Resonance, page 2
But it took me longer than it should have to recognize one of my songs playing in my own damn record store.
I stopped in the entryway for a second and cocked my head, listening to myself wax bitter on an unreleased done-wrong song as the glass-fronted door thumped against my back.
The automatic chime got stuck as the door shut when I stepped farther inside, an err errr errr weaving between the croony chorus until I hammered the heel of my palm against the alarm sensor.
The store appeared empty, but just when I was about to get my hackles up about no one being at the front counter, Owen’s tousled head popped through the beaded curtain that led to the rear of the shop where I kept used CDs and a few bins of cassette tapes.
“Shit!” Owen Harper. God Almighty. He was a guy for whom exclamation points were invented. His eyes went cartoonishly wide, and he shoved through the beads, swatting them over his shoulder when they got tangled in his rush toward the counter. “I thought you weren’t coming in today.”
“Thought wrong.”
“But it’s Tuesday. You never come in on—”
“It’s Wednesday.” I lifted a brow, though there was half a second that I thought maybe I was wrong. I’d been more scatterbrained lately. Too much happening in the wrong places in my life.
Owen grimaced. “Oh. Yeah. Feels earlier in the week.” He made an apologetic face as he approached while I stuffed a few rolls of receipt paper under the counter.
“What’re you getting up to on Tuesdays that I should know about?”
“Nothing!” He blinked rapidly as I reached and mashed the button on the CD player to power it down. The store went quiet. The ghosts evaporated. Peace descended.
Owen’s gaze skittered over the player, then up to me. “Sorry, I know I shouldn’t have…”
“Where’d you find it?” Those were B-sides, and rare ones at that. Never mastered, never released.
And I knew where he’d found it.
“The Hoard… I mean the special collections room,” he backpedaled, and I had to bite back a grin. Guess that made me the dragon. My employees seemed to have the idea that I was blissfully unaware of half the shit that went on when I wasn’t around.
“And where’d you get the key?”
“Ru left it out.” When I started to frown, Owen corrected himself. “But under the counter, and he only ran down the street for coffee. Not, like, out where everyone could see or anything, and I put it in my pocket.” He patted his pocket, and then his face contorted with panic. As I watched, he dug his hand into his jeans, sighing with visible relief as he pulled out the set of keys and dangled it in front of me triumphantly. “So it’s safe.” He paused and licked his lips. “I’ve been here a pretty long time, shouldn’t that be okay? Haven’t I proven myself or whatever?”
I eyed him pensively and yeah, part of me was just having a little fun with him. He drove me up the wall about as much as I enjoyed his flighty ass. “The only thing you’ve proven is that you already thought you lost the key.”
“Nah, that was just me wanting to assure you I had it.”
“You have zero poker face, kid.”
He rolled his eyes—maybe at the truth or maybe because that I’d called him kid. Couldn’t help it, but I was working on it. More so lately since certain parts of my body had started having some stronger opinions about him. I wasn’t sure when the hell that had happened or why, but I wasn’t thrilled about it. Owen was a walking, talking caffeine buzz in a disco club, while I was a guy who’d prefer the peace and quiet of a funeral parlor.
And he was my employee. I reminded myself of that as those magnetic green eyes widened on me again and something in my chest tightened.
“I’ll put it back. I’m sorry.” His voice got quieter with the apology, and I shook my head. Messing with him was one thing, but making him actually feel bad was… well, I struggled with it, even when he legitimately screwed up—which was rare in the first place. He was a great employee. Customers loved him. There was just a lot of aura compacted into what I’d gauged to be a five-and-a-half-foot frame.
“I’m screwing with you. I’ll do it.” I held out my hand, caught the keys he tossed me, and then retrieved the CD from the disc changer, carefully placing it back into the jewel case I found next to it.
Owen tapped the plastic lightly after I closed it. “‘Lay Down Your Burden’ is really good. It’s a shame y’all never released some of these.”
The case squeaked from the pressure my fingers exerted on it as I picked it up. “No it’s not.”
The special collections room was a fancy name for what was nothing more than a cinder-block storage room, but it was secure, and I’d installed a dehumidifier to fight Nashville’s oppressive humidity during the summer months.
