by Selena
After a quick shower, I got behind the wheel of my H2, and we went to see the man who had taught me to play the guitar and to get while the getting was good, encouraging me to pursue the opportunity Nash offered. Gramps had also been there to teach me to suck it up and not cry after skinning a knee—“put some salt on it”—falling from a tree—“rub out the sore spot”—or wrecking my bike—“if you can still move it, it ain’t broken.”
Now, life’s problems were so much bigger.
nine
Laney
I didn’t go back downstairs for breakfast until Brody was gone. I watched him out the window as he took off down the path, running like he had something to prove. He was probably just showing off, knowing that I’d watch from my window as I always had while he drew further and further away. A moment of nostalgia overtook me, and I had that same unbearable urge that I’d always had—to throw open my window, lean out and blow him kisses, call down that I loved him.
But the love was long gone, and the urge was just a silly moment of weakness. No, not weakness. Laney Tucker did not have time for weakness. This was a simple case of déjà vous. I turned from the window and descended the stairs to join my mother on the veranda.
“What are you doing having Brody Villines over for breakfast?” I demanded, placing a hand firmly on my hip.
“Oh, don’t be so hard on him,” Mom said, looking up from her gardening magazine. She’d put on her bifocals now that Brody wasn’t around to notice she was getting older. It gave me a slight pang to see them. Mom had worn reading glasses for some time, but I’d never seen the bifocals. The sight of my lively mother wearing something I associated with the elderly tugged at my heart.
“I’m not being hard on him,” I said, joining my mother at the table. Not every mom still made her daughter breakfast when she came home from college.
“Maybe a little,” she said. “He may be famous, but he’s still the boy you loved. If you talked to him, you’d see that. He’s not so much different than when he left.”
“I don’t have to talk to him to know that he’s not the person I loved. Not anymore. And even if he was, I don’t love that person anymore.”
Mom peered at me over the top of her glasses, an old habit from when she’d worn reading glasses only. “You can’t change who you loved in the past,” she said. “That can’t be erased, no matter what happened afterwards. Cherish that memory, darling. If you’re planning to go through with a loveless marriage, that memory is all you’ll ever have.”
I sighed. My mother was being unusually serious, but I wasn’t falling for Brody the way my mother had. He may be able to charm the pants of every other woman in America—hell, in the world—but he couldn’t charm me. Not this time.
“Mom. He cheated on me. Remember? I’ll always have that memory, too.”
“Of course he did,” Mom said, flipping a page in her magazine. “You know what they say. Boys will be boys.”
“Don’t give me that shit,” I snapped. “That’s no excuse.”
“No,” she said, laying her magazine flat on the table. “Men are weak when it comes to temptation. And I doubt if he was the one doing the chasing. He’s a star. And girls will be girls, too.” She gave me a conspiratorial smile, the way she had all my life, whenever my dad said or did some asinine thing. It was a smile that said we were a team, me and my mom. An “us girls stick together” kind of smile.
“I don’t buy it,” I said. “He had a choice. He could have chosen to be faithful to me.”
“True,” she said. “But don’t forget, you looked at him that way when you were teenagers and you heard him playing the guitar. You may not remember it, but I do.”
“I get it,” I said. “I was a stupid, gullible girl like every other girl he screwed over. Except I’m the one who’s going to do something about it. For all of us.”
“Oh, honey. Cut him some slack,” she said. “He was a rock and roll star, on the road, alone. And he was barely more than a child. Men much older have done the same. Even country singers do it. Even when their wives are on the road with them.” She gave me that no-bullshit look.
“He doesn’t deserve my forgiveness,” I said, standing. “But you’re right about one thing—I couldn’t have done anything about it. Cheaters are cheaters. If I’d gone with him instead of going to college, or if he’d turned down the band and we’d become an idiotic country duo, the same thing would have happened. I know it’s not my fault, Mom. You don’t have to tell me that.”
