Any “I told you so” died on her lips as the front door burst open and Daddy barged in.
“What the fuck did you do, Lacy Rae?”
Mama stood to put a barrier between me and Daddy, who was drunker than we’d ever seen him. He couldn’t even stand straight. “More to the point, what did you do, Lucas Abernathy? Your daughter was almost raped tonight.”
“She was perfectly safe,” he slurred. “I told you, someone like Doyle Quinlan isn’t going to risk his livelihood on jailbait.”
“You don’t believe me?” I echoed softly.
“Remember what you said yesterday? You couldn’t even tell me what he had done to make you so uncomfortable. How do you know he was going to rape you?”
“Because he took his penis out and tried to stick it in me,” I gritted between clenched teeth.
“Baby, you’re fourteen,” he reasoned. “How would you even know what a penis is?”
“Maybe because I’ve been listening to you fuck Suzanne for two years,” I snapped.
He glared between me and Mama. “So that’s it, then? You’ve spent the last hour and a half tearing me to shreds?”
“Actually,” Mama said as she stepped in front of me to face her husband. “I’ve been helping your traumatized daughter come to terms with the fact she almost became a statistic tonight. But you’re half-right. If you hadn’t come in when you did, I certainly would have turned it into a reason to bash the hell out of you.”
“Oh yes, it’s all my fault, isn’t it? The poor put-upon martyr who works all day to take care of her deadbeat husband. Like you don’t punish me every goddamned day for your own failures. Face it. The only reason I fuck Suzanne is because you turned into a cold-hearted bitch since the day she was born.”
Mama’s slap echoed throughout the tiny trailer. He grabbed her by the shoulders and slammed her up against the fridge. “Oh, so we’re going to do this now? That’s what you want?”
“Yes, do it now!” Mama screamed right in his face. “Let her see what kind of man you really are.”
He wrapped his hand around her throat. “I’m the man you married,” he gritted between clenched teeth. “And I’m the man you’ve stayed with every day since, even when you tell everyone who will listen how shitty of a husband I am. So who is the real fool here, Jules?”
“Daddy, stop!” I hollered as I hopped up on his back and grabbed him around the neck to pull him away from her. He flung me backwards onto the table, where I landed with a loud crash.
It hurt so bad I couldn’t catch my breath.
“You get away from her,” Mama yelled. “Haven’t you done enough?”
“Me?” he yelled back. “Do you have any idea what she did tonight? We’re screwed. Because of what she did to Doyle Quinlan, we’re virtually blacklisted all over Austin. She ruined everything!”
“What she did to Doyle Quinlan?” Mama echoed. “How about what that bastard almost did to her?”
Daddy shook his head. “It wasn’t like that, Jules. She was perfectly safe. He wasn’t going to do anything to her she didn’t want to do.”
Mama stared at him, incredulous. “My God. Did you send her in there like some lamb for the slaughter?”
“I wouldn’t do that,” he said, but it sounded unconvincing to all who heard it. I crawled off the table.
“I want you out of here,” Mama told him as she pulled me into her arms. “Get your shit and get out.”
The altercation seemed to sober him up a bit. He looked more like his old self as he leaned against the table. “Are we really going to go through this again?”
“No, Lucas. This is the last time. I want you to get the fuck out of my house and out of our lives for good.”
“You know you’ll change your mind,” he said softly.
“Maybe,” she conceded. “But you won’t.”
His eyes narrowed. “What does that mean?”
“You can continue to live here, but only if three criteria are met. You have to give up the music. You have to go out and get a real job and you have to ditch every vice you have, from booze to other women.”
“Baby,” he started but she held up her hand.
“Don’t. Just… don’t.”
“Jules,” he crooned, but she gathered me into her powerful embrace, almost as a shield to keep him away. “You know I love you. I even love her, despite what she did today.”
I could barely believe my ears. How could I share even one gene with this monster?
Mama’s voice was tight. “You don’t love us, Lucas. You just want us around because we were stupid enough to love you. No matter how much you hurt us. No matter how much you hurt yourself. No matter how much you fucked everything up. We were your built-in groupies. That’s all we have ever been.”
She took off her ring and laid it on the table in front of him. “Now get out.”
They stared at each other long and hard before Daddy Lucas Abernathy disappeared into the bedroom for the only things that mattered to him: his guitars.
He left without another word.
Part Two: Tony Paul
Chapter Four
A lot of things happened in the four years that followed Mama’s kicking Lucas out of the house, the most impressive of which was that I managed to graduate high school. It was a significant achievement, given that I had juggled two part-time jobs and school my entire high school career, with school often taking the biggest hit from my divided attention.
It wasn’t like it mattered, though. There were no college prospects. I was just a paid grunt like any other, working at restaurants as a hostess, or a waitress, or cashiering at convenience stores and fast food establishments. I got my first job when I was fifteen, mostly because I didn’t have anything else to do. My romance with Christopher Witt deflated just like a balloon in the aftermath of what happened with Doyle and Lucas. Christopher tried, God bless him, but after one too many freak-outs just because he put his arm around me, he decided that we were in two very different parts of our lives. We could only hurt each other if we tried to force it to work.
