“A last resort, they doubled you up in the same incubator. Connected to each other, you breathed and Shelby’s heart beat,” she says as though she witnessed it but still can’t believe it. “Mason and I joked that you ‘took her breath away’ and she ‘totally eclipsed your heart.’” Mom laughs, a full-on guffaw, now that she can. “Get it?”
Versed in ’80s music, thanks to her. “Yeah, I get it.” But I’d rather forget it, un-hear it. It only adds to the mystery of what Shelby and I could be. Shelby literally breathed for me and my heart beat for her. So, what, we can’t live without each other? “The guitar…you think we can find it?”
“A vintage music quest…” Like giving an antiquer a lead for Depression glass, Mom can almost feel it, her fingertips trailing over the image of the handmade guitar on the insert. “Tell ya what, you get some rest while I finish up my shift, and we’ll give it the old college try.” Emphasis that she hasn’t given up on it for me.
She pulls an ID card, complete with bar code access, from her scrubs pocket and slides it across the table. “This will get you into the physicians’ lounge—on-call room for resting. I’d send you to the nurses’ lounge, but that would first require them to actually provide one for us.” She rolls her eyes at the dated system built on patriarchy.
Still fighting, huh, even outside Appalachia.
Mom’s rich-ass Dutch husband, and neurosurgeon, Dr. Stephan van den Berg’s ID almost makes me regret coming. It feels like a betrayal to Pop.
Pop went through the trenches with her, from awkward teens to troublesome twenties, figuring out who they were and how they were going to make it. Breaking his back, and his lungs, in the mine—the best living a man can make for his family in Appalachia—to try and give her the things she wanted, to make her happy.
Then van den Berg swoops in—like some buzzard waiting out the warrior’s kill—and nabs her in her thirties, when she knows who she is and has made it. When there are no trenches. Lazy bastard.
He’s never done anything to me but try to impress me with expensive gifts. Gifts that I offload without removing from the elaborate wrapping they came in. Gifts that become the highlight, or laughingstock, of Miss Patterson’s toy drive. The only thing a Halo Board will get you on a holler road is a broken neck.
And she’d have to break my arm to make me take that ID. “If I stay at all, you’ll find me in the visitors’ lounge.” In the abruptly unbearable air, I leave my commitment hanging.
Harsh, maybe, but better than when she walked out on hers.
With the breaking of another dawn, Destiny and I stand behind the counter at Hot Brown.
Monitoring our sluggish tables, we await the rush of the church crowd. Not exactly the best shift, many of the mindset that if ten percent is good enough for the church, it is plenty good for us.
“Alright, dish,” Destiny prompts, now that we have the time. “What happened last night with Ace. Did you hook up?”
“No!” I retort.
I don’t tell her that we rode around and almost kissed, because we didn’t kiss. More precisely, he didn’t want to kiss me. Ace Cooper does whatever he wants; everybody knows that. If he had wanted to kiss me, he would have. Still crushed by the fact that I am unkissable, I’m certainly not going to brag about it.
“Ugh,” she sighs. “He didn’t try? You didn’t try?” She would’ve tried.
I tried! Didn’t I? “It’s not like that with us.” Apparently.
“Well, you missed the fireworks at the river.”
“There were more?” Ace’s smackdown of Red’s date wasn’t explosive enough?
“Oh, yeah! It turned legend in a hurry. Somebody found a gun.”
“Oh, good God.” The last thing that inebriated crowd needed was a gun.
“So, Silas Haskell called his brother, who called their cousin-in-law, who’s a cop.” Destiny laughs. “Dumbass.”
I think my heart skips a beat, considering the unwelcome guests.
“Before we knew it, we were swimming in Poke County’s finest. Ree-oww, ree-oww, ree-oww!” She gives a comical impression of the sirens.
But it’s not funny. “Who all did they catch?” Surely a lot of our classmates for underage drinking.
“You know how it goes,” she prefaces the good ol’ boy law enforcement we are accustomed to. “Girls and athletes got off with a warning. So did Silas. And everyone else who knows anyone at the police department. Besides, the underage drinking took a back seat to ‘the smoking gun.’” She hoots at her own humor.
