Ernie puts an arm around me. “Kid, that makes me happier than you know.” Gently he clinks his Coke glass against mine and takes another sip.
* * *
Watching my father’s performance from the audience is an entirely different experience.
From the minute he steps onto that stage, I feel the crowd surge around me, like a kind-hearted creature. As if five thousand people have made a pact of mutual affection.
He gives us his all, his fingers working the fret board at blur speed, and they give back to him all the love they’d paid a hundred dollars a head to express. Every time he plays the introduction to another song, there’s a roar of approval.
The live-version experience is so different from the studio tracks I carried in my pocket my whole life. The concert acoustics are booming and ragged without the carefully edited balance mixed by a fleet of recording engineers. I can hear fret noise from Ernie’s bass, and the occasional sound of my father drawing breath past his microphone. I can see all the sweat and effort and dropped guitar picks which are part of real life.
And it’s perfect anyway. Perfect, loud, messy, and real. The crowd stands, swaying around me. Jake threads his arms around my waist and kisses me on the ear. The pulse from the subwoofers mingles with the warm thud of his heart.
Above me, my father beats out the rhythm guitar licks on “Much of Me” with a furrowed brow. He’s literally up on a pedestal, several feet above eye level. How wild it must be to stand up there and hear people yelling your name. It must be a feeling that you can carry away with you afterwards. A guy can make a lot of stupid decisions in life, and still people will yell his name and throw flowers at his feet.
Weird.
After the final song in the set, people stamp their feet for more. The house lights stay off, and I picture my father backstage, toweling off his head, deciding what to play for an encore. Maybe he’s taking a moment to give Norah a kiss. It only took him forty-one years to trust a woman enough to stick with her, so I suppose that would be a moment well spent.
When he comes back out on the stage, he comes alone, in front of the curtain. A techie scurries out with a chair and a microphone. Frederick sits down very close to the lip of the stage, and a spotlight makes a circle against the curtain behind him.
He strums his guitar while he speaks, looking out over the crowd. They’re quiet, listening. “I don’t know if you know this about me,” he says. “But I have a beautiful daughter. Her name is Rachel, and she’s the bravest person I know.”
I gasp.
“Oh!” Aurora says, taking my hand. Jake squeezes my other one.
“She is, naturally, a genius,” he says, and the crowd laughs. “Recently she said something so clever and true that I couldn’t let it go. So I wrote this song for her. I’m going to call it ‘Double Negative.’ It’s a song that asks for her patience. I figure by the time she turns thirty I might figure out this fatherhood thing.” He closes his eyes and begins slapping out a bluesy rhythm line on his guitar.
I can’t not love you,
And I can’t not care
I won’t take no for an answer,
And I won’t bow to despair.
I don’t stop hoping,
But I won’t forget to say
That you’re not wrong in anger,
And I can’t wish that away.
You don’t believe that I am true
It took far too long for me to come through.
But I am your double negative
Where everything wrong turns right.
You might say that I am trite
But don’t fight me, girl, on this tonight.
I am your double negative
Where everything wrong turns right.
I have to sit down when it’s over. I fold myself into my seat and put my head in my hands. Eventually the theater empties out, leaving just the four of us in the third row.
Aurora fumbles in her purse for some tissues. “Here, sweetie.”
“Thanks,” I hiccup.
“You two! It’s like duel of the tearjerkers,” Aurora says. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think Frederick won.”
“He can keep the trophy.” I sniff. I dig my phone out of my pocket. Payback is a bitch, I text to him.
“So what happens now?” Jake asks.
It’s the question I’ve been asking myself for a year. But lately it seems less difficult to answer. I put my head on his shoulder. “After they pack up, there’s a party somewhere. Probably at the hotel. We’ll go ask Henry in a minute.”
When we stand up, my phone buzzes with a response. It says only: I love you Rachel.
T H E
E N D
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Acknowledgments
First of all I need to thank James Di Salvio for his permission to use a lyric from Bran Van 3000! I’m so flattered, and I love all your music.
Thank you to Mollie Glick for your help with this project way back when. How bumpy was this road? And to Patricia Nelson who is priceless.
And to Rosemary DiBattista and Sarah Stewart Taylor and Jess Lahey and K.J. Dell’Antonia who shored me up when things went wrong.
Thank you to Edie Danford for your editing wisdom and to Jo Pettibone for your sharp eyes. Thank you to my early readers: Becky Munsterer Sabky, Natasha Sinel Cohen, Sarah Mayberry, Tiffany Ing, and Jenn Gaffney. And to Miranda Kenneally and Ginger Scott for your support!
Copyright © 2018 by Sarina Bowen
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover design by Sarah Hansen of Okay Creations. Stock photo from Shutterstock.
Sarina Bowen, The Accidentals
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