“I know,” Mom said lightly. “But I like to. Maybe one day you’ll believe the rest of it, too.”
Upstairs in my room, I dropped onto my bed and picked up my phone. Majesty, my father’s beloved Maine Coon, lay on the floor at my feet, purring and digging his claws into my Persian rug. I called Piper and filled her in, then noticed I had a text from Paul. With a sigh, I opened it. We hadn’t talked since I’d gotten home two weeks ago, and I really owed him more than an occasional text. But we didn’t have flourishing conversations, and the feeling of obligation to call annoyed me.
If I wanted to marry this man, I’d have to learn to make those compromises, though. So I called, my mind drifting as he told me about his summer internship at a law office in Knoxville. I wondered what Brody was doing right then, what plans he had for the future. While he’d been in Just 5 Guys, it was easy to think of him as a permanent part of boyband culture. But now what? Surely he had some plans beyond bumming around his parents’ house for the rest of his life, wallowing in vats of cash.
I realized the line had gone quiet later than I should have. “I’m sorry, what?” I said.
It struck me then that I really, truly did not care. “I think we have a bad connection,” I said. “I didn’t hear you. I’ll call you later.” I hung up the phone feeling both relieved and guilty. A bad connection was exactly what we had.
ten
Brody
After returning home with my mother, I needed to get out of the house. I needed to do something, to get my mind off my grandfather, lying in a hospital bed with the thin, threadbare blanket pulled up under his arms. Once, he’d seemed impossibly strong as he clutched my hand in a crushing handshake or turned a wrench under the hood of a car while I stood on the front bumper, watching, eagerly awaiting a turn.
Now, those forearms looked stringy and brittle, the skin spotted and delicate. His hands were gnarled in ways I didn’t remember happening gradually. Granted, I hadn’t seen my grandfather in a year, and probably hadn’t spent much time looking at his hands. But now, suddenly, as if it had happened overnight, he was old.
I made my way through my mother’s meticulously manicured gardens behind the house, wandering aimlessly down one path and another, going nowhere. Gramps had worked hard his whole life, but he never denied that luck had played a part in his success. It was his way of staying humble, of giving credit to God for working in his life. Without a lucky break, Gramps said, he would never have met Hank Williams, Sr, in his short life, and through him, gone on to make connections with dozens of other country legends.
When Nash had contacted me, Gramps had urged me to take the lucky break when it came instead of stubbornly holding to my own ideas of the future. Now, I was adrift.
What if I hadn’t joined Nash’s boyband? Without Just 5 Guys, I’d be nobody. Nobody but Laney’s husband, probably. By now, we’d have a baby and another on the way, and Laney would be hating me because she’d never finished college.
I punched in the code at the back gate to leave the fenced portion of property around the house. For a while, we hadn’t protected that gate since it was hidden from the road and quite a distance from photographers. But eventually, some crazy fan had found the gate, snuck inside, and taken pictures through the windows of my childhood home. After that, we’d installed a tall iron gate with a keypad.
When it swung open, I stepped through. Instead of following the trail all the way to the gazebo, I stopped at the row of weeping willows that had on
ce served as the dividing line between the properties. Because the Villines’s estate had ruined the aesthetic when we created the monstrosity of a brick wall around our house, like some kind of medieval castle, we apologized by giving the Tuckers all the weeping willow trees. I wouldn’t have made that concession. The willows added ambience and would have added to the property value.
The Tuckers would have forgiven us eventually.
I chose my favorite tree, the largest one, whose branches draped all the way to the ground. Parting the curtain of branches and leaves, I slipped through and sat against the trunk, between two twisted roots that protruded from the ground slightly at the base of the tree. As children, Laney and I had played under these trees, had climbed into the branches, heedless of our mothers’ warnings. The last time I’d been with Laney had been under this very tree, an urgent, breathless, almost desperate attempt to hold onto something that had already begun to slip away.
