by Sarah Title
“Maybe I should sit down,” Gran said, and of course she did. She did what Liam said. He’d only caused her to break her leg with his hotness. What her own granddaughter suggested didn’t mean anything at all.
Liam shooed a set of twins out of the nearest comfy chair and ushered Gran into it. Joanna stood by, bouncing on her heels. Maybe she could go, since Gran was being so well taken care of. Except she sort of wanted to see the book Liam picked out for Gran. Also, she was trying to be a good granddaughter. Abandoning Gran in this chaos was probably not a great move.
“Who are all these kids?”
“Joanna,” Gran scolded.
“School’s out and summer reading begins today,” Liam explained. “We’re having a big party. Well, Toni is having a big party. I’m just helping.”
“Oh, summer reading! Joanna, you used to love that.”
Great. Next thing she knew, Gran would pull out pictures of her naked in a bathtub.
Actually, Joanna had a few recent ones of those. Huh. Full circle and stuff.
“Yeah,” she said noncommittally as a child wailed in her ear.
“I should get back,” Liam said. “Toni has a bunch of volunteers, but . . .”
“Mr. Liam!”
“Oof,” he grunted, as his abdomen was struck by several flying children. “Yes, I should go.”
“Liam! There you are.”
“Toni? What’s wrong?”
The children’s librarian looked . . . well, she looked frazzled. There was no more polite way to say it, even with Joanna’s new personality.
“Bouncing Bob isn’t coming.”
“What?”
“Who?”
“Bouncing Bob, the guy who’s supposed to sing goofy but educational songs to entertain all these hooligans,” Toni explained.
“Why isn’t he coming? He signed a contract,” Liam said. His face looked hard and serious. Joanna hadn’t thought his face was capable of it. Must be his Director Face.
“He had a heart attack.”
“Oh.”
“He’s not dead. Just in the hospital.”
“And we’re just finding out now?”
“Well, he is in the hospital.”
“Joanna is a musician,” Gran said from her comfortable chair.
Oh no. No no no no no no no. Joanna was a musician, sure, but she’d given up on music. And even if she hadn’t, she didn’t know any goofy but educational songs. All the songs she knew were about sex and heartbreak. Which could be educational, she thought, but probably not what Toni had in mind.
“Yes! Joanna!” Toni exclaimed, looking at Joanna as if she was the second coming of Bouncing Bob.
“I don’t have a guitar,” Joanna said, relieved to have found an excuse in her back pocket.
“I have one. It’s pretty crappy. I usually just use it for storytime.”
“Joanna learned to play on a pretty crappy guitar,” Gran said, helpfully.
“I don’t know any songs that are rated G.”
“Can you just make something up?”
“You used to make up songs all the time,” Gran said. Really, really helpful. “Remember that one you used to sing to Doris’s cat? How did it go? ‘Where’d you get such a fluffy fluffy butt, fluffy fluffy butt, fluffy fluffy butt—’”
“I remember! Jeez, Granny,” she said, sounding nothing at all like a petulant child. Maybe she should stamp her feet and throw herself on the floor, go full-on temper tantrum.
“Toni, she’s not prepared. Can’t you just play?” Liam, bless him, jumped in to her defense.
Except why did he think she couldn’t do it? She could totally do it. She grew up improvising fluffy dog butt songs.
“They didn’t come here to see me,” Toni said desperately.
“Well, we’re not going to be able to pretend that Joanna is Bouncing Bob.”
“Who’s going to corral the volunteers and sign the kids up and prepare the snacks and . . .”
“I can do that,” Liam said.
“Then who’s going to watch the rest of the library? Please, Liam, don’t make a stressed-out pregnant woman cry.”
Liam turned to Joanna. “Are you sure this is okay?”
Joanna didn’t remember agreeing to do anything, so she wasn’t quite sure what Liam wanted her to confirm.