I let him go without a fight. I had no interest in dating boys and I had no real interest in being a girl. I stopped wearing makeup and cute clothes, which made every single person at my high school declare I was too weird to save. I met some friends through work, but whenever they got too close, I’d generally take a powder.
It was too soon. I had lost too much. And who the hell could I ever trust again?
Mama seemingly felt the same way. She didn’t date. She didn’t have friends. She just went to work and paid the bills. We were all we had. Most days it was good. As long as I stayed away from music, I had won back her favor. She chalked it up that Lucas had simply bamboozled the both of us with his crazy dreams.
Ironically enough the only thing I missed about Lucas Abernathy was the time we spent performing together. It hurt so bad I couldn’t even bring myself to sing for a full year after he left. But my passion for music never really died, though admittedly it was a love-hate relationship at best. It had renewed itself slowly, mostly in school. I joined choir and drama productions just so I could sing, but whenever I caught myself staring into the audience, I saw Doyle Quinlan’s face in every man’s face who looked up at me. I felt the ghost of his hands on my skin, his mouth on my body.
It took until senior year before I could think of him without running to the showers to scald myself clean. I rejected anything that brought me male attention, from makeup to a leading role in any high school production. I never dated, I didn’t hang out. I just wanted to be left the fuck alone, and I resented – deeply – anyone who suggested I do otherwise.
I had become accustomed to my role as odd woman out. I didn’t care about homecoming or prom. I just wanted to finish, get my diploma and then find a full-time job, preferably one that paid daily in tips.
I scoured the paper every Sunday to line up prospects the minute I was set free from high school. It was on the Sunday after commencement w
hen I found the help wanted ad for Southern Nights.
I sat at that old Formica table, staring at the newspaper for a good ten minutes as I contemplated what to do. I had given up singing because Mama was right. It was a dead end. Despite all the glittery promises, it still became ugly and scary and bleak.
But a bartender job, that I could do. The ad promised not only a nice hourly wage, but big money in tips. I liked the sound of that. There was always something going wrong with our old trailer, so we regularly had to rob Peter to pay Paul. The wolves were never far from our door, especially now that Mama had been diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, as a result of her decades as a smoker.
Regardless, she wouldn’t quit. She planned on an abbreviated existence much like her own mother, and I couldn’t convince her otherwise.
What, really, was she hanging onto?
Some nights I had to wonder what I was hanging onto.
So I borrowed a bartending book from the library and studied it until I knew the basic drinks backwards and forwards, even though many of them I had never tasted myself. After Lucas’s history with alcoholism, I steered far clear of it, which made me even more of a social pariah among my peers. They didn’t understand why I had no interest in keg parties or getting wasted every weekend.
I wouldn’t even drink communal wine when Mama insisted we go to church once a year to reset our sins to zero.
I knew my sins would never be zero. I blew apart our family and there was no way to come back from that. I wouldn’t even know where to start.
BJ and I kept in touch for a few years, so I knew that Lucas had moved in with Suzanne after he left us. That lasted roughly four months. Thanks to everything that had happened at the Golden Armadillo, the band fractured and no one could get work in Dallas, Houston or Austin, so Lucas and Suzanne hightailed it to the bright lights of Vegas, one of the entertainment capitals of the world.
They stayed together approximately six weeks before he blew all the money they managed to make in the casinos where they worked. Though they were planning to wed, she promptly dumped him like a bad habit and moved both her and BJ to Nashville, to keep the dream alive in a brand new setting.
We lost touch after that.
If Lucas ever tried to contact Mama, she never said. I figured he wouldn’t. He knew the requirement for coming back into our lives. All three of us knew he wouldn’t give up music. He had made his choice.
There was no coming back from that either.
Mama and I coexisted peacefully for the most part. After I started singing again, I tried my best to hide it from her. One night, however, after she had a particularly rough go with a bout of bronchitis, I ended up crawling into bed with her and singing her to sleep. She said nothing. It was clear music still pained her more than she could articulate.
But as long as I was working at a legitimate job and bringing home a paycheck, she generally let me live my own life. I had been a good girl for the most part. I had even made it to age eighteen without losing my virginity, despite my close call at age fourteen.
It took years before I forgot what his penis felt like against my leg. It had felt more like a gun barrel against my temple.
So sex never really made my particular list of priorities. All I wanted was to make enough money to move Mama and me out of Austin, away from all the ghosts that haunted us. That was, of course, providing I could get her to leave Grandma’s trailer.
But after all these years, I better understood the enormity of her regret, choosing music and Lucas over her own mother. I had many of those same regrets myself.
Since I knew that she’d resist my going to work at Southern Nights, simply because it was another nightclub, I figured I’d secure the job first. I’d worry about telling her later.
I dug out some barely used makeup to apply for the job. I figured the older I looked the better. I hadn’t grown an inch since the eighth grade, so I was still mistaken for a young teenager wherever I went. If it weren’t for my deeper, husky voice, I probably would have to wear my driver’s license in a lanyard around my neck in order to prove I really was, finally, legally, an adult.
