know how badly he needed to get that all out until it kinda just… did. One end of the fuel tank comes loose, and Grady pushes his heels against the concrete floor and scoots the wheeled creeper over to work on the other end.
“I hear Roy Orbison, so I know you’re in here somewhere.” Grady rolls himself out on the creeper to find Nico standing over him. Before Grady sits up, Nico slowly takes in Grady’s torn-up jeans, grease-stained arms, the smears across his bare chest, the hair clumped with sweat and he remarks, “I may have to reconsider my stance on disliking this car.”
Of course, Nico would have a thing for the greasy mechanic look. Grady heaves himself up and mops his face and neck with his shirt. “How late is it?”
Nico winces. “Late, sorry.”
“Lots of late nights, huh?”
It’s there, whatever he’s hiding, fighting to be said in the struggle in Nico’s eyes and the firm set of his mouth, as if he’s barely keeping it contained behind his tightened lips. Nico darts his gaze away to the steel workbench. “What’s that? Transmission?”
Grady follows the conversational detour, for now. The Superbird’s transmission is laid out in puzzle pieces: the dozen or so parts Grady has disassembled, cleaned and greased, ready to be reassembled. “Yeah, it’s not in bad shape. Needs some new seals, maybe a gasket, but I’m optimistic I can rebuild it.”
Nico’s look back at him is soft, warmly loving, and it’s so hard for Grady to have any fight left when Nico looks at him like that. Grady loves him, but, more than that, he has to find a way to trust that Nico means it when he says he loves Grady. Grady stops the music blasting from his old boom box, closes the hood of the car, and covers the transmission parts with a tarp. “Your mom is coming here.”
Nico narrows his eyes, and his head slowly tips to the right. “At the end of next month for the wedding, you mean.”
“Um,” Grady says, his voice sliding up. “No. Tomorrow night. We were talking and— I guess she sorted out that I was havin’ a hard time lately.”
Nico’s head un-tilts, but his face is unreadable. Sad? Tired? Hiding? “Yeah, she’s good at that.” He pulls his phone from his pocket and scrolls through a long line of text messages; his eyebrows lower and rise several times over. He pockets it and announces, “Okay, I’ll send a car to the airport for them. Dad’s coming, too.” Then he untucks his shirt and uses it to fan his stomach. “As much as I’m enjoying the sweaty, shirtless view, it’s like the inside of a steamer basket in here.”
Grady agrees. The setting of the sun hours ago had little effect on the stifling, moist heat; it’s fall now, technically, but the summer weather won’t
release them from its grip for weeks. As soon as they step inside, Grady’s skin prickles with goosebumps. The punishing heat outside is cathartic much like singing or playing guitar or sex or going for a long run: the release that drugs or alcohol used to be. Nico’s solid, sure presence and the air-conditioning inside are a blessed relief; he can only stew in his own toxins for so long.
“Go shower, and I’ll order some food,” Nico says, pausing in the kitchen to set down his bag and unload his pockets. Before he goes, Grady pecks Nico’s cheek; there’s a hint of stubbled roughness against his own. Nico always clean-shaves every morning. He must be stressed out, too. How could he not be? Is he looking for an exit strategy of some sort, a delay or an option B if he’s foolishly determined to not leave altogether? “Hey.” Nico catches Grady’s hand as he moves away. “I know things are hard right now, but we will get through it. Hang in there.”
“I’m trying to,” Grady says. Lord, is he trying. “I don’t know what else to do.”
Nico releases him with a wide-eyed look of warning. “Well, sounds like help is on her way direct from Sacramento.”
Grady gets up early the next day and mows their sloping front and side lawns instead of going for a run, has Flora drop by with some mums for their garden, plants them among the tall yellow goldenrods and dainty orange helenium flowers and the fuzzy clumps of lamb’s ear that Cayo likes to pet with one pointed chubby finger when he isn’t toddling off or picking flowers or throwing rocks. The leaves on the two juneberry bushes he and Nico and Flora planted in the garden in memoriam for Grady’s grandparents are showing the first hints of the brilliant red they’ll be once cool weather finally arrives.