I can’t laugh, but I am relieved. That will put the kibosh on any future river bashes, alleviating me of coming up with an excuse not to attend.
“Oh, and you have a campus tour with Edward Grayson Keene, the third…” she mocks in an aristocratic tone “…next month.”
“What?” More intimidating than cops, my heart sinks like a tea glass submerged in dishwater.
Slyly she pulls his business card, stained with Mornay sauce, from her apron pocket.
“No,” I gasp, choking on suds.
“Don’t worry. I made you sound cool. ‘Hey! What’s up? TDTM. CU46.’”
“TD…C6…what?”
“‘Talk dirty to me. See you for sex.’” She crows. “For being so smart, you’re pretty naive.”
“Impale me now.” I groan, leaning over the spike stick bill fork that punches and holds together handwritten guest checks.
“Sure. But not until after next month.”
“What did you text to Grayson, exactly?”
“Okay, so, first I thought about saying, ‘Hi. It’s Shelby, like the car! LOL.’ But then, I was like, Shelby wouldn’t say that. And textspeak probably ain’t the greatest either, right? So I just said, ‘Hi. It’s Shelby.’ Just Shelby,” she affirms, proudly. “I threw it out there—like you, short and shy—to see if he remembered and if he was down.”
I’m not short. My distance running Achilles heel is that I’m too tall. If I could take an inch or two off my height—and my wrist circumference—I’d be faster. But Destiny is tall. The tallest girl in our class, the tallest girl in school. To her everyone is short, even most of the boys.
“Did he?” Remember. “Was he?” Down.
“Girl, he jumped on that text in a hot second. He is definitely down!” Habitually talking or fiddling or both, she snaps me with a greasy hand towel mid-wipe of the counter. “And, he said exactly what I was thinking. He said, ‘Hi, Shelby, like the car! LOL. Are you ready for that campus tour?’ So, thbpbpthpt!” She sticks her tongue threw her teeth and blows a raspberry at me.
“What about school? I can’t skip.” Excuse, check.
“Already thought of that. The last Friday in September is teacher in-service day. No school for us,” she sings.
“What about cross country? I’ll still have practice.” Thank God! Check. Check.
“Thought of that, too. The Third is setting up a meet and greet for you with the track coach on the campus tour. That counts as practice, a legit reason not to be at practice, right?” She waits, impatiently, for something…gratitude, jubilation, anything…from me.
But trepidation is the only thing I feel. “He can do that?” Who is he? What will I say to a bona fide collegiate track coach?
Destiny waves Grayson’s business card two inches from my face. “‘Office of Recruitment.’ That’s what he does, Shelby. Come on, don’t be you. I mean, be you. Just don’t be the brooding you. You like that word, huh! Yeah, I got words, too.” Again with the showboating, she blows on her nails and buffs them on her apron.
“He did say Fridays aren’t the best for campus visits. But I said that’s the best I…you…could do. He said no sweat, just make sure you’re there early, before noon. Apparently the college crowd knocks off early for the weekend. Sounds like a breeze compared to high school,” she grumbles at our seven-hour days.
“Be there before noon? How will I get there at all?” Ace! His Jeep. He said I could log driving hours in it. I couldn�
��t. Not after last night. More excuses—yes! I have them.
“Let me get this straight. You got a 1400 on your SAT, but you can’t figure out how to get to Lexington?”
“How do you know my SAT score?” Still displeased to have missed my mark by a hundred and fifty points, the 1550 I aimed for could have gotten me further than Lexington. Perhaps Ivy League. With the exception of colleges applied to, my scores were shared with no one.
“I know everything.” She whirls her hands, complete with pointy and bedazzled black fingernails, around an imaginary crystal ball.
Trash digger. “There was a book…a study guide…for the SAT,” I point out the difference in preparing to score well on it and miraculously transporting myself to UK for a campus visit.
“Put your money where your mouth is, Miss One-Way Ticket.” She sees through my fear and excuses. “There’s a bus station in Sigogglin. I’ll drop you off. A round-trip ticket ain’t but fifty bucks. That’s a weekend waiting tables. Or two.” She shrugs, dependent on foot traffic and tippers. “You can swing that, can’t you?”
