Strummin' Up Love

by Erin Wright

  “Now wait up a minute here,” he said, holding up his hands to stop her roll. “I can see why you want to stay in Idaho but there’s just no way that it’s good for Skyler. He’s in one of the top-rated schools in the country in Tennessee. Their math program is stellar. It’s a launching pad to all of the top universities: Harvard, MIT, Yale—”

  “But he hates it there,” Louisa cut in.

  Zane stopped. “He…he what? He does not. It’s a great school—”

  “Zane Risley,” Louisa snapped, “have you ever heard your son talk about friends that he has in that school? About his teachers? About the clubs he can get involved in? Really think back. What positives has he ever mentioned to you?”

  Dead silence. Zane had been thrown for a loop. She wasn’t sure if he was ever going to start speaking again. He seemed to be stuck in permanent-mouth-agape mode.

  “I know that all of the rich parents think that boarding schools are the Best Things Ever, and only the best will do for their children, but Skyler hates being gone from home. Even back when you two weren’t real close, he still didn’t like being sent away to school. C’mon, Zane, think about it. He’s still a kid. Spending the night at a friend’s house is fun, but being sent away to boarding school and not seeing your parents for months at a time? It isn’t natural. After spending this summer with Skyler and really getting to know him, are you honestly going to be okay with going back to only seeing him during Christmas and spring break? Aren’t you going to miss him?”

  She fell quiet then, waiting, and still, Zane just sat there, his mouth hanging slightly agape, staring at her like she’d started speaking another language on him.

  The silence stretched on, and she couldn’t bear it any longer. She had to keep talking. She had to get him to understand.

  “Under your scenario, you get me, you get your career back, and you get to live where you want to live. Meanwhile, I lose my career, I live in a fishbowl, I live where you can practically swim through the air because of all of the damn humidity, and there’s an entire country between me and my family. It doesn’t work. I’m more than an appendage of you, Zane. I am my own person. I need to be here, where I can be that person.”

  “But…but you said how important it is for me to start touring again,” Zane said, still watching her like he couldn’t decide if she was being serious or not. “I can’t make music in Idaho. Music is recorded in Nashville.”

  “Then you fly to Nashville and you cut a record. Or, you build a recording studio here. I’m fairly sure they’ll let you record a music record somewhere else on the planet other than Tennessee. There’s so much here in Idaho that we’d be giving up if we moved back east. Let’s be real for a minute, Zane: I’ve fallen in love with you despite you being a famous country music star, not because of it. Life would be so much easier if you just worked down at the automotive shop, fixing engines. We wouldn’t have a herd of reporters outside our front door, for starters. I’m willing to have some give-and-take to make this work, but it can’t be all give and no take.”

  “I…it never occurred to me.”

  He still looked half convinced that she was pulling his leg and was going to yell out, “JUST KIDDING!” at any moment. He hadn’t shut her down, though. He hadn’t told her not a snowball’s chance in hell. Not yet, anyway. They still had a chance at making this work, if she could just get through to him.

  “Think about this,” she said impulsively. “I know this house isn’t your favorite.”

  “You do?” he interrupted her, looking – if anything – even more surprised than he had before.

  “It’s not hard to pick up on,” she said dryly. “You wander around and mutter under your breath about all of the dark wood and how this is an old man’s house. I get it – there can’t be that many handicap-accessible mansions for rent in Long Valley, Idaho, so you had to roll with it.”

  “One. There was one. This was it. Either we took it, or we didn’t come. The guy who built it was in his late 80s, and he wanted a little ‘hideaway’ where he could be sure he could get around in his wheelchair when he came to visit.”

  “If this is your idea of a little hideaway…” Louisa mumbled, looking around the ornate formal living room. This room had to be her least favorite one in the house, and honestly, that was saying something. The competition was fierce for that particular “honor.”

  “My thoughts exactly.” Zane flashed her a quick smile. “According to Nina who arranged all of thisfor me, the older man is hospitalized and most likely won’t make it through the end of the year. He’d made arrangements beforehand to rent this place out since he wouldn’t be using it. And I’m grateful to him for it – it made this trip to Idaho possible. But I could never live here full-time.”

  She tried not to sigh too impatiently, although if she was being honest with herself, she didn’t try that hard.

  “Do you know how cheap land is out here, especially compared to Nashville?” She cocked an eyebrow at him. “You could probably buy an entire working ranch up here, cattle and all, for less than what a mansion on a quarter-acre costs back in Nashville. I’m not saying you want to buy a working ranch – God knows you and horses aren’t the best of friends – but you could buy a huge spread and build a house from the ground up. It can be wheelchair accessible and your style, at the same time. You can put in a private airport. You could fly from here to Tennessee and back again whenever you’d like. And if you want, you could put up a nice security fence around the property to keep out the Franklin weirdos.”

  She swore she heard him then mutter something about skinheads under his breath but when she asked him what he’d said, he quickly waved her off. “Nothing. Don’t worry about it. So we stay here, buy some land, build a house, and I fly back to Nashville whenever I need to.”

  We. It was such a lovely word.

  “That’s the idea,” she said softly.