After that, he sees Nico off and spends the rest of the day cleaning the house from top to bottom. That song comes back to him as he’s sweeping; the lullaby picks up tempo, goes from wistful and solemn to an angry undertone, an old anger that Grady knows all too well, a cadence he’s heard for a long time, notes and words he’s been collecting his whole life. He abandons the broom and a pile of dirt and debris on the kitchen floor to scribble down the music and lyrics before he can shove them away again. Emotionally wrung out, he goes on another run to drain the tension physically, too.
He circles back to finish cleaning, cleans himself, and sits down to knit to keep his still-anxious hands busy—a good anxious now, an excited anxious, until his phone vibrates with the message he’s been waiting for.
Nico: Plane is arriving on time. I’ll try to beat them home.
Grady finishes three and a half fingerless gloves for the cooler months—assuming they will eventually arrive—when he hears car doors slamming closed. He jumps up to greet them on the porch. “Mr. Takahashi, sir.” Grady shakes Ken’s wide, solid hand and grabs his sturdy shoulder with the other. He’s like a broader, grayer, more stoic version of Nico. “And Amy.” He bends to scoop her up in a hug—he’s been expressly forbidden to call her Mrs. Takahashi.
“Oh, let me look at you, it’s been too long.” She squeezes Grady’s face between both of her hands after he sets her back down on the porch. “So handsome. Ken, look how handsome!”
“Yes, very handsome.” Nico’s dad looks at the luggage the driver brought up. “Where can I take these bags?”
Grady insists on carrying most of the suitcases himself, though Ken grabs two, then Grady gets them settled in the guest room at the far end of the top floor. It has a nicer view of the woods behind their house than the downstairs one, and it has Nico’s old bed and funky refinished vintage dresser and shelves. “The bathroom is the first door on the left,” Grady says, when Nico arrives to join them.
Nico gets a handshake and back pat from his dad and a hug from his mom that he crouches for. “I’ve missed you, my handsome boys,” she says, patting Nico’s cheek, then his chest, and frowns as she asks, “What is this shirt, Nico? So bright.”
Nico looks down at it with pouted lips. “Neon is on-trend again,” he says, more to himself than her. His shirt is neon stripes with neon triangles, and on anyone else it wouldn’t work at all. But it’s Nico, so, of course, it does.
“I like it,” Grady says.
Nico replies, with great emphasis, “Thank you, Grady.”
“Okay,” Amy says, hauling a suitcase half her size onto the bed, and then a slightly smaller one after that. Ken is unpacking clothes into the dresser and setting his toiletries on top, as quiet as Amy is chatty. “Nico, I brought you those seaweed crisps you like from Costco.” She unzips the smaller bag. It’s completely filled with boxes of roasted and salted seaweed chips. Nico gasps and grabs one of the boxes.
“Thanks, mom, you’re the best.”
“You know we do have a Costco here,” Grady points out.
Nico replies with disdain and a mouthful of seaweed snacks, “As if I’m going to shop at Costco. Grady, please.”
“And Grady,” Amy says, opening the other suitcase. “I couldn’t remember if you liked plain M&M’s or peanut more, and they also had the white chocolate Kit Kat bars I know are your favorite, only in a variety pack, so I hope you like Reese’s Cups and Hershey Bars, too.” She pulls out a pound-size bag each of both plain and peanut M&M’s, and a bulk pack of thirty full-size candy bars. “Oh, I hope they didn’t melt.”
Grady is speechless, overwhelmed that she thought of him and remembered his favorite candy and then went to the trouble of hauling a suitcase full of it all the way across the country.
“I dunno, Mom, maybe you should have gotten sixty candy bars,” Nico says, loudly crunching on his seaweed snacks. “That’s not nearly enough junk food.”