It is going on my third year of weekends and summers waiting tables, ever since my sophomore year when the guidance counselor told me that I had the grades for higher education and Miss Patterson gave me the opportunity to pay for a portion of that education with a job. The stash of money in my room is much more than fifty dollars.
Fifty dollars for a VIP campus tour with Grayson Keene III. Fifty dollars for a meet and greet with a collegiate track coach. A pipe dream imaginably, plausibly, fortuitously becoming reality? Gratitude delivers.
Brooding Shelby becomes blubbering Shelby. “How will I ever repay you?” I bear hug Destiny, nearly knocking the both of us to the floor.
“You deserve this, Shelby.”
“You deserve more.” More than me. More than I bring to this friendship. With an ounce of her spunk, the things I could do. The person I could be.
She forces an arm’s length of breathing room between us, hands clutching my shoulders and fiery eyes fixed on mine. “You deserve this. Believe it. That’s how you repay me. Take this opportunity and do what you do best…run with it.” The counselor in her subsides; the firecracker returns. “And if all else fails, ask yourself WWDD. What Would Destiny Do? And do that!”
I join in her laughter, thinking how neither UK nor The Third would ever be the same after all of that.
On our pawnshop scavenger hunt, guilt weighs heavy on my shoulder along with the damn seat belt. She’s a good woman, a good person, as good a mother as I allow her to be. I shouldn’t have been a prick about the ID card. I shouldn’t be a prick about a lot of things.
Marrying into money hasn’t changed her. We ride along in her sensible Subaru Outback, not the Porsche Cayenne Turbo S that van den Berg gave her for their anniversary. A showy car that doesn’t represent what she’s about in any way, a showy car that took less thought and time than finding a gift unique to her, a showy car that equates love with possessions—happy freaking anniversary, honey!
She drives the same way she used to while taking me to and from school. Hands on the wheel at ten and two, the car itself could never be as valuable as the cargo within.
We unwind. Sunroof open, music up. My guard finally down, I hope this hunt never ends.
After a stop on the outskirts of Lexington and a stop just west of Appalachia, with no leads we continue on south, ending up two-and-a-half hours away in Knoxville at Piper’s Pawn & Pickers.
The first place Mom said we should visit is the first pawnshop she ever took me to. She stocked the Koronette from Piper’s.
“Incense and vinyl…” she inhales.
Far better than the smell of disinfectant in the hospital, I’ve yet to put my finger on what old records smell like. Old books? Must? Cigarettes? Hairspray? Peace? Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll?
Wooden bins in the center hold music. The walls hold stringed instruments that make the music—mostly guitars, banjos, fiddles, and a few upright basses—along with posters and flyers of a bygone era. A fat, entitled cat holds down the counter.
From behind a beaded curtain, separating the back of the store from the front, Miss Piper’s praying hands—adorned with gaudy rings—appear first as she parts the eye of the tie-dyed pattern.
If ever I wanted to live in the past, here is my opportunity.
“That’s a great color on you, Miss Piper,” Mom compliments her muumuu.
Which one? I wonder at the walking mural of bright colors and patterns.
“Wren, darlin’, I haven’t seen you in a coon’s age. And who is this?” She looks over the top of her glasses at me. They have beads hanging from them too.
“My son, Ace.” Mom pushes on my shoulder with hers, turning my left profile—the bruise-free side—closer to Miss Piper. “You remember…”
“Who could forget such a hunky face!”
Please don’t pinch my cheek.
“What can I do you for?”
“A guitar,” Mom says, laying the insert with the image of it on the counter.
“Bootleg. Homegrown and handmade,” Miss Piper knowledgeably peruses the cover through her bifocals. “Come. Come.” She leads us to a wall of posters.
In true DIY spirit, the posters feature forgotten bands, bands that most never knew existed. Bootleg—there they are again in a different and larger flyer image. Same stone-cold threesome, same boots, same seductive midriff, but two guitars.
“We had ’em in for a little ditty with that album release. Nice band. Talented, too. I sure hoped they’d go somewhere.” She fondly taps the flyer. “But I haven’t heard anything about ’em in years.”