I changed into one of my rare Sunday dresses and headed out to my car. Now that Daddy wasn’t drinking away our money we could afford a second vehicle, and the insurance that came with it. I paid that additional cost of insurance, as well as the gas and vehicle maintenance, including regular state inspections and registration.
I carried my weight. I would not burden my mama.
That meant that the car was used, nicked and scratched, with about 100,000 miles and four used tires on it, but it was all mine. It rattled and sputtered, but it got me where I wanted to go. That Wednesday afternoon, it got me to the sprawling music mecca, Southern Nights.
The 15,000-square-foot dance hall was the toast of Austin, and had been for decades. The only other nightclub that even came close to being in the same league was the Golden Armadillo. But Quinlan’s joint focused more on his high-powered friends and the conservative elite of Austin.
Southern Nights let everyone in.
They played all types of music, with a focus on good ol’ Southern Rock. Just like Doyle Quinlan, the Hollises were tried and true Texans, so they kept it a little country even with a more modern edge. The walls inside were dark, covered in colorful neon signs boasting the bigger, better things Texas had to offer. There were two bars on either side of the vast, wooden dance floor, which had been polished to a satiny shine. Rigs for lights hung overhead, to turn this simple, if large, space into a place where people could kick up their heels.
And there in the back was the stage Lucas Abernathy had jonesed over all those years ago.
It was a star-making stage, no doubt about it, though it was fairly unimpressive completely empty in the light of day. It was large enough to comfortably fit a band, with an elevated space for the drummer and an upright antique piano that looked like it had been lifted right out of the Old West.
“Can I help you?” a feminine voice asked from behind. I turned to face a stunning brunette with long, flowing hair and eyes even darker than mine.
I held out my hand as I smiled. “My name is Lacy Abernathy. I’m here about the bartender job.”
She mirrored my smile and shook my hand. “Jacinda Hollis,” she said. “My mother, Gaynell, is hiring for the position, but I don’t think she’s set up any interviews.”
“I didn’t have an interview yet,” I clarified. “I was just in the neighborhood and thought I’d apply.”
It was a lie, but I was no stranger to the concept if it landed me a job.
“Do you have any experience?”
“Yes,” I said immediately, another lie. “Not in a place as big as this, of course. But I’m sure I can catch on quickly.”
“I tell you what. Mama is upstairs on a business call. If you want to fill out an application real quick, I can run it up to her. Maybe she can see you today.”
“That’d be great,” I told her with a bigger smile.
She led me to one of the tables next to the stage, handed me the application and a pen. She brought me a bottled water and then left me to it.
I was just finishing the application when Jacinda’s mother, Gaynell, joined me at the table.
I was dutifully impressed the minute I laid eyes on her.
Gaynell Hollis was a larger-than-life Austin icon. I knew all about her history, everyone in Austin did. She began her illustrious road to fame and fortune by marrying Ty Hollis when she was barely twenty-two. Ty came from money, a lot of it. His family made their fortune in energy, so after he got his degree in business, he went about acquiring a host of homegrown companies, whether media, athletics, grocery and department stores, as well as transport companies.
Though she had married into big money, Gaynell tired early of being a socialite. Using his business experience, Ty helped her open Southern Nights in 1971. After that, the club was her baby. She had launched international careers fo
r local stars, which quickly made her a force to be reckoned with in local business and politics.
That she had done it with style and grace was her signature. She was a treated like a lady and respected as a mother. She had raised five children while making Southern Nights a huge success, which won serious brownie points for any Texas conservative who thought her place was in the home.
It was rare to find anyone who would disparage her.
I was intimidated the moment I looked up into those unnerving eyes that seemed to see through every lie I told to get the interview. She held out a hand. “Gaynell Hollis.”
“Lacy Abernathy,” I responded.
She sat in the chair opposite of me, taking my application out of my hand. “How old are you?” she asked.
“Eighteen,” I stammered. Her eyebrow raised as her eyes swept over me. She pursed her lips and turned back to the application. “Jacinda said you had experience. Where have you tended bar?”
I gulped. “Parties mostly,” I lied again, cursing how my voice cracked when I said it. “My Mama has done part-time work with party planners, so I stepped in if needed. Volunteer basis mostly.”
It wasn’t all a lie. Mama really did work for a caterer and I really had volunteered to help when they were shorthanded. I just left out I was sixteen at the time and no one let me anywhere near a bar.
“Mm hum,” she murmured as she put the application aside, clearly unimpressed. “You’re not just some singer trying to get into the club through the back door, are you?”
I shook my head instantly. “No, ma’am. I don’t sing.”
She glanced me over. “That voice sounds like you’ve been singing in smoky bars for the last twenty years.”
“What can I say?” I shrugged. “I get horrible stage fright.”
She nodded. “Are you available now?”
My eyes opened wide. “Now?” I stammered.
“You busy doing something else?” she challenged with one cocked eyebrow. “One of my gals called in sick tonight and I’m shorthanded. Show me you can handle this place on a Wednesday, maybe we can work something out for the rest of the days of the week.”
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