  “Do you have any idea how different you are from Tamara?” he asked then, and shook his head, laughing. “In a million years, I didn’t expect this to be an option.”

  She smiled in response to his little joke but didn’t say anything. It was time for him to think through things. She’d given it her best argument.

  He either saw the truth, or they fell apart.

  Chapter 42

  Zane

  Live in Idaho.

  Live in Idaho.

  It was such an insane idea, he still partly expected Louisa to start laughing uproariously and admit that it was all just a joke. But she wasn’t laughing, and it wasn’t a joke.

  Live in Idaho?

  Granted, the idea had some merit to it. He could fly back and forth across the country just as easily as Louisa could.

  And it was true that Skyler actually had friends here, whereas back in Tennessee, he couldn’t remember Sky ever begging to go spend the night at a friend’s house.

  But public school? For Skyler? You couldn’t send your kid to public school. Public schools had knife fights and gangs and—

  Oh. Except that was Nashville. Now that he thought about it, the chances weren’t real high that the Sawyer schools had knife fights and gang members in them.

  But still. An elite private school for some of the richest residents of Tennessee had to have better programs than Sawyer.

  But if your child hated that school? If your child was miserable there? Was it better that it be a premium school with every opportunity and a miserable child, or a run-of-the-mill school with a happy child?

  Letting Skyler leave for school and not see him for months…Louisa had forced him to think about that when he’d been doing a damn good job ignoring what was about to happen. He’d been dreading going back to Tennessee – although he wasn’t about to admit that to Louisa – because he’d known that he was going to have to say goodbye to Skyler. No more chats over breakfast about what amazing insight he’d gleaned from Juan. No more discussions about Xbox vs PlayStation. No more kayaking around the lake and getting into water fights.
Sure, they could come back next summer, but did he really only want to spend time with his son once a year? Now that he knew who Skyler was, he didn’t want to send him away again. He was just starting to learn how to love his son.

  And it was all because of Louisa.

  He looked at her and wondered for a fleeting moment how long he’d been lost in his own little world. He hadn’t said a word for probably a good ten minutes, and yet, she wasn’t pushing and prodding him. She was giving him a chance to think through it all and make a choice. He tried to imagine Tamara doing that for a moment, and completely failed. She would’ve been no more likely to do that than she would’ve been to jump on a unicorn and fly to Paris. Tamara was not known for her patient nature.

  “I hadn’t thought about it like this before,” he said, and immediately felt stupid. He’d already said that. He just…

  The whole conversation was making his brain hurt.

  “There’s no way Tamara would’ve ever wanted to live here,” he continued. He had to make her understand what a huge loop she’d thrown him for. “Even Boise would’ve been way too small. She only tolerated Nashville because that’s where country music stars are ‘supposed’ to live. If it’d been up to her, we would’ve lived in New York City or LA.” Louisa shuddered. Zane laughed. “I’m a people person. I would’ve been just as happy in New York City or LA as Tamara would’ve been. But, I was also happy in Nashville. I have plenty of friends there – friends who all think I’ve gone off the deep end for spending an entire summer in the middle of Nowhere, Idaho, by the way. If they could hear us discussing moving here permanently, I think they’d probably call for the men with the white straight jackets.” Louisa laughed lightly at that like he’d intended her to, but he could tell she was getting nervous. Did this mean no to living in Sawyer? The panic was starting to grow in her eyes.

  “I’d wanted to only ever give Skyler the best,” he said softly. “You’re right—” he gulped hard, “—that I’ve been dreading sending him back to school in just another week. I’m finally learning who my son really is. Did you know he doesn’t like mayo?” he demanded, getting sidetracked for a moment by the insanity of it all. She bust up laughing. “Who doesn’t like mayo? He says it makes his bread soggy. No, it makes his bread edible. His nut-and-seed-free bread, mind you. When we first arrived here, I couldn’t have told you at gunpoint if he liked white bread, wheat bread, gluten-free bread, sourdough bread, or no bread at all. That wasn’t something I had to worry about. Ask the chef – he’ll tell you. It’s his job, after all, not mine. There was so damn much that I didn’t know about him – big things. Little things. Everything in-between things. Tamara was in charge of all of that. Of him. Of our home life. Tamara…”

  His face screwed up with pain and the lingering laughter in the room dissipated, leaving Louisa just staring at him, eyes intense, waiting for him to tell her whatever he needed to get off his chest.

  Damn good listener – he was adding that to her list of amazing attributes.

  “She never really gave up on the dream of making it big.”

  There. He’d said it. He’d finally admitted the truth that he hadn’t dared discuss with even Tamara.

  “It was slowly killing her inside that she hadn’t made it in the country music world. It was eating her alive, and she dealt with it through massive doses of retail therapy. When she died, she had clothes in the closet with the tags still on them. And not just a few – she had entire closets full of clothes with the tags still on them.” Louisa’s eyes went wide at that, and Zane chuckled ruefully. “It didn’t matter to me – I didn’t care. Money wasn’t the problem for us. It was the drive she had to go shopping because she was trying to fill that hole – it was the fact that that hole existed – that caused the problems.”

