Chapter 4

I was pondering the differences from how I perceived Liz's life to be and how she looked at it when she stood abruptly.

"If we are going to do anything before we eat and start a long-winded conversation, we need to get moving!" she declared with a grin. In only a few hours I had figured out the difference between sincere and feigned with her facial movements. Liz hadn't smiled much when she was younger. First off, she didn't have a whole lot to smile about. But she also had a mouthful of braces from the time she turned 12 until the day she left for Nashville. I'd had braces for a year in my teens. I'd worn a retainer for another year. I did not have to have either for five or six years. Thinking back, I wasn't sure Liz would have needed them for that long either.

I decided it didn't matter but I wondered if she had decided not to settle for anything less than perfection in her teeth. I was willing to settle for far less. My teeth were still slightly crooked. I still had a slight overbite because I didn't wear the retainer as often as I should have. But Liz's teeth were perfectly straight. They weren't the sort of white that a person would associate with toothpaste commercials but it was pretty obvious that she brushed and flossed regularly (things I could do with far more frequency, my dentist had told me the day before).

She no longer wore the glasses either. I thought for a moment that the glasses and braces and the weird clothing might have been camouflage to keep her focused on her Nashville dreams while she was a teenager. I dismissed the thought pretty quickly. Only a masochist would put up with the sort of teasing those things produced. I gave my head a mental shake to focus on the present.

"What do you have in mind?" I asked.

"You realize that this is my first visit to San Diego," Liz noted with a laugh.

"No," I admitted.

"Well, now you do," she said. "If I weren't here what would you do tonight?"

"Drink a beer or two, sit on the back deck and go to bed," I said.

She smiled again.

"Which, in fact, does sound like a nice evening," she told me. "But you have agreed to entertain your guest so you better think of something quick."

I chuckled at the mock glare she offered.

"We could drive up the coast," I said. It was something I did frequently because they had a great taco stand right next to the beach.

"That also sounds fun," Liz said. "I like the beach. However..."

She tilted her head.

"As I might have mentioned ... I am not anonymous," she continued. "Now, personally, I don't mind when a photo of me hanging out with a hot guy gets released. It comes back to those lesbo rumors and ... well, the country crowd ain't too hip to divergent lifestyles. But you might want to keep a few more days of anonymity and hanging out with me at a beach is pretty sure to put that to a quick end."

"Yeah," I agreed. "I was just thinking about dinner. They have a taco stand that's pretty awesome. It also has vegan stuff so I figured we both could find something."

"I'm not a vegan!" Liz insisted. "I'm not a vegetarian. I'm not a ... a ... anything. The idea of Mexican food is great. I love spicy food. One of the first decisions I made for myself concerned food. My parents were into the health food crap. They wanted organic this and organic that ... completely ignoring the fact they used pesticides on their main staple."

Blank confusion must have been etched on my face because Liz rolled her eyes.

"They used bug spray and growth additives on the cannabis they grew," she explained. "Christ, they probably laced it with PCP some of the time. Yet my mother wouldn't buy an apple that was grown in a normal place. She wouldn't buy a hot house tomato. She wouldn't purchase seedless watermelon because she considered them genetically altered. She never stopped to consider that she and Dad went to a strain of weed with no seeds when they found out some of their customers were trying to grow their own. Like I said, completely screwed up. Anyway, I eat whatever I want to eat. I try not to overindulge. My stage costumes are ... well, a few of them are sort of tight. I don't want a gut hanging over my pants. Shandra Rose has a Vegas residency and I saw pictures of her there. She seems to think she's still 19 years old. She wears these slinky, tight costumes completely forgetting that she's now 37 and has popped out three kids. It's pretty gross."

I shrugged. Shandra Rose had been my first celebrity crush. I had been about 12 when she first hit the stage as a teenager. She wore men's shirts unbuttoned to the waist and the shortest skirts allowed by law. I loved it!

"At least I made it through my 20s without blowing all my cash on coke," Liz said, shaking her head. "I thought my parents were bad until I met hers. Christ. They sexualized that girl when she was 12 years old and then acted surprised when she turned into a coke slut at 25. Hell, they probably loved it. It gave them a reason to petition a court for control of her finances. That's all she ever was to them ... a cash cow. She's stuck out in Vegas because her parents squandered her fortune on shit for themselves. Both of her ex-husbands are losers. But she's cleaned herself up and she's trying to be a decent mother, I think. She brought the oldest boy to one of my shows last year. I guess he's about to graduate high school."

"That doesn't make me feel old or anything," I said with a wry smile. I flexed my shoulder involuntarily and Liz stared at it when it made a series of loud pops and cracks.

"Damn, that sounded ... painful!" she said. I repeated the motion and then circled my arm. It made the same noises only louder.

"That reminds me of the roller coasters at Cedar Point!" Liz declared. "You know, how they would clack and click when they were pulling the cars up the incline."

"Gee, thanks," I said jokingly. I had thought the same thing once or twice.

"Let's head up the coast," she stated. "We'll grab some tacos and find a spot. I'll pull my hat down low and lie if someone recognizes me."

"You should probably call your security team and let them know where we're headed," I opined. "I'm sure they have a GPS tracker in your shoes."

Liz crossed her arms and gave me a playful glare.

"It's more likely they stuck one on your car while we were in the studio," she said with a wink. "But I'll call them anyway. They will stick around the hotel in case I decide to go somewhere if I don't. This way they can relax a little, too."

