Rose

by Elle Casey

  It makes sense on more than one level that the band has money managers. I’ve gotten the impression from the stories I’ve heard from Amber that Red and the other guys don’t really know how much money they have; they just spend it. I wish I had so much money that I could have the same cavalier attitude. Instead, I watch every single penny and agonize over every expense.

  “I probably should’ve paid better attention from the very beginning,” he says, sounding supremely disappointed. “Maybe if I had, none of this mess would’ve ever happened.”

  I look up at him, confused about the topic. “What mess?” Is he talking about the writing on my door? I don’t understand the connection.

  “The one with your moms. With you and your sisters.”

  My heart sinks. I’m being dragged into a conversation I’ve been avoiding for months. I’m so not in the mood for this.

  He looks up at me, his expression as vulnerable as I’ve ever seen it. “I know you’re upset about what’s going on with your business here, but would you allow me to talk to you about a few things that have been on my mind for a while?”

  I feel my face starting to burn. My emotions are a mix of embarrassment and anger. Now I know how a wild animal feels being pushed into a corner. The beasts in my care usually react by attacking when put in this position. But every once in a while, one of them surrenders. And I’m so tired of fighting . . .

  “Go ahead. I’m listening.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Red leans forward and rests his forearms on his thighs as he stares alternately at the floor and at me. “This was many years ago, you’ve got to remember. It was before I had all these wrinkles and these aches in my back.”

  He’s trying to be charming so I give him a smile, even though I’m not really feeling it.

  He plays with the rings on his fingers as he speaks. “We were so young. Darrell was with the band then. He was a great guy when we were younger. He was so full of life, so excited about our future. He knew exactly where we were going before any of the rest of us did.”

  I look up, surprised to hear him speaking of Darrell in such glowing terms.

  Red seems lost in the past, staring off into the distance as he turns the rings on his hands. “We played for two years before we could get anybody but our friends to listen to us. And then things just happened. It went really fast. One day we were playing in our moms’ basements, and the next we were playing in arenas . . . zero to sixty in two seconds flat.” He shakes his head in disbelief. “It was like a fairy tale, and your moms were there almost from the start.” He grins at me. “Your mom, Sally, actually sat in my mom’s basement for one of our shows.”

  “She did?”

  “Yeah. She saw us at a local show first, but then we did this party at my mom’s place and I invited her, and she showed up. It was crazy.”

  “I never heard that story.” Red has genuinely surprised me. I thought my mom had told me everything by now.

  “We had this manager. You know him . . . Ted. Anyway, he was young too. We were a bunch of dumbasses. We had no idea what we were doing.”

  “Seems like you figured it out.”

  “We did. We made a lot of mistakes along the way, though. A lot of mistakes.” His smile disappears. “Success didn’t happen overnight, but it sure felt like it. We never stopped. We hardly ever slept. It was just go, go, go, all the time. And in the middle of it, we were writing music . . .”

  “I hear it was your most productive time.”

  “It was.” He shakes his head, lost in the memories. “A lot of that was Darrell. He was kind of the motor . . . the engine in front of the whole thing. He wanted it more than any of us.”

  “So if that’s true, why did you kick him out of the band?” It seems like a really cruel thing to do to the guy who made everything happen.

  Red’s face morphs into something that looks like anger . . . or maybe it’s regret. “It was a combination of things. We’d been going full blast for a couple years by then. We had your moms with us, and everything was pretty great. But the pressure started to get to us. Other people started getting involved in making decisions for us—people from the record label who had more experience than we did. They were the money guys. They started calling the shots. And Darrell didn’t get along with them.”

  “I hear he’s kind of pushy.”

  “Pushy? That’s one way of putting it. I’d say he’s an asshole, but that’s just me.”

  I have to smile at that. I think Red would describe any man who didn’t agree with him in that way.

  “Anyway, we were so wrapped up in ourselves and the music, we didn’t see what was going on with your moms. I mean we didn’t get it at all.” He looks surprised at his own memory. “One minute they were there, having a ball, kicking back with us, and the next they were gone.” The look on his face says it all. Red and his bandmates were lost. Confused. Totally in the dark. Kids trying to live the lives of grown-ups.

  “I remember the day they left like it was yesterday. I woke up and went looking for them, but I couldn’t find them anywhere. It was crazy.” He shakes his head, pressing his hands together. “At first I thought they were out shopping. I thought maybe they were getting their hair done or something. They didn’t usually do that, but I was trying to find reasons for their absence. Where were they?”

  I can see the stress building in him as the memories wash over his mind. He rubs his hands harder and gets up, pacing the floor. “I asked Ted where they were and Darrell too, but nobody had any answers. Cash, Mooch, and Keith were just as upset as I was, but Darrell wasn’t. He just had this look on his face.” Red looks like he wants to punch something. Or someone. “It was like he was happy they were gone.”

  “Was he?”

  “He was behind the whole thing. I don’t know when he got pulled into the scheme, though . . . whether he initiated it or joined in after. Nobody’s given me a straight answer yet, but it doesn’t matter.”

  “Maybe it does.”