“Joanna,” Toni said, looking desperately into Joanna’s eyes. “Joanna. I hate to use the hormonal card twice in one conversation, but I am very pregnant and very stressed and I need someone to sing stupid songs to these kids. At this point, I don’t care what you sing, as long as you don’t curse. Please. I’m begging you. Don’t make a pregnant woman get on her knees and beg.”
“Oh, you don’t have to beg,” Gran said from her comfortable chair where she was not being asked to suddenly play songs she didn’t know in front of a crowd of hyped-up kids.
Toni looked at Joanna beseechingly.
Gran looked at her hopefully.
Liam looked at her like he was getting ready to tell Toni that her beseeching looks weren’t going to work.
Joanna took a deep breath.
“Fine. I’ll do it.”
* * *
Liam hadn’t thought Joanna could sing.
He still wasn’t quite sure.
Bouncing Bob was supposed to come with his own PA system, so he and Toni set Joanna up with the crappy one they used for author talks and board meetings, the one that he was currently writing a grant for the money to replace.
It didn’t do much to amplify her voice. This might have been a good thing.
Except that the kids were getting restless. It was still pouring rain outside, so the only place for them to burn off that last-day-of-school energy was by bouncing along to Bob, or, in this case, Miss Joanna and her Magical Guitar.
One thing that did not help was that the first thing Joanna said when she got up to the mic was, “This guitar isn’t magical, you guys.”
Maybe she still had anxiety about performing. Her meltdown had been pretty spectacular—or so he’d heard. He still hadn’t watched the video, no matter how sorely he’d been tempted.
It felt a little different now, watching the breaker-upper struggle with a crowd of unruly children.
He was tempted to step in. Toni, who was supposed to be working on all the other stuff she needed to do, was standing at the back of the room, nervously biting her fingernails. That wasn’t a good sign. Liam half expected her to run up on stage and rip the guitar out of Joanna’s hands.
If she didn’t, he might.
“You suck!”
The crowd was definitely getting restless, as evidenced by the fact that one of the older boys was being heartily shushed by his mother. But the heckle seemed to do something to Joanna. It was like she woke up from her nervous stupor. All it took was someone to tell her she sucked, and she came alive.
“Hey, guys,” she said into the mic, and her voice sounded clear and strong.
“Uh-oh,” said Peggy, who had hobbled up next to him.
He was distracted by getting Peggy a chair, so he didn’t quite hear what Joanna said next, but it must have been hilarious because every kid in the audience was cracking up. The parents, not so much. He was definitely going to get angry e-mails about this.
“How many of you have a dog?”
About half of the kids raised their hands.
“Yeah, me too. Well, it’s my gran’s dog, but she’s pretty cute. How many of you sing songs to your dog?”
Pretty much the same hands stayed up.
“Here’s a little song for my gran’s dog. It’s all about my favorite part of her, her fluffy butt.”
The eyes of a good portion of the parents in the audience went wide—apparently “butt” was not a very nice word—but the kids were suddenly rapt. A grown-up singing about dog butts. This, they could get into.
The song . . . well, it wasn’t terrible. Certainly it wasn’t any worse than the greatest hits of Bunny Slippers. It was maybe even a l
ittle more intelligent. It used metaphors and clever rhyme schemes, and lots and lots of repetition of the phrase “fluffy butt.” With every rousing chorus, more of the kids joined in, and soon the entire library was singing its devotion to Starr’s fluffy butt.
“Well, that’s the only song I know that’s not about making out,” Joanna said.
“Eww!” said every preadolescent in the crowd. Liam caught Toni’s look of abject horror. She, too, could imagine the angry parental e-mails.
A little girl in the front of the crowd said something Liam couldn’t hear and Joanna said, “Oh, really? You wanna come up here and sing it?” Then the girl was taking the one step up to the stage while Joanna fiddled with the fragile mic stand so it was kid-height.
Liam couldn’t hear most of what was so song-worthy about the little girl’s cat—he had to show someone how to use the copier—but what he could hear sounded remarkably like Starr’s Fluffy Butt song. Which was good, he supposed, since Joanna already knew that one.