Not our love, but our innocence, our illusions. It was before our breakup, before I’d fucked anyone but her, but I’d let two of the baby-dolls grope me after a show. They’d refused to take my excuses for an answer, and after a while, I hadn’t been able to keep their hands off my dick. I hadn’t told Laney, but she’d already lost faith in my promises of fidelity. I’d sworn to myself it would never happen again, that I would hide out in my dressing room or my tour bus until they disappeared. I hated every one of them, hated that goddamn song, hated Nash and the songwriter and the rest of the band.
But the show went on.
I’d gone home to see Laney one weekend, a rushed visit where we barely saw each other after her drive up from school and my escape from prying eyes. When we’d managed to sneak away, we’d met under the willow tree. Even then, she must have known it was ending. I remembered the frantic way she’d undressed me, how she’d told me not to wear a condom. She wasn’t the kind of girl who would trap me into marrying her, but in that moment, I knew that she’d been trying to hold onto me, have a piece of me that would last forever.
She’d cried afterwards as she lay in my arms. But she hadn’t gotten pregnant. Shortly afterwards, she’d said it was over, and I’d gotten wasted and hate-fucked a baby-doll. And I hadn’t stopped since. I wondered if my grandfather had done things like that in his day, as a producer. If he had known the temptations I would face, and if he was disappointed in me for not resisting. Othal loved Laney like his own granddaughter, having seen her almost every time he visited me since we were children.
I shifted against the rough bark of the tree, resting my head back against it and closing my eyes. In the distance, I could hear horses’ hooves as they ran one of the fields, and in the tree overhead, the insects had begun to play their night song. The evening was dispelling the heat, covering the countryside in a warm, damp, oppressive stillness.
And then, cutting through the buzz-saw song of the crickets in the tree surrounding me, a horse’s hoofbeats approached, pounding the earth until I could almost feel their vibration. I sat up, alert now. Had I fallen asleep thinking of that last night, and now I dreamed Laney was on her way?
When she stepped through the curtain of branches, I knew I wasn’t dreaming. She was here, in the flesh, just as she had been that last night.
But this time, she didn’t run to my arms and fall to the ground with me. She stopped short, a look of confusion flitting across her face before quickly disappearing. “You’re on my property,” she said frostily.
“Actually, I’m on your father’s property.”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be a dick.”
“You came all the way here to tell me not to sit under my favorite tree? I’m not the one being a dick.”
“I didn’t know you’d be here,” she admitted. “I was just…”
A smile tugged at my lips. “Coming to sit under my favorite tree?”
“Not because it’s your favorite tree,” she assured me. “I didn’t think you’d make yourself so at home on our property anymore.”
“Grandpa Othal would never have given you all of them. Maybe half. Not all.”
“Well, Grandpa Othal didn’t have that hideous wall built around your place. You did.”
It was true. Although we’d never hurt for money, Grandpa Othal wasn’t famous. Sure, a few crazy country music fans might drive all the way out here to take a picture, but it was different than the kind of fame I’d achieved.
I sat silent for a minute, not sure if I wanted to tell Laney this news. But she’d hear it somewhere.
“He had a stroke,” I said at last, picking at the bark on the protruding root.
“What?” Laney cried, her expression changing from confrontational to stricken. “Oh my God. How bad was it? Is he…?”
I shrugged, trying not to show that it bothered me, but something pulled tight inside me. Any other girl would have given an insincere, awkward condolence. But Laney knew me, and Othal, and what Othal meant to me. She understood exactly what it meant without me having to explain it.
“He’s okay for now,” I said after a pause.
“How okay?” Laney asked, inching closer. “Is he coherent? Can he talk? Is he… Paralyzed?”
“He’s not great,” I admitted. “But you know Gramps. He’ll pull through. He can make it through anything.”
“Brody…” Laney hesitated, then sank onto her knees beside me. “This isn’t anything. This is different. You can’t fight age.”
