Chapter 2

Liz sighed and arose from her chair.

"I just claimed I needed a potty break," she said. "Can you stick around? My manager said it might be a couple of hours before I'm done. I really want to catch up."

"We need to get back to work," I answered.

"We do," Rick pointed out. "You don't. We can cover for you if want."

"I drove," I replied.

"Even better!" Sarah offered with a laugh. "That means I finally get to drive your car. You should see it!"

"Did you finally get the '69 Mustang you always threatened to get?" Liz asked.

"Uh, yeah," I admitted with a hint of embarrassment. I also didn't let anyone else drive it – ever.

"That was his dream car!" Liz told the group with a shake of her head. "How about this? I'll have my driver take you guys to wherever you need to go. Then I'll use Travis as my personal chauffeur for the rest of the day. I have to visit a radio station. Then we can have dinner and you can fill me in on what's happened in your life. Is that cool?"

The others looked to me but I knew the decision had already been made. I would never hear the end of it if I didn't agree. And since the trio of people sitting across from me comprised my only friends the abuse would last for quite awhile.

"If you're sure it's no problem," I replied.

"Great!" Liz answered. "I gotta hustle but I promise I'll be back as soon as I can. Help yourself to anything you want from the buffet or from the fridge."

Rick offered his best smile when she departed.

"Wait until I tell Ronda about this!" he said. "You know she tried to set you up with every one of her single friends ... and a couple that were married. Now you waltz in and get to have dinner with Liz Larimer. I'll just tell her you were biding your time for bigger things than people dumb enough to hang out with my sister!"

I rolled my eyes.

"She probably wants to know where all the people we went to school with are now," I answered. "I'll have to call Mom because I left two years after she did and didn't go back either. She'll spend half the night talking to my mom and life will go on like usual tomorrow."

The manager, who finally introduced herself as Stephanie Rhodes, sat down and handed out three envelopes.

"Liz wanted you to have tickets to the show tomorrow night," she said. "The car service is on the way but he's probably 20 minutes out. If it's a problem, I can have Jill drive you now."

"It's no problem," Sarah said as she looked at the envelope and grinned. "It sure pays to have friends in high places. These are front row in the center. Please tell Ms. Larimer that we're very grateful for her generosity."

"You can tell her yourself tomorrow night," Stephanie replied with a laugh. "Once you get to the field you'll be given all-access passes. Liz set these aside for VIPs and she said that she can't think of any more important people than Travis's friends. Are you all in marketing?"

"All of us," Susan replied. "We're all at a hospital a few miles out of town."

"Interesting," Stephanie said with a nod. "Have you worked anywhere else?"

"We have," Rick said, gesturing to the women on either side of him. "I spent two years at Disney before coming back south. Susan was the marketing director for a clothing store chain until they moved their corporate offices to Las Vegas."

"I did dog food commercials," Sarah said with a hint of embarrassment. "That got real old real quick."

"And you?" Stephanie asked, turning to me.

"St. Joe's is the only job I've ever had," I admitted.

"Aside from professional baseball," Rick added helpfully. "Trav got a late start. You were, what, 25 when you finished college?"

"Almost 26," I said.

"But he's good," Sarah chimed in. "Our hospital administration is hopelessly out of date. They don't understand that the marketing department's main job is to encourage quality practitioners to come and then encouraging them to stay. That's what we do. We put together the seminars that our hospital presents at conferences and to medical schools and nursing schools. We're also in charge of the Community Health Initiative. We design and promote the wellness programs the hospital provides ... like smoking cessation and healthy dining on a budget."

"That sounds interesting," Stephanie said, mostly just to say something. My job was tedious; it was unfulfilling; it was aggravating. I liked it because I got to work with my friends and we provided a valuable service to the community. It wasn't interesting in the slightest. But I stayed silent.

The conversation continued, with me mostly sitting quietly, until Jill Clay popped her head into the room.

"The car just pulled up," she announced.

"We'll take you out a side door so you don't have to fight the crowd," Stephanie said. I stood and walked to the door with my friends. A stretch limousine awaited them.

"Oh, this is awesome," Sarah said. "We're going to get back to the hospital right as lunch ends. I hope Jennifer is still in the cafeteria."

"If Thompson is there you tell him I'll collect on his debt," I declared.

"Oh, you can count on that!" Sarah said with a laugh. "When the moment comes, I am going to get it on video and post that sucker on YouTube so we can enjoy it for the rest of our lives!"

I used my time in the conference room to catch up on Liz's life after she moved to Nashville. I knew she had hit the big time, of course, but I knew very little about her personal life – despite the fact that her every move was dissected endlessly on various blogs and news sites.