“There are two?” I point to the twin guitars in the flyer.
“That’s what I said when I saw those boys!” Miss Piper laughs, alluding to the dopplegänger appearance of Mason Lynn and Johnny Allman. “Now, this one,” she points to Johnny, “he kept at it.” Leading us to the alphabetized bins in the center, she leafs through the C’s and pulls several albums by the group Contra Band.
Contra Band—contraband—a play on Bootleg. Clever? Or copycat?
“They’re not as popular as The Avett Brothers or Old Crow Medicine Show, but they’re in that same vein…a mix of blues, country, folk, and rock. ‘Roots music,’ I believe they call it. They do pretty well on the Americana circuit.” She gestures to a promotional poster, Contra Band among the lineup. “Word is they’re more popular overseas. The Beatles may have invaded America, but the Brits can’t get enough Americana!” She guffaws. “Music does unite us.”
“Come. Come.” She leads us behind the counter to an antique-looking cabinet with a slew of drawers that couldn’t hold anything bigger than index cards. “Oh, don’t go gettin’ all territorial, Mouser,” she talks to her cat who stalks us and would pounce, if it could thrust its portly self up off the counter.
“Mouser? That cat hasn’t hunted for food a day in its life,” Mom whispers to me, taking the thought straight out of my head. “Wow, I haven’t seen one of these since elementary school,” she transitions in a voice loud enough for Miss Piper to hear. Her forefinger tucks under the C-shaped handle on one of many small drawers, surprised that it still fits. “I thought the card catalog was dead.”
“Nothin’ dies ’round here, honey.” Miss Piper’s muumuu jiggles with the snickering belly beneath it. “G, G, G…Guitars. A, A, A…Acoustic. H, H, H…Handmade…” the repetitions guide her fingers over the uniquely systematized catalog. “Hot dog! I wasn’t imagining it.”
She pulls from the drawer a Polaroid of the guitar—the Bootleg emblem on the headstock—stapled to an index card. “They say the mind is the first thing to go. Poppycock! The body is.” She shimmies hers beneath the billowy muumuu. Straining through bifocals, she hands the index card to Mom to read, not wanting to make her eyes work any harder than they have to.
“‘Purchased from Mason Lynn for $760 plus the trade of a replacement Ibanez, value $40,’” Mom reads.
> Hell, it’s not a Hawkins, but eight hundred dollars for a handmade guitar? He got took.
“The poor boy hated to sell it. Said he needed the money more. Had a new baby at home with health problems.” Miss Piper shrugs, sympathy in those tired eyes.
Shelby…preemie health problems.
“I thought I was doin’ him right, makin’ a fair deal. Prepared to give him $500 for it, I upped the offer on account of his situation. But after Johnny Allman took off, I sold that guitar for $2300 to a fan and collector. He didn’t ask if it was Johnny’s, and I didn’t offer up that it wasn’t. Business is business,” Miss Piper says. “Besides, now that Johnny is established, that collector could triple his money at least. If he’s willin’ to part with it…”
“We’ll find out, won’t we,” Mom says, transcribing the collector’s information from the inventory card. “And that Ibanez…was it a spruce top with mahogany sides and back?”
“Well, now, maybe the mind ain’t too far behind.” Miss Piper scratches her head. “It had to be nearly twenty years ago. Many a guitar’s passed in and out these doors since then. Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been much…for $40. He just wanted something affordable he could keep strummin’ with.”
“And he did,” Mom says, solemnly. “If you and Shelby could only remember the music that surrounded you. Guess we considered it love. We skipped ‘Rock-a-bye Baby’ and went straight to ‘We Will Rock You.’” There she goes again, standing right in front of me, smiling eyes retrieving a glimpse of the past.
Buddy, you’re a girl, make a big noise…We will, we will rock you, she sang to that baby in the NICU. She sang it to me—and Shelby—first. She is weird, but in a pretty badass way.
“‘We Will Rock You,’” Miss Piper repeats, that brain of hers unwilling to give up the fight. “Rocking chair. The Patterson lady. I believe she’s from your neck of the woods, idn’t she?”
Just Shelby Page 6