I managed to avoid looking at the cramped handwriting on the white label until I navigated to the shelf where it resided along with a handful of other unreleased sessions. Then I gave myself a half minute. A half minute to look at those ballpoint letters and remember them on notebook pages. Hundreds of them, thousands maybe. Centered on the page or wrapped around mine. Bolstered up or under, or off to the side. A note, a comment, sometimes a stupid drawing.
Once it’d been my arm. Some afternoon on a date I couldn’t remember. A lazily swaying breeze. The bus parked to refuel, and the windows open for fresh air. We’d been on tour for weeks. The air smelled like exhaust fumes and gasoline and life. I’d been lying on the couch, one hand over my eyes. Sunlight pressed down on my chest like a warm hand, and as Ryder laughed and scrawled, the pen tickled against my skin, lifting goose bumps.
And after I’d filled in the rest of the verses, that particular song had topped the charts. Originally called “Lover on the Road,” released as “Love Her on the Road.”
A tired old ache rambled through me, looking for a foothold, but I wasn’t interested in hosting it for a pity party. I slotted the jewel case alongside the others that no one in a decade had expressed any interest in.
Then I went and shut myself in my office.
The scent of coffee preceded Ru as he drifted in a half hour later, extending a paper cup toward me as I eased back in my chair. “Plain like always.”
I accepted the cup with a nod of thanks, and Ru leaned against a file cabinet, his hair reckless and scattered, plaid shirt open over the T-shirt underneath. Rufus Merrill—Ru—was my best employee, and the way he was standing there, posture poised and patient, he wanted to talk. I prompted him with a slow sip of my coffee and a lift of my brows.
“You want me to go with you to the Knoxville closing? I can find someone to cover my gig at Howie’s. NBD. Can’t imagine anyone noticing.”
“NBD? Can’t even be bothered with the whole three words?”
“Maybe after coffee.” He grinned at my eye roll.
“Nah, it’s fine. Not much to oversee. The auction guy’s just gonna pick up everything in a big truck. The rest’ll go to recycle or refuse. Not gonna take but a few hours to get it squared away.”
The online outfit I’d sold most of the stock in the Knoxville shop to was set to arrive with trucks at 9:00 a.m. and cart it off to a warehouse somewhere. The rest, well, I couldn’t bear to toss it, so I’d had my remaining employee there, Aisha, do a social media blitz and put up a bunch of flyers for a yard sale. Most of it had sold the weekend prior for pennies. It was humbling. I’d been too loud and proud telling everyone I’d go down before my shops did. It turned out human willpower was a shitty match against the digital age and retail hotspots that seemed to shift every year.
Reading my expression, Ru grimaced. “Sorry, man.”
“It’s business, right? It’ll keep the Gatlinburg shop open a little longer.”
He lifted his coffee cup for a sip, then bit the corner of his thumb. “Sure you won’t just ask Les and Evan for a loan or some charitable contribution? You know they’d do that shit in a heartbeat. God only knows how much their last album made.”
“No.” I cut a hand through the air in a decisive dismissal. Yeah, it was humbling, but not enough for me to start looking for handouts masquerading as loans. Which I couldn’t really afford anyway. I’d seen the cracks in the hull a year ago and had been bailing water ever since. But I wasn’t ready to give up yet. And I wasn’t going down without a fight.
“Stubborn and prideful,” Ru grunted.
I grunted back, then added, “You left the Hoard key out.” I tossed the ring to him. “Owen got ahold of it.”
“Sorry. Oversight.”
I shrugged. “I was thinking of getting him a master key, letting him open and close some if he wanted? That’d help you out, too, yeah?”
Ru arched a brow, seeming surprised. “Yeah? I mean, I think he’d love that.”
“Sure, why not. It’ll make him feel good. Get one of those lanyard things if you think about it, though, god knows he’ll somehow manage to forget it’s around his neck.” Owen wasn’t that bad. Klutzy, yeah, but not inept. And he was other things, too, nearly elfin the way his wild blond hair framed those big eyes. Quirky. Funny. I ran a hand down my cheek and pushed the thoughts aside.
“Will do.” Ru saluted me and rapped his knuckles atop my file cabinet. “I’m doing Howie’s tomorrow night per usual. Oughta come.”