  He looks up at me, coming back to the present. “I want you to know that I went straight to Ted and asked him what was going on, and he looked me right in the eyes and lied to me. He told me he had no idea, but he’s the one who arranged for your moms to leave. He’s the one who gave them the money for it. He stole money from us to do it.”

  I really want to believe him, to believe he was so young and so clueless that all of this made sense to him. But it seems so far-fetched. “What I don’t understand is how you didn’t know. How is that possible?”

  “We had no clue. I told you before, I’m terrible with money. It comes in somewhere, and I spend it with the credit cards I’m given by our accountants. I don’t know how much money I have. I never do. When I need something I can’t buy with a card, I ask for the money and they give it to me. I pay people to watch it for me and make sure no one steals it, but I didn’t have the checks and balances in place for the first five years. That’s how Ted got away with it.”

  “What about the others?”

  “They’re just as bad as I am.” He winces. “I know this is going to sound terrible, but when you have as much money as I do, you don’t worry about it. You just spend it on whatever makes you happy.”

  I shrug, not taking offense and not connecting with his statement in any way. I’ve had the exact opposite experience. I have almost no money, and all I do is think about how I don’t have enough to pay for the things I need.

  “It was crazy. When your mothers left, it was a really dark time for us. You can hear it in the music.”

  “You didn’t look for them.” My heart is still hard. He’s making a convincing case for being a dumb kid, but not for letting our mothers walk away or for using them. Dumb is one thing; being heartless is another.

  “We had a full tour, completely booked. We needed to be in twenty cities over thirty days, and that was just the first month. It went on like that for two solid years, and we had to write new material at the same time. We had no ti
me to do anything but play the music and try to survive.”

  I can’t put myself in his shoes exactly, but I do know what it means to have so much work that I don’t have time to think about anything but eating, breathing, and taking care of business. It’s possible I’ve let some important things slip when I was too busy working.

  “I guess that made Darrell happy.”

  “It did make Darrell happy. And Darrell being that happy over something that was breaking us apart inside just pissed me off.” Red is back to being furious again. “I nailed him one day. Right in the face. I gave him a black eye. I’ll never forget that day. It was glorious. I’ll never forgive him for what he did.”

  This is also a story I’ve never heard before. “What happened?”

  “He said something that I still can’t get out of my head.” He looks up at me. “He said we were better off without them. Without your mothers in our lives.”

  My heart hurts for the pain expressed plainly on his face.

  “He was wrong. He was wrong then, he was wrong for twenty-five years, and he’s still wrong. We are not better off without your mothers.”

  Tears well up in my eyes, and I shake my head. “How do you know that? After all the time that has passed and all your success without them?”

  His expression is pure anguish. “Because we missed out on our daughters.” His voice breaks. “How could that possibly not be wrong? No amount of success will ever make up for that.”

  I have to look away. I grab some tissues out of the box on my desk and press them to my eyes. My heart is aching; I think it’s breaking in half. “This is really not a good time for me to be talking about this.”

  He gets up and comes over, crouching down next to me. He puts his hand on my knee. “I know it’s not, and I’m real sorry. I know this is hard for you, but you have to understand that it’s really hard for me, too. It’s hard for all of us. We missed out on so much.”

  He sighs, his breath shaky. “You’re not a parent, so maybe you can’t understand what I’m trying to say here, but please believe me when I say that our hearts are torn in two. All these years we’ve had three little girls—three beautiful little girls who grew into amazing women—living their lives out here on a farm, sometimes struggling to get by, and there we were, out in the world with all the money we could possibly need, and we were oblivious to it all. You struggled, and we could have helped, but we didn’t. We could have shared our lives and our successes with you. We could’ve helped you along. We could’ve made your lives easier. And had we been given the chance, that’s exactly what we would have done, but we weren’t. It was stolen from us. You were stolen from us, but not by your mothers. They did what they thought was best. We were stolen from you by Ted. By Darrell. By everyone at our label who had a hand in squirreling you away and sending you out here to the farm.”

  I lower the tissues from my face and stare at him. His words are overwhelming. Sad. But they miss the most important point entirely. “We don’t care about the money. Don’t you get that?”

  “I’m starting to get that impression,” he says.

  I don’t appreciate his humor. “You could’ve been dirt-poor. It didn’t matter. All you had to do was show up at the front door and everything would’ve been fine. But you never showed up.” Now I’m really crying. “You never came. You were out there living your lives, and we were here, living ours. You never knew you were missing out on anything until now, but we knew all our lives that we were missing out on having fathers.”

  “I know,” he says, taking my hand. His hands are warm but mine are ice-cold. “That’s what I’m trying to say. We didn’t even get the opportunity to know what we had . . . the most precious thing a person could have . . . a child. Maybe I should be mad at your mothers for taking that opportunity away from us, but I just can’t be. I love them too much. I’ve always loved them. Twenty-five years have gone by and I still love them. That’s why I never married. It’s why none of us ever married. Your moms were always there in our hearts, even if they weren’t physically present.”

  I want to believe him, but common sense keeps pushing back in my head. “You never bothered to try to find them, for twenty-five years. That doesn’t sound like love to me.”