Amy furrows her brows and pats one of the extra-large bags of M&M’s. “Oh, no.”
“He’s joking, dear,” Ken says, in a flat tone. He gathers his bathroom items and heads off down the hall.
“Nicolas,” she chides, swatting at Nico. Grady chuckles and thanks her, then reassures her that it’s more than enough and he very much appreciates it. “Oh,” she says, digging around in the bigger suitcase again. She pulls out a raincoat, a mesh ball cap, nylon waterproof pants, and socks that say MAXDRY on the store tag. “I was at the new garden center on Winslow. Nico, you remember where that video store used to be when you were little—”
“No, I do not,” Nico says.
She continues, ignoring him, “I think it’s a flooring place now? Next to that they opened a garden center, and next to that I saw there was a running store, and the woman who works there said all this stuff is good for running in the rain. I was telling her about how my sons are in Nashville, and how much it rains here with the thunderstorms, and I worry, Grady, about you running in the rain without proper gear.”
Grady wants to scoop her up in another hug and never let go; he could not possibly love this woman more. “Thank you,” he says, clutching the rain pants and coat and hat and socks to his chest, tight against his full, happy heart. “This is— Thank you.” He swallows and sniffs, and she seems to understand that his gratitude is for more than the rain gear and candy.
She reaches up to cradle his face in her hands. “Of course, my darling.”
27
Grady has so many memories of Memaw; a hope chest full of her laugh and her smile and her cooking and her kisses dropped on the crown of his head. Memaw was everything good and warm and kind in this world, and if Grady is ever even close to being as kind or warm or good, it’s because of her. He tries and fails and tries again, because she believed that he could. So he does. He falls, he gets up, he falls. She’d make him brownies and kiss the messy curls on his head and say, It’s okay, angel. Failing just means you get to try again.
When he wakes to the smell of pancakes, his still-sleepy mind takes him to a Saturday morning in the trailer, waking to find Memaw in the kitchen and Granddaddy in his chair and Johnny Cash singing a hymn on the radio. Keep my feet from wandering. There from thee I’ll roam. Lest I fall upon the wayside. Lead
me gently home.
“Mornin’ angel,” she’d say. “Go on, set the table, now.”
The confusion clears from Grady’s head, and he sits up in his house not in the rural shadowed outskirts of Nashville, but on a hill that overlooks its skyline.
Nico is up early and gone again; the rare days that he does so are becoming less and less rare. Grady throws some clothes on and goes down to find Ken watching TV in the living room and Amy in the kitchen. She sets a plate of pancakes in front of him and informs him that Nico didn’t eat anything at all.
“In your freezer you have banana bread and ice cream and in your refrigerator you have milk, soda, ketchup, and blackberry jam. Lucky I found pancake mix in the cabinet. Where is your food? What do you eat?”
Grady spreads jam on his pancakes and sits at the breakfast bar. “We get takeout,” he says, deciding not to mention that Nico lives mostly on a diet of green smoothies, protein bars, and black coffee and the longer Grady lives with him the more he does, too, plus, Mello Yello. “Been kinda hard for us to get to the store, even more than usual,” Grady admits.
She makes the same tight-lipped disapproving face that Nico so often does. “I saw those cameramen outside. Shameful.”
Grady eats his pancakes and nods. “I try to remind myself that people are just curious and don’t mean any harm. I know it bothers Nico a whole lot, though.”
Amy gets the milk from the fridge, pours a glass, and puts that down on the breakfast bar for him, too. It’s really only there for the days Nico doesn’t take his coffee black, but Grady drinks it without a word of complaint.
“Nico is very strong-willed,” she says. “He can handle it.” Grady laughs a little at the understatement. Strong-willed, yes indeed. “I’ll have him stop at the market.” Amy pulls a notepad and pen from her purse and starts a list. “He said he was running errands today.”
Blended Notes Page 15