“I’ll probably pass. How’s that album coming, by the way?”
He paused in the doorway. “Don’t ask.”
“If you’d get out of that damn honeymoon phase with Quinn, you’d be further along.”
“You’d know, I guess.” The minute he said it, he looked like he wanted to take it back. “I didn’t mean it to sound sarcastic like that, I just meant… you should still be playing.”
“It’s all good.” I waved him out.
CHAPTER 3
“Not it!” Ru backed away from the glass entry door of Grim’s as he invoked the oldest, most immature, and yet still totally legit bailing method, then turned and raced for the barricade of the front counter like hellhounds were after him. I glanced up from the pile of dust I was sweeping from beneath the display racks to see what had sent him hotfooting.
“Not fair!” I called out, glimpsing the hulking mountain of entitled flesh that was country-pop phenom Terryl Black stalking across the parking lot. “I wasn’t even looking. I call a redo.”
“No way. I’ll pull rank on this one. Dude always smells like onions. I get migraines sometimes, you know.”
I shot Ru the bird as I set the broom aside and scowled. “He always looks at me like I’m bug guts on his fancy boots. C’mon, Ru, at least he’s only a mild pain in the ass to you.”
Ru shook his head and folded his arms across his chest, making a face like a petulant child, which wasn’t a look that worked very well on him. Too built, too hot. I enjoyed the comedic effect of his effort, though. For all of a second, because then Terryl was stepping through the door, bringing the promise of ass badgering thick in the curl of his lip. He already looked like he was hunting for trouble.
I cranked up the wattage on my smile to try and head his scowl off at the pass. In the months I’d worked here, he’d come in several other times, and usually Dan handled him himself, sometimes Ru. But Dan wasn’t present at the moment, sadly for us all. “Hey, can I—”
“Hot as shit out there,” Terryl interrupted. “Not sure what the hell happened to winter. Get me a water, will ya?” He stopped just inside the door and stared at me, sure enough, like I was stink on a mule. And it was fifty degrees, not exactly sweltering, but whatever. That was how he was. I wondered if he was aware that everyone referred to him as Coattails behind his back. He could barely play the guitar, and he had okay pipes, but mostly he had luck and the connection of a true legend—his father—on his side. It appeared to have done ugly things to his personality—assuming he’d had one in the first place. Even Dan had trouble hiding his distaste for him, and Dan was like the Obi-Wan of industry diplomacy.
“Sure thing, let me get that—”
“Right here, heads up,” Ru called, and tossed me a cold water bottle that I fumbled a few times before handing it over to Terryl. He took it and knocked it back like a horse at a trough. I was fun-sized next to him, and as he peered down at me while he guzzled, I got the distinct impression he liked that.
“Looking for anything in particular today?” I activated my secret weapon, the customer service smile I’d perfected over the last four years of dead-end retail jobs. Ru said it made me look like a vacant-eyed robot. But that was because he knew me. No one else noticed it, I didn’t think.
Terryl looked me over like he was just now seeing me as an actual person, and his expression got tighter, eyes narrowing for a second before he flicked his gaze behind me, then rolled his shoulders. “I’m donating to a fundraiser. I know Dan’s got some rare stuff around here. I need something good and expensive.”
I had to clench my jaw to keep an eye roll in check, but I funneled the desire into broadening my smile agreeably and gesturing him ahead of me toward the back. “Keys?” I called out, and Ru dug them from his pocket and threw them in my direction. This time I caught them smoothly, no fumbling. Awesome. It really was the little things in life sometimes.
I hurried to catch up with Terryl and skirted around him to unlock the door to the Hoard. Within the windowless room, which Dan had duded up with wall tapestries and an old oriental rug, were glass cases and mahogany display racks he’d made himself containing some of the greatest albums known to man, handwritten original lyrics by a number of artists, signed memorabilia, rare photographs, and show posters. It was my favorite room in the shop, and the average customer never got to see it.
I let out a reverent sigh as I flicked the light on and inhaled the scent of music history while Terryl barged in like a horny bull and went straight for the display racks where the albums were encased in protective plastic sleeves and ordered alphabetically.