I was surprised to learn that her first song to cross over to the pop charts hit the airwaves the summer I moved to Austin. I had heard the song but I didn't know it had been sung by someone I sort of knew. She had the Number One song on country radio and Top 40 radio the day she turned 18.

I scanned down her list of albums. I didn't own a single one of them and I had never been tempted to purchase one. I recognized a few of the song titles but I didn't know any of the lyrics.

No surprise there, I mused. I read through them quickly on a site that seemed devoted to Liz's life. I thought they were pretty good. They were a lot more personal than I remembered country radio being. While I was in Texas – and for awhile in the minors – country radio was predominant with those I spent time around. I remembered the songs to be about trucks and drinking and girls in short shorts. In fact, I was pretty sure that every country song I could name off the top of my head was written about one, two or all of those three topics.

"Interesting," I said as I finished reading the words to her latest release, the song that had started the entire commotion. The song was titled "Tuesday" but it was a ballad revolving around Tuesday being the day after Monday and Monday being the day after a lover had left for good.

I moved to another site that focused primarily on Liz Larimer's love life – and it appeared to me that she was very active in that department. The photos started when she was just 18. She went to her Number One party with a guy that was, at the time, a famous television actor. He had disappeared in the past dozen years and I didn't think I'd heard his name in a decade.

What followed on the site was a timeline of every guy that Liz had dated ... or maybe even spoken to. I stopped when I hit 70 and still saw I had a fair amount of the page to go.

"If she slept with them all then she's more active than most porn stars," I said to myself. The next link on the site gave a rundown of all of Liz's celebrity friends ... from other singers to models to actresses.

I chuckled at the thought of the girl with greasy hair that always smelled of stale smoke bumping shoulders with the highfalutin' folks of Nashville, Hollywood and Paris. If someone would have told me 15 years earlier that Liz would one day have millions of adoring fans ... and I would have exactly none ... I would have laughed in their face.

"Life is funny that way," I muttered as I clicked on the next page. I shook my head again. "Christ, she's a fashion trendsetter."

I followed down the photos, separated by month and year. The clothes the girls wore in Austin my sophomore year had been graced by Liz Larimer the year before. I saw that even the high-waisted bikinis that now littered the San Diego beachfronts had been started by the woman that wore a tie-dyed T-shirt and bell-bottomed jeans to class picture day in second grade.

I found myself laughing aloud at the memory. The rest of the class had showed up in shirts and ties or skirts or dresses. Elizabeth Larimer, or "Loony Lizzie" as the students whispered behind her back, had arrived dressed from the 1960s. The only way that anyone knew she was dressing up was because the bandana in her hair matched her T-shirt.

I wondered how much a tabloid would pay me if I could locate that sucker. I was certain my mother still had it packed away at the house. I shook my head and moved to the last section of the website.

"Hmm," I said as I read. It listed all of Liz's charitable donations and the causes that she had lent her support or her voice. The list of boyfriends was far shorter than the list on the last page. From a concert to benefit Midwestern tornado victims to paying the hospital bill of one of her young fans, it seemed that Liz did her best to give back to those that had given to her. I heard the door open as I was nearing the bottom and smiled at her when she walked in.

"I am so sorry," she said as she sat down heavily in the chair and rubbed her hand.

"No problem," I replied.

"Let me grab a bite to eat and an iced tea and we can go," she said wearily.

"Sit," I said when she started to rise. "I've been sitting around like a lump for almost a week. I can use the exercise. Let me guess ... alfalfa sprouts and avocado dressing on stone wheat bread."

"Gross!" Liz said. "How about one of those apples and a pear?"

"What happened to soy milk and all that stuff?" I wondered. I remembered Liz packing a variety of healthy – and completely unappetizing – lunches in middle school.

"That was my parents," Liz said, shaking her head. "Thank God they finally moved to Denver last year."

"Were they on the road with you?" I asked as I handed across two pieces of fruit and a bottle of tea.

"God, no," Liz replied. "I'm glad they moved to Denver because now I know I'm not going to get a call in the middle of the night from a TV station asking for my reaction to their arrests."

"Arrests?" I asked as I sat down.

"Jesus, Travis," Liz said with a laugh, "those two probably grew half the weed in northern Ohio. That's how they made money. Well, selling weed and knitting stuff. I think the weed had a lot higher profit margin. At least in Denver they can smoke until their lungs explode and the cops won't bust in and haul them away in handcuffs."

"I had no idea," I admitted.

"You weren't into that stuff," Liz replied. "I think I was so damned goofy in school because I had a constant contact buzz from age three until 18. It wasn't until I got away from them for a little while that I stopped craving Doritos all the time."

I chuckled and shook my head.