“He’ll be okay,” I said again, but this time, I wasn’t sure if I was trying to convince myself more than Laney. She wasn’t buying it. But I was still trying to.
“Is he home? I’ll go see him.”
“He’s at the hospital,” I said. “He’ll be home in a few days.”
Laney folded her legs and sat down in the grass. Her voice was softer this time, tinged with kindness. “Did the doctor tell you that?”
“I don’t remember.” I crossed my arms over my chest to keep them from reaching for her. She was so close I could have reached out and touched her, and I wanted to. Damn, I wanted to. To pull her into my arms and bury my face in her hair, to feel her soft hands moving up and down my back as she told me it was going to be okay. But I could no longer rely on her to reassure me when I needed it. I’d had her love, and I’d wasted it.
“Oh, Brody,” she said, and she reached out and touched my knee. “I’m so sorry.” Again, I thought I had to be dreaming. No way in hell was Laney Tucker ever touching me again. Not if she could help it. She’d made that abundantly clear.
None of this was real. It had nothing to do with me, and everything to do with her overreaction to the news about my grandfather. Death was literally the only thing that could convince her to touch me.
“Stop acting like he’s dead,” I said, shifting away from her. “I don’t need your pity.”
“It’s not pity,” she said. “I loved him, too.”
I gave her a hard look. “Yeah, well, I still do.”
“I didn’t mean…” Her lovely, sweet face turned a little pink, and she shifted, curling her legs beside her on the sparse grass beneath the tree. When at last she met my eyes, I saw something there… Something… But I wasn’t sure what. Once, I would have known, would have been sure.
“I didn’t mean I don’t still love him.” Her voice was soft, but an edge of hurt and accusation colored it, and suddenly, I wasn’t so sure we were talking about my grandfather.
“Then what?”
“I don’t know.” She shifted again, pulling her knees up under her chin. She wrapped her arms around her legs and stared off in the direction of Pegasus, who made a soft whinnying sound in the gathering dark.
“You taking him back?” I asked, nodding to the dark shape outside the curtain of leaves.
“I probably should,” Laney said, unfolding herself and standing. She looked down at me, and again, that inscrutable expression crossed her face. When had Laney Tucker, as sweet and sure a thing as iced tea at her mother’s house, become a mystery to
me?
After a moment’s hesitation, she turned and ducked through the curtain of willow, leaving me sitting alone again.
eleven
Laney
I took Pegasus’s bridle and pulled his head down, resting my forehead against the bony ridge of his face. Closing my eyes, I ran my hands up and down his jaws, under the soft skin of his chin, along his neck. He stood motionless, absorbing my confusion and sadness. Othal Carter was a man to be reckoned with, a big personality with a big voice. He’d made big things happen for both his family and many others in country music. And he’d been more than generous with advice, sharing his connections and donating to local charities. He was the kind of guy people referred to as a “pillar of the community.”
He wasn’t dead, I reminded myself. Lots of people had strokes and went on to live long lives afterwards. But the shock of hearing that someone so respected and well-known in the area, someone larger than his own life, was laid flat in a hospital bed by something out of his control, had gotten to me.
And then there was Brody.
I knew I was treading dangerous ground, that I should swing back into Pegasus’s saddle and ride home, leave him to himself. Because if I didn’t, I might do something I’d regret, something that would ruin all my carefully laid plans. It had been all I could do not to wrap my arms around him, a memory burned into my muscles after twenty years of doing just that. Three years hadn’t made my body forget.
But I was the master of myself, my body. I could keep it from doing the things it wanted to do—to be there for Brody, to comfort him and let him comfort me until we both forgot our sorrow and shock. And he was vulnerable now, malleable, despite the defensive act. This was the perfect opportunity to move forward with my plan, to get him on my hook.
A flare of guilt went through me, though. I couldn’t take advantage of someone when his grandfather had just had a stroke, take advantage of his loss. Brody and his father had always had a strained, distant relationship. But he loved his grandfather, even idolized him.