I wanted to reach out and smack his wrist when he started riffling through them like he was flipping impatiently through a magazine in a grocery checkout line. As it was, I came to stand next to him with my fists at my side.
“What about some rare Dolly Parton or somethin’?”
“We have her—”
“Oh no, wait, what about Kenny Rogers. Oh! Or Kenny Chesney. Is there any Kenny Chesney?”
I quietly sent up a prayer to the universal guardians to please give me patience and kindness to deal with this man who knew not what the fuck he was doing. I was cheerful, right? Like, that was my whole thing: cheerful, peppy, “spirited,” and I was pretty sure it was why Dan had hired me. I wasn’t gonna let this tool get my goat.
“So, I think if you’re looking to impress, a good option would be…” I paused to see if I was going to actually get through a sentence, and when his little snake eyes remained fixed on me and his mouth stayed closed, I continued. “Bill Monroe. He’s not especially rare, but we have his—”
“Who the fuck is Bill Monroe?”
Goddammit.
I lifted a finger and reached around him, navigating down to the M’s to pull out Monroe’s quintessential Knee Deep in Bluegrass. “He’s the Father of Bluegrass.”
“Oh, yeah, I knew that,” Terryl backpedaled. “I thought you said someone else.” He studied the record I extended toward him with a narrow-eyed look. “How much is it?”
I angled my head to glimpse the back of the sleeve and double-checked if memory served, which it did. “Three hundred dollars. You can find plenty of his records on eBay, but this one’s signed.”
“Hmm.” He grunted and scratched his chin. “What else you got?”
“Does it have to be a record, or would you be interested in memorabilia, too? Posters? Signed sheet music?” I tried to ignore how the idea of selling him original lyrics by someone like George Harker branded my soul and left the stench of singe behind.
“Wait. I’ve got it.” Terryl snapped his fingers with a flourish. “Jessup Polk. Do you have any of his?”
I sighed, unsure how Terryl even knew of Jessup if he didn’t know Bill Monroe. “Yeah, but I don’t know that he’s what you’d be—”
“I’ve been hearing people talk about him, lately.”
Polk wasn’t new. Not by a long shot. No one even knew if he was producing stuff anymore. But that was part of his mystique. Physical copies of his albums were rare, always released in small batches, and therefore extremely coveted by collectors. And by some voodoo, Dan had acquired three of his records that were in this room. That I’d be damned if I was going to sell to Terryl so he could impress some ritzy fuckers at a fundraiser. But if Dan found out I lied, I’d be up shit creek with the paddle in my ass, because lately he’d been more proactive about trying to sell off some of the stuff in here. So begrudgingly, I said, “We’ve got a few, but I’d really suggest the Monroe.”
Please go for Monroe. Inner cheerleader had returned. I didn’t hate him as much as I had back at the Sparrow.
Terryl fixed me with a gimlet-eyed stare, and I withered a little inside, knowing what was coming next. “I’ll take ’em all.”
“They’re two hundred each.”
He shrugged. “No problem.”
Of course not. I pressed my lips together, then popped them out, decision made. “No.”
“No?” His eyes went wide with incredulity.
I wasn’t sure where to go next; I’d kinda just lobbed the refusal out there to see what would happen.
A hand clamped down on my shoulder, squeezing a little too emphatically, and Dan emitted a chuckle that sounded forced. “He’s fuckin’ with you. They’re yours if you want ’em.”
“Yeah, I’ll take them.” Terryl stared hard at me for another long moment. I gave him a tight smile for his trouble. The tightness was to keep any other words—like dipshit—from leaking out the corners. I was a customer service fail today.
Dan gave my shoulder another bone-grinding squeeze, as if he knew. It was too bad these were the circumstances, because otherwise I would’ve enjoyed the contact. I’d had a quiet secret crush on him since he’d hired me back in Gatlinburg. The kind I kept rooted purely in fantasy because a guy like Dan and a guy like me? No fucking way. But it was fun to entertain sometimes, between me and my hand and some envisioned scenario where Dan called me into his office, leaning deep back in his chair the way he had a habit of doing, and then told me to drop my pants in that sexy Southern rasp that was half-drawl, half–Delta mud, and all man.