  “Like you and drinking,” Louisa put in softly, and Zane paused. Oh shit, she was right. “Your drinking never got bad enough that you were blacking out or making insane decisions or destroying stuff. But you also weren’t dealing with the real problem because you were able to cover it up with the drinking. Paper right over it.”

  He just stared at her for a good long while. “I didn’t…wow.” He rammed his fingers into his hair. “You’re right. I hadn’t thought about it like that before. But back to where to live – you’re right that I could fly out of here just as easily as I could fly out of Nashville if I go on tour again—”

  “When you go on tour again,” Louisa interrupted him. “No more punishing yourself. You need that stage. You need that feedback and that outlet of expression and that interaction with the crowd. I refuse to let you hide behind the walls of the house any longer.”

  His mind skipped back to Tamara yet again, remembering the many blowout fights they’d had on this topic. Had Tamara wanted him to stop touring because she knew it’d hurt him? Had she been trying to make him as miserable as possible?

  Maybe.

  Probably.

  Did that matter now, though? That chapter of his life was closed. He could move forward with Louisa now, and that was what mattered.

  “So we stay here,” he said casually, as if this really wasn’t a big deal at all, “buy some property, build a handicap-accessible home on it, put in a private airstrip, and fly out whenever needed?”

  She nodded, looking almost scared to believe it could really be that easy.

  “I think I can get behind that,” he said with a grin, and leaned forward to kiss her.

  He was finally home.

  Epilogue

  Zane

  18 months later

  The energy was there, beating hard and fast through him like an electrical current set on high. It was back. He was back.

  And damn, did it feel good.

  Louisa had been right, of course. Who was surprised? Not him.

  But ever since that fateful day when they decided – together – that they should stay in Sawyer-freakin’-Idaho of all places, life had begun unfolding in ways he never could’ve imagined when he’d first spotted that online interview with Dr. Adam Whitaker. He’d come here as a last-ditch effort – a Hail Mary to deal with his out-of-control son because he had nothing left to lose.

  And now…

  “I’m your biggest fan,” the woman was saying as she shoved her shirt at him to sign. He sent her a charming grin and she practically melted into the ground right there.

  “Thanks for coming,” he said, scribbling his autograph onto the t-shirt with only a small amount of struggle – years of practice always helped when wrangling fabric around – and handed it back.

  “Zane Risley! Zane Risley!” A little kid was shouting and waving his paper above his head. He looked just like Skyler had as a kid. Zane missed that version of Skyler, not only because he’d been a damn adorable kid, but because he’d quite literally missed that part of Skyler’s life, being gone all the time on tours.

  Zane bent over, chatting with the kid, his mother beaming, and then it was time to sign the autograph and move on. Making each person in a crowd feel special and singled-out was a talent not everyone could master. There was a trick to the chatting, the eye contact, a quick question, a signature, and then moving on. Not too long, not too short.

  Today was the day – a fundraiser for the Sawyer School District the size that no local had probably ever seen. Jaxson Anderson, the local fire chief, had told him that their fundraisers tended to be baked potato dinners, chili cook-offs, and the occasional spaghetti feeds when a group was feeling particularly international. Zane had thought Jaxson was kidding but then the look on Jaxson’s face…

  Well, today wasn’t a baked potato dinner or a chili cook-off, that was for damn sure. It would be so much more than that.

  “Zane!” The cries for his attention were coming from every direction. He was thriving – reveling in the energy of the crowd. Right where he wanted to be. Signing autographs. Making people feel special because they were special. Posing for pictures.

  Just then, Georgette Nash came hurryin
g over, a clipboard in her hand. “Zane,” she said in a low tone of voice, “it’s time to start moving backstage. The stage crew says they need the time to mic you up.”

  Zane flashed the woman in front of him his most charming smile as he handed her Country Music Vibes bumper sticker back to her. “Enjoy the concert!” he said even as he began winding his way towards backstage, following Georgette’s gently round figure. After he’d decided to make Long Valley his home, he’d met Luke Nash, a good friend to the Miller brothers, and Luke had told him about his younger sister, one half of a set of twins and somebody with more musical talent in her little pinky than most people had in their whole bodies. Zane had nodded and listened politely with half an ear – if he had a nickel for every time someone tried to convince him to give a hand up to a family member or friend or themselves, he could probably double his net worth instantly.

  But when Luke started playing a video on his iPad of Georgette singing up on stage, her voice in a full libretto, the hairs on the back of Zane’s neck stood straight up. Hot damn, she really did know how to sing.

  Except, she didn’t want to keep touring and trying to make it on the big stage – Luke didn’t share why and Zane didn’t ask. Instead, she wanted to come back to Long Valley, and that was something Zane could get behind. He pulled a few strings and talked the superintendent of the Sawyer School District into hiring Georgette as the new music teacher for the district. She had talent in spades, and it showed. Under her excellent tutelage, Skyler had moved up to the next level. Maybe Skyler would want to be just like his ol’ dad when he grew up. Maybe he wouldn’t. But Georgette’s guidance and instruction would mean he had that choice.