Chapter 3

By Wednesday I was starting to get a little antsy. Warren still didn’t have any news for us about our next gig, although he said he was working on it. I was still holding out some hope for a summer tour, but if we needed to put time into smaller clubs locally before we could book a full tour and we would have to be done touring by mid-August, we were running out of time to get it done.

What made it worse was that I had nothing to do. Kat was off at practice and Mrs. Phillips was working, leaving me at home alone. I still had band practice that afternoon, but even that felt like we were going in circles. The last new stuff we worked on was before Christmas, and we’d practiced everything else to death. If we had a show to get ready for, at least we could be working on set lists, trying to tailor it to that specific crowd, but we didn’t. The Blue Ridge shows were all but on autopilot at this point, and treating it like something else just made the fact that we didn’t have any other gigs all the more noticeable.

I flipped through channels on the TV, tried listening to an album, skimmed through books on the shelf, but nothing held my attention. I was finding it difficult to be patient and needed something to get my mind off worrying about our next gig. Finally, I grabbed my guitar. When I’d been sitting in prison a song had started brewing in the back of my head, but I’d been avoiding letting it out because I knew it would be difficult for me to confront.

I even had a name for it already. “Ashes and Sand.” I didn’t have any lyrics or anything beyond that, but I knew it was going to be about my parents and it felt like it was probably going to focus on my father. I hadn’t been ready, at the time, to face that and still wasn’t sure I was ready now. But it wasn’t going away, and I knew the more it percolated, the more I’d think about it. Better to start working on it now, see if I couldn’t get some of it out of my system.

I started strumming, just to see what came out as I thought through things. I found that when I was starting a new song, it was best to let my hands kind of wander on their own and see what came out. What came out was kind of melancholic, slow, and haunting.

As I played, I let my mind wander, going through old memories. Late nights in the Winnebago with Mom while Dad was still in the club, drinking. She’d whisper stories to me, trying to lull me to sleep while people were yelling in the parking lot, scaring me. Waking up when Dad stumbled his way back to us and fumbled around in a drunken stupor.

Was it really like that, though? I tried to pull an actual memory from that time, but it was more of a feeling than a memory. Mom always said Dad’s drinking didn’t get bad until I was older, about a year before he ended up in jail, when I was fourteen or so. And yet, in my hazy memories, I was really little, closer to the time when he first started teaching me to play, my arms barely wrapping around the guitar.

Was I letting my memory of the later years, when things got bad, color my earlier memories? How much of remembering him coming back drunk was just remembering how he was after he got out of jail? Was I writing about how things were then, or how things ended?

Maybe that’s why I’d landed on the title. Memories could be like that, shifting, flowing around until they got all jumbled up. Was that the point? To address how I felt now and make sense of the two lives I knew. The fuzzy memory of love and hate, living out of the Winnebago, and the crystal clear one of those last moments, Mom on the floor, Dad coming at me. Reconciling those memories, I stopped playing and wrote in my notebook.

Mom’s stories, whispers at night.

Dad’s blurry gaze, spoiling for a fight.

That last line was definitely from the end. Or not the end. The time before that, when he went to Mom’s trailer, stumbling around drunk outside. I remember that look in his eyes. The hatred he had for me. Blaming me for everything wrong in his life, regardless of the fact that I was barely past being a pre-teen when he went to jail, and I was barely a kid when his dreams fell apart.

The booze always made it easier for him to find someone else to blame his problems on. Let the paranoia and rage take over. I knew there was a time, before he’d beaten the will out of Mom, when she’d actually chosen him. When she’d fallen in love with him. I wondered what he was like then.

Mom didn’t really talk about that time, at least not that I could remember. By the time I was old enough to hear those stories, the shine had definitely been rubbed off their marriage. The fact that she never talked about the man she’d fallen in love with, and only about the abuser who controlled her every moment, suggested that she knew how wrong everything was, even when she wasn’t able to get away from him.

I didn’t even have pictures from that time. I don’t know if they’d never taken any or if Mom had burned them after Dad went to prison and she’d finally been able to address her feelings toward him. The only pictures I had were from the times I could remember, after we’d come to Wellsville.

I set the pen down and picked up my guitar again, strumming a few more experimental chords, frowning as they didn’t seem to fit what I was feeling. I wasn’t trying to go for just somber.

It wasn’t just about my past and the things I’d lost. It was an acknowledgment of where I came from and how it made me who I am today. It was about the dichotomy of love and hate, warmth and cold, safety and danger. It was about recognizing that every experience, good or bad, contributes to one’s identity.

That was the backbone of the song. The heart and soul of it. It wasn’t just about the pain or the memories, but also about the understanding and acceptance of my journey. My hand stilled, and I put the guitar down beside me. A weight on my chest, one I hadn’t even realized I’d been carrying, felt like it lifted a little bit.

Ever since the end of the school year, I’d been carrying around a lot of feelings about Mom and Dad, about Sydney and her father, about Aaron’s father. It was all packed in tight, and now I’d added my feelings about Willie and his illness on top of it. I hadn’t realized how pent-up I’d felt. Finally giving an outlet to those emotions, even if it was through the lens of my parents, made me feel a little better.

Of course, not everything could be fixed by a single song. Thursday came and still we’d heard no news of a new gig being scheduled. It had been almost a week, and considering we were talking about smaller clubs, I’d hoped we would have heard something by now.

Seth and Lyla showed up in the early afternoon for our normal practice session. The house we had been using had been rented in Marco’s name, since he’d had the best credit of the three of them, and when Seth and Lyla decided to stick with me, it was obvious we weren’t going to be able to use it to practice anymore. Worse, Marco had kicked Seth out. For now, he’d managed to find someone who needed a temporary roommate, but that would become a problem at some point too.

To keep the peace with the neighbors, who weren’t terribly happy that we were playing in the garage, we practiced on weekday afternoons and tried to finish before five. That was going to be a bigger issue when I was back in school, but I wasn’t playing baseball anymore, so at least I wouldn’t have those conflicts with practicing. Still, we needed to figure out something less temporary, which was another thing we weren’t going to be able to do until we started getting gigs.

“Hey guys,” I said, coming out of the house and opening the garage door.

Lyla was using Tabitha’s truck and was picking Seth up, since the van had also been Marco’s, so they always arrived together.

“Tell me you have something new for us to work on,” Lyla said, setting down her case and pulling out her bass.

“Not yet,” I said. “I do have a new song I’m working on, but I’ve only got half the first verse, and none of the actual melody yet. I need some time before I’m ready to let anyone else see it.”

“We could help you work on it,” Seth said.

Both of them were anxious to start working on anything new. I felt their pain. While we loved playing, going over the same song again and again got really old, very fast. I also wasn’t ready for anyone else to touch this song yet.

“No, not this one. It’s kind of personal and I’m using it to work out some stuff, so I want to keep it to myself for a while.”

“At least tell us what it’s called,” Lyla pleaded.