Then Mrs. Altman needed help printing out pictures of Whitney Houston (again) and he helped Mr. Johnson find a Jack Reacher book he hadn’t read yet, and before he knew it, the hour had practically passed and there was still raucous music coming from the children’s room. So either Joanna was still playing on the stage or the PA system had been taken over by the audience.
He poked his head around the corner. It was both. The stage was full of kids, so many that there were barely any left in the audience. The grown-ups were close to the stage, too, clapping along. He saw Trina up front, waving her hands along with the beat.
Joanna was there somewhere, he was sure. He could hear the guitar, barely, over the din of little voices. Then the sea of stage children parted, and Joanna emerged, leaning into the crappy acoustic guitar while her fingers flew over the strings. Liam couldn’t help the smile that crossed his face or the bob that dipped his head. Even on a barely-in-tune piece of junk, on a stage covered with children she professed to dislike, she was wailing.
Then she threw her head back, raised the guitar above her head, and howled. The kids howled with her. He was definitely going to get some angry e-mails about the ruckus, but he didn’t care. The kids were having a great time, and he’d bet none of them would ever forget the time they were rock stars at the library. Then Joanna let her guitar down, grabbed the mic, and shouted, “Don’t forget to read!” and he could have kissed her.
Instead, he just girded the circulation desk for the onslaught of checkouts to Halikarnassus’s newest batch of budding rock stars.
Chapter Seventeen
“You were amazing!”
Joanna was starting to get embarrassed at the way Toni kept following her around the children’s room, rehashing her favorite moments of the impromptu concert that had happened literally five minutes ago. Fortunately, they were interrupted by frequent hugs and high fives from her new adoring fans. Joanna even signed a few autographs.
This was always her least favorite part of rock stardom—the stardom part that took away from the rock part. Sure, she wasn’t the most famous member of Bunny Slippers—well, maybe now she was—but there was still an element of fan schmoozing and adoration that she just could not get behind. She just wanted to play.
She missed playing.
That was the only way to explain that the most public fun she had had since she’d moved back to Halikarnassus was on a stage taken over by rock moppets singing about fluffy butts. There was something about the innocence of their anarchy that made her nostalgic for when she used to be an actual badass, before her band sold out and then watched that bridge as it burned to the ground.
“You should consider playing children’s music,” Toni said, and Joanna was very proud of herself for not laughing in the poor woman’s face. “A lot of rock stars are doing it now, you know.”
“I think this was just a one-time thing,” Joanna said.
“Even if I get hundreds of requests to have you back?”
“Even if all the kids in the town offer to sell their souls to rock and roll for the chance to hear me play again.”
“See? Even that sounds like a rock song! You have to!”
“No.”
“Fine. At least let me thank you in some way.”
“Oh, Joanna, that was wonderful!” Granny hobbled up from the back of the room, weaving her way around discarded juice boxes. “I knew you could do it.”
“You always knew I could entertain a crowd of toddlers.”
“You can be as sarcastic as you want to be.” Granny leaned in and kissed her cheek. “I’m still proud of you.”
“Thanks, Gran.”
“Now will you convince her to come back?” Toni asked.
Granny snorted. “Honey, if I could convince Joanna to do anything . . .”
“It’s true,” Joanna said. “I’m an adult woman.”
“Can I treat you to lunch?” Toni asked. “I’d say dinner, but we have a deal that while I’m pregnant, my husband cooks, and I want to take advantage of that. I would invite you over, but . . . he’s still learning.”
“Calvin always was such a sweetheart,” Gran said.
“Really, it’s fine,” Joanna said. “It was just a favor. Let’s just . . . let’s just pretend it never happened.”
“I don’t know if you realize the long memory that children have. We’ll be hearing fluffy butt songs for months. And when you invited them onstage? Girl, you made them feel like rock stars. They won’t forget that any time soon.”
“It was amazing.” Liam came up from behind her and joined the group. She stiffened. She didn’t know why. He didn’t make her nervous or anything. “Best accident ever.”