"You laugh like I'm joking," Liz replied with a grin. "They weren't that bad. I mean, you know, I knew they cared about me. I swear to God, you would think 1967 was the year they graduated high school instead of being the year they were born. I introduced them ... well, there is an old singer that's really into the stuff. My dad became his supplier. Can you believe that shit? I have seven multi-platinum discs; my last tour grossed $237 million. And my dad still sells weed."

"Two-hundred-thirty-seven million dollars?" I asked incredulously.

"The net was like a hundred and ten but, yeah," Liz said with a shrug. "I don't get to keep it all. I mean, Christ, who needs that much money?"

I shook my head. The Angels had paid me a $920,000 slot bonus and I thought that was enough money last me forever. Suddenly the list of charitable contributions made more sense. Liz would have to give away a ton of money to limit her tax debt.

"Do you want something else to eat?" I asked when Liz had demolished the fruit I had handed her.

"Want?" she asked. "Yes. But if I eat anything else I'll have to do a radio interview with these jeans unbuttoned. That's the last thing I need popping up on the Internet. The record label would go crazy if the top of my panties showed."

She shook her head and sighed.

"You saw what happened when I gave Jodi Prentiss the finger a few years ago," she added.

"Uh, I must have missed that," I confessed. "Who's Jodi Prentiss and why did you give her the finger ... and why did anyone care?"

"Wait until I tell her she's not universally known and beloved," Liz laughed. "She was in The Pueblo Girls ... until they broke up. That's a music group. Their first six songs went to Number One."

"Oh," I answered. Liz just rolled her eyes.

"So, uh, if you don't know her then you probably aren't a real big fan of my music," she said.

I gave an uncomfortable shrug. Liz chuckled and shook her head.

"My first eight songs went to Number One," she informed me. She seemed more embarrassed than proud of the revelation. "We were on the same label so she went to my party. They have parties when your song hits the top of the charts."

I nodded ... although I had just learned that fact a few minutes earlier.

"So, uh, after the group broke up Jodi went solo," Liz continued. "Her first five solo songs made it to the top and she was giving me crap. She told me I still had a ways to go before I was in her league. She was totally joking and so was I. I flipped the bird and didn't think anything about it until some asshole with a camera posted it. I got to spend the next three days being lectured about how my core audience was impressionable young girls and how things that seem innocent to me can be misconstrued by the public. You would have thought I had been caught having sex with a donkey. Then my next release didn't go to Number One so I got to listen to the same crap again. The label didn't consider that it was a pretty bad song and it still made it to Number Two for six weeks.

"You don't release five songs off the same disc. There is a formula I'll explain to you someday. Right now, I guess we need to get on our way."

I nodded and headed out to bring the car around without mentioning I had no desire to learn how the music industry works.

Liz had her own security team and I was still dressed for work in a dark suit. I wasn't as big as any of the burly guys but we were dressed close enough that it might have been 'Take Your Puny Nephew to Work Day" or something.

Liz waved to the crowd that had made its way behind the center to watch her leave. I waited until her security team got in a dark SUV that had followed me around and we pulled away with Liz still smiling and waving.

She let out a long sigh when we were clear of the parking lot and slumped in the seat.

"Pull over and let's put the top down," she suggested.

"What about your hair?" I asked. "I'm sure they'll want promo shots for the station."

"Damn it," she grumbled. "Yeah, they'll want pictures. I need to get the directions from my phone."

"Stephanie said you're heading to The Wave," I said. "I know where that is. It'll take about half an hour in this traffic. Are you OK for time?"

"I'm good," Liz said. She fiddled around with the seat until it reclined slightly. And although she didn't have a second apple, she unbuttoned her jeans and slid the zipper down until more than just the top of her white cotton panties showed. I caught a glimpse of her toned, tanned stomach and the fine blonde hairs that rested just below her unpierced belly button.

"You wouldn't think sitting and signing autographs would be tiring but it is," she said, seemingly oblivious to the fact she was partially undressed in front of a stranger.

I did my best to ignore the view and focus on the traffic.

"I think it's dealing with the people," I offered. "The guys in front of us were complaining about the 'no pictures' sign. A woman behind us had a CD of her singing she wanted to give you. That would get on my nerves pretty quickly."

"Good thing you never made it to the Majors," Liz joked. "In hindsight, giving you a hug might not have been the best idea."

"Sorry," I said, even though I didn't solicit the action.

"It wasn't your fault," Liz replied. "And I'm glad I gave you a hug. It's just that everyone that saw it thought I should hug them, too. I finally had to have Stephanie announce that I had hugged you because we're old friends that hadn't seen each other in years."

She sighed again and a small smile crept to her face. She fished out her phone from her pocket – sliding her jeans farther down her hips – and hit a button.

"Are you still near the bus?" she asked someone on the other end. "Great! Could you grab me a pair of shorts and a light tee?"