Liz found riding in an old car with the top down had as many limitations as advantages. Yeah, it was awesome to feel the raw power and the wind through your hair. But you couldn't use a phone or have much of a conversation. The roar of the engine and the fact that the car was the height of 1960s aerodynamic innovation meant the air currents were pretty noisy, too.

The car had been restored to original condition. That mean the radio was only AM. It meant no BlueTooth capability or GPS navigation. It also meant that it had no cell phone charger or USB port. I had a charger that went into the cigarette lighter that worked fine with my cell phone but not with Liz's ... which was several steps above the phone I carried. Her phone died while she was sending a series of texts.

Despite the fact we were on the open highway, Liz unbuckled her seatbelt and crawled halfway into the backseat while she rummaged around in her bag for a spare battery that she assured me that Jill would have packed for her.

The shorts she wore were plenty long when she was standing but they rode up until the bottom of her pale butt cheeks poked out the bottom while she had her knees on the front seat and her hands in the back. I tried to keep my eyes away from the smooth skin at the back of her thighs but I couldn't help but notice where her tan ended. A trucker honked when I passed him. I thought for a moment I might have drifted too close. It wasn't until I saw him holding his hand out the window with his thumb upward that I understood he was just appreciating the view he had gotten as we went by.

"Shit," Liz muttered as she resumed her place.

"No battery?" I asked.

"I found the battery," she said loudly. "I can't believe I just flashed my ass to a truck driver."

"He liked it," I said with a grin.

"Yeah, I got that!" Liz said.

With her sunglasses and my cap, no one would recognize her as we zoomed past at almost 80 miles an hour.

"Hey, it's like hanging out with your model friends," I replied. "You get to do wild stuff but I'll make sure you don't wind up passed out in a gutter somewhere."

"Anastasia once stuck her head out the sunroof of a limo and showed her boobs to people on the street in New York," Liz said.

I could only shake my head.

"I'm surprised that didn't wind up on TMZ," I opined.

"She pulled her shirt so far up that no one could see her face," Liz admitted. "Otherwise, yeah, it would have. Some tourist in London saw me pat a guy on the hand. The next day the tabloids told everyone I was ... canoodling ... with a stranger in a restaurant. I had to have someone explain to me what canoodling even is."

"Now you can tell me," I said. "I still don't know."

"Fondling, making out, dry humping, whatever you want to call it," Liz said. "I mean, yeah, it looked like I was holding his hand in the picture. I totally wasn't. I didn't know the guy but he was really polite. He waited until I had finished eating before coming to the table. He didn't ask for an autograph and even apologized for bothering me. But he told me one of my songs had really helped his sister out. He decided that he would never get the chance to tell me again and he wanted me to know. He was so sincere that I asked him to sit with us and to tell me about his sister. I mean, hell, I don't know. Maybe I just wanted an ego boost or something. I don't think I wanted to know how I'd helped. I wanted to know if she was still having problems.

"She was just this mixed up teenager. It wasn't anything ... major. But it was major to her. You know how things like that are. He got her one of my discs for her birthday and one of the songs really spoke to her. It might have been coincidence but she pulled herself out her funk and went back to being the kid he'd always loved. I patted his hand and that was all."

She demonstrated with the hand I had closest to her on the steering wheel. She put her hand on mine long enough to close her fingers and then removed it. It wasn't hand-holding by even the most liberal of interpretation.

"I jotted an autograph for his sister on a napkin and he left," Liz continued. "By the next morning the Internet made it sound like I'd blown him under the table and given him my digits in case he wanted me to do it again sometime. My manager found out the tourist had been taking pictures of me all evening. I guess the guy was hoping for a shot up my skirt. One of the websites offered $10,000 to anyone that could take a picture like that. The guy had to settle for $2,500 because I managed to keep my knees together all evening."

"Jesus," I mumbled.

The conversation died for a few moments before Liz spoke up again.

"I saw a rest area ahead," she said.

"Do you have to ... go?" I asked.

"No," Liz replied. "But it's too loud to talk like this. I decided I like riding with the top down but I want to talk to you more. So we should put the top back up. I have to sing tomorrow. I can't be hoarse from screaming at you tonight."

Once we stopped, Liz helped me pulled the top back up, grinning like it was the most fun she'd ever had.

"It's too cool that you got this car," she said. "Do you remember the Valentine's card someone stuffed in your locker in ... eighth grade? The one with a Mustang drawn on the front?"

"Yeah," I said, glancing to my right. My mother still had the card tucked away at home because the drawing was so good.

"Me," Liz admitted.

"So your artistic skills extend past music," I said because I could see the revelation had embarrassed her. It shouldn't have. I had always suspected it was either Liz or another girl that had slid it through the air vents.

"I guess," she admitted. My attempt to lessen her chagrin had failed.

"I still have it," I said.

"Seriously?" Liz asked.

"It was the best drawing I had ever seen of this car," I said with a smile. "So, yeah. I had it on my wall for years. I wanted to take it with me to college but Mom convinced me to keep it at home. I think she had it laminated so it wouldn't yellow. It's in a box with the other keepsakes I've accumulated."

"Cool," Liz said. Her embarrassment had faded and she seemed happy that she had created something that had obviously become important to me. "Did you know I sent it to you?"