“Yes, I’m so glad Bouncing Bob had a heart attack,” Joanna said.
“Oh, that’s not what he meant and you know it,” Gran said, ruining Joanna’s perfect moment of ruining Liam’s moment.
“Did Toni talk to you about payment? We did budget a performer for this.”
Joanna tried to picture what Gran’s face would look like if she took money from the public library. Then she looked over at Gran, and she didn’t have to imagine. There it was. “No, it’s fine, really. It was just a one-time, volunteer thing that will never happen again.”
“Even though you were a huge hit?” Toni asked.
“Especially because I was a huge hit.” That was how the whole trouble started with Bunny Slippers. They became a huge hit, then they became terrible. Only they didn’t notice because they were too busy being a huge hit.
She was done selling out.
Even if it meant living with her grandmother in a town she hated.
At least she wasn’t playing gigs for kids’ parties.
She wasn’t that desperate.
Yet.
“Let us buy you dinner, at least,” Liam said. “We’re closing in a couple of hours, and I don’t know about you guys, but I could use a beer.”
“Hmm. I could definitely use a beer,” Joanna agreed. A beer or two or six. Even though this wasn’t a real gig, she was starting to feel the post-gig adrenaline crash. Always best to pour a little booze on that.
“No beer for me,” Toni said, patting her baby stomach. “And no dinner for me, either. Calvin’s cooking.”
“I’m wiped out,” Gran said. “You kids go. Joanna can take me home and you can come pick her up?” she asked Liam.
Jesus. Granny was trying to set her up with the librarian.
Probably just so she could look at his legs more often.
Yikes. That was a terrible thought.
Either way, this was decidedly not a date.
“I’ll just meet you,” Joanna said with a pointed look at Gran. “Where?”
“Um . . .” he said, clearly thinking. Smooth guy, this librarian.
Not.
Oh, God, her inner monologue was reverting to her teenage sense of humor.
She needed a beer.
“How about that new place on Main?” Toni asked. “I’ve never
been there, but I heard it’s great.”
“Uh . . .” said Liam, clearly trying to think of a way out of it. Joanna tried to think of what the new place on Main was.
“The Wine Bar?” she asked. “I thought we were getting a beer.”
Toni waved away her objections. “You deserve something more fabulous than beer. Besides, you refuse to be a rock star, so you might as well go classy. Right, Liam?”
Joanna tried to ignore the pained look on Liam’s face, but there it was. No matter how much she saved his great ass, going to a fancy wine bar with the town troublemaker was clearly not high on the library director’s list of Friday Night Fun.
Well, screw him. He was going to take her out, dammit. He was going to buy her a damn drink.
“Right,” he said, then turned to face Joanna. “Right.”
* * *
One of the things that Liam loved about upstate New York was the food. He grew up in places where “greasy spoon” meant you sent your plate back to the chef. Here, he could get eggs and hash browns any time of the day, or the best burger in the world, or grape leaves and hummus with a cannoli for dessert, all in the same place.
This was not the case with the Wine Bar.
At the Wine Bar, one could have wine and a small plate of vegetables cut into fancy shapes without taking out a second mortgage on one’s house, but that was about it. He tried not to think about how there was perfect French onion soup at Hallie’s, and Hallie’s also served beer, which he preferred to wine, just like he preferred not wearing a tie, which he would never have to wear at Hallie’s. Ties reminded him of board meetings. This was supposed to be fun.
If the look on his companion’s face was any indication, he was going to have to have enough fun for both of them tonight.
But, no, it wasn’t about fun. It was about gratitude. Joanna had saved their butts totally and completely this afternoon. As they walked toward the bar in the back of the restaurant, several people had stopped him and told him how much fun their kids or grandkids had had at the library party today. He only got one complaint about the repeated use of the word “butt,” and the parent was assuaged by the fact that Liam assured him Joanna would never perform at the library again. Not by Liam’s choice, of course. In fact, Liam had hoped to use tonight to persuade Joanna to give summer music another go. Maybe if she had time to learn some nonanatomical songs . . .