  “When somebody who loves you says, ‘I don’t want to see you anymore and you need to stay away,’ that’s what you do. Their actions and the messages they left behind with Ted told us very clearly that we were to leave them alone. And so we did. With love comes respect. And we respected your mothers.”

  I laugh bitterly at that. “I don’t think so.” Respect has nothing to do with drug-filled orgies, which is pretty much how our mothers have described their relationship with the band. Not in my book, anyway.

  Red lets go of my hand. “I know you’re angry. I get it, believe me. I’m angry at me, too. But please don’t accuse me of not respecting your mothers. I do.” He puts his hand on his heart. “I truly do. That’s why I haven’t pushed you guys to take the money. Your mothers asked us to let you decide how to handle this situation, and out of our respect for them and you, we have agreed to those terms. But I sure do wish that you’d give us a chance.” He strokes the back of my hand. “Like it or not, I’m your dad. So is Mooch, so is Cash, so is Paul . . .”

  “So is Darrell?” I ask. I mean, if he’s going to include a guy who wasn’t even there during the sexy parts, he at least needs to include a guy who was there.

  Red’s nostrils flare, but he answers. “Yeah, maybe. He was around then. It’s possible he was . . . involved.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say.” I’m finally able to look into his eyes. They’re swollen and red-rimmed. Mine are probably worse.

  “I just want you to tell me that you’ll give us a chance,” he pleads. “Let us try to make up for everything we missed. I know it’s not possible, but we’d like to try. Let us get to know you. Make an effort to get to know us. I promise, you won’t regret it.” He tries to smile. “We’re good guys. We made some big mistakes in the past, but we’re doing our best to make up for that now.” He puts his hand on his chest. “I personally am going to work the rest of my life to be a good man and a good father to anybody in this family who will let me. I think Amber is considering it, and maybe Emerald is too. I’d love it if you would join them. But there’s no pressure. If you decide it’s too much, I get it. Some mistakes are unforgivable, and you’re the one who has to decide that. I can’t do it for you.”

  I nod, almost feeling relieved at his request. I think this is something I can do. I can try, at least. “Fair enough.”

  “I know you have a lot on your mind and that this is going to take some time for you to figure out, but can I just say one more thing?”

  I nod, sniffing and wiping under my eyes with a tissue. “You might as well.” I have no more resistance in me, too emotionally exhausted to fight him off anymore.

  “You could do an awful lot of good with that settlement the band has offered you. And it’s a no-strings-attached deal. If you take it, it doesn’t mean that you accept me or any of the other guys as your father, and it doesn’t mean you forgive us for what we did or didn’t do. It’s just a way for you to make your dreams come true, whatever they are.” He smiles. “You could rebuild the clinic as it was or make it bigger and better. You could hire people to help you. Or you could do something completely different. Give it all away, for all I care. I just want you to have it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re the daughter of people I love. And you’re the only family I’ve got. My money and my music are my legacies. Let me share my legacy with you. Please, Rose.”

  Tears pour out of his eyes and trail down his wrinkled, weathered cheeks. He makes no effort to wipe them away.

  I think about what he’s said, and it doesn’t take me long to come to a conclusion. We are his only family, and this is a man who’s spent the last almost thirty years of his life moving from town to town and country to country. How
lonely that must be. My life is all about roots and belonging and family. I could not imagine living his life. I’m the lucky one, not him. I actually feel sorry for him, for the first time ever. And I feel sad that I’m the one thing standing between him and his happiness . . . between my mothers and true happiness. They love these men. What could possibly be so wrong with a love that has lasted more than two decades? How selfish can I be? My mothers and my sisters and the band are my family, and the world would be a big, scary place without them in it. Red is sitting here offering me his heart. I would have to be a bitter fool to walk away. I reach over and grab some tissues from the box and hand them to him.

  “Thanks,” he says, dabbing at his face.

  Without another thought, I reach over and put my arms around him and pull him toward me. The leather of his jacket makes creaking sounds as his arms move to return the gesture. The hug is awkward, but it’s a great start.

  “I promise to try to be more accepting. To work on accepting all of you into my life as family,” I say. And as soon as the words are out of my mouth, it feels like all of the weight that has been pressing down on me takes flight and departs for places unknown.

  “That’s all I can ask,” he says.

  We pull apart and stand. “I’m going to go wash my face,” I say. I need a little space after that heavy moment.

  “I’ll hold down the fort,” he says.

  I walk into the back room, my feet barely touching the ground. It feels amazing, and I feel zero regrets over my decision to let the band into my heart.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  I’m lying in bed staring at the ceiling when there’s a slight tap at my door. It’s ten o’clock at night and I should already be asleep, but my mind won’t stop racing; I’ve been checking the time on my bedside clock for the last hour.

  I sit up and face the door. “Come in.”

  I expect it to be Amber, but it’s not; it’s Greg, and I’m shocked to see him. He acted so removed at dinner and then went to sleep early in another part of the house without saying anything but ‘Goodnight’ to me. I did not expect to see him until tomorrow at breakfast, but even then, I know he’s scheduled to leave for his office soon after. I was actually starting to wonder if this whole affair thing was already a bust.