Chapter 16

Saturday brought another exciting day with Chef. Because of the party, I was much more tired than I had been the previous Saturday, but my overall level of happiness entirely made up for that. Not only had the night ended beyond my wildest dreams, but I was going to be playing again, tonight. Maybe one day, the thrill of getting on stage would wear off and it would start feeling like a job, but right now, with only one performance behind me, my excitement just thinking about it happening was over the top. I was like a kid on Christmas morning every Saturday now, waiting until the moment I got to open my present. Which, in this case, was stepping on stage with my guitar.

Today was much less ambitious than the previous weekend, since Chef didn’t like to do the same things, too close together. This time we got fresh goat cheese, fresh spinach, some fresh squash, and some other assorted vegetables.

The main special for the day was going to be goat cheese and spinach stuffed chicken, which he already had a large supplier for, since it was one of the staples of his menu. Beyond that, he taught me to make pasta, which we spent a good portion of the morning preparing and drying. For his second item, he was planning butternut squash ravioli and butternut squash soup.

I’d never had either, so it was interesting. Preparing the squash was messy at times but not difficult, since both recipes needed the squash cooked down into almost a paste, with the soup having that blended and strained out, so only the liquid remained.

The ravioli itself was incredibly time-consuming. I have to say I much preferred the pig to making pasta. The chickens didn’t need much in the way of prep, since we’d mix the two fresh ingredients together and stuff the chickens an hour before lunch and again an hour before dinner. The end result was probably going to be delicious, but it wasn’t particularly complicated, either.

That was probably for the best because I was having trouble concentrating. Not so much that I did a bad job, but if we had to do anything delicate like working with fish again, I might have caused myself problems. Beyond my excitement to play tonight, I couldn’t get my mind off Rhonda. The relationship was still early, but we’d been spending so much more time together ever since my talk with her last week. We talked on the phone almost every single night, and she’d promised to come out and hear me play again tonight, although since she’d skipped dinner with her family last night, she had to do that first, so it wasn’t an out and out date. I couldn’t help but think about how excited I was to see her again, and if I were honest, I’d admit that I was also looking forward to a little alone time with her.

I kept working it over in my mind how to tell Rhonda I wanted to see only her, and for her to be my girlfriend. I hadn’t gotten to talk to Hanna today, and she’d be busy working by the time I got off and had to start getting ready to play, so I didn’t have her advice. If I were smart, I’d just play it cool until I could talk to her and find out how kids usually went about these things, but I knew myself well enough to know I wasn’t going to play it cool. I wanted to ask Rhonda to be my girlfriend, and I didn’t want to wait until after I talked to Hanna.

I finished up the day shortly before the dinner shift started and went up to take a shower in Chef’s apartment. I felt flour caked into my pores from making pasta all day. I’ll say making pasta isn’t my favorite thing. It’s time-consuming and less interesting than some of the other things I’ve worked on.

I finished getting ready to play and headed down to wait. I was wearing the same thing I’d worn on my first date with Rhonda, since I had limited options when it came to dressing nice. Willie and the rest of the band didn’t dress fancy, but they all wore slacks, button-up shirts, and polished shoes. The least I could do was wear a button-up shirt, although I didn’t own slacks and my only shoes were a pretty worn-in pair of tennis shoes.

With my much larger paycheck, I could give Mom half, keep a little aside for a date with Rhonda next weekend, and still have enough to do a little shopping. It wasn’t so much that I could go to a nicer shop, but there was a Walmart on the outskirts of Asheville I could go to and get a handful of clothes that would still be a step up from what I currently owned. The only hard part was getting there, since it was almost an hour away. I didn’t have time on weekdays because of school and training, or on Saturdays because of work during the day and playing at night. Sunday’s during the day was my only choice, but Mom would be at work. I’d have to ask Hanna, but she gave me rides so much I was starting to feel bad about it.

I headed down and made my way out front to sit with Willie while I waited. Several of the other guys in the band were already there, and I mostly just listened to them talk. While I loved that they let me play with them, I still felt weird about engaging with them outside of practice and the stage. Even though I’m normally confident about my abilities and who I am, everything had happened so fast that it was hard not to suffer from imposter syndrome a little bit.

I was listening to them talk about the old days when Hanna came in for her shift. She waved for me to follow her and led me to the storage room, which was currently empty.

“Hey, I wanted to check in with you and make sure you were okay after last night. I know that was ... different.”

“I’m not going to lie, it was weird making out right next to my best friend.”

“Best friend?”

“Umm ... I mean, yeah. I talk to you every day, eat dinner with you and your Mom half the week, and it’s not like I have a lot of other friends.”

“No, I like it, and yea, it was kind of weird kissing Marcus with you in the back seat with Rhonda, but I wanted some time with him, and you and I were getting dropped off, so I didn’t see a lot of options. I hope it doesn’t make things weird between us.”

“It won’t, although let’s not make a habit of it.”

“Agreed. So, I’m your best friend, huh?”

“Shut up.”

She laughed and gave me a one-armed shove.

“Wait,” I said as she turned to leave. “I do need a favor.”

“Ohh, I see. I was wondering what your angle was.”

“That’s not how it is, and you know it. I just have a problem. I don’t have enough clothes to wear on stage or go out with Rhonda. Everything I have is t-shirts and jeans. I was hoping I could get a ride down to Walmart so I could pick up some stuff.”

“There are places here in town that you could get clothes.”

“Yeah, but they’re too expensive. I give half my checks to my Mom to help with bills, so I don’t have a lot of available cash.”

“Okay, I’ll take you, but since we’re down that way, I also want to go to the mall. I’ll get us back in time for work.”

“Really?”

“Here’s another lesson on girls. Asking us to go shopping is never going to get you in trouble. We love to shop and prefer it when we’re with someone so we can ask ‘how does this look’ a hundred times.”

“Thanks Hanna, you’re the best.”

“What are ‘best friends’ for?”

“Idiot,” I said, as we both laughed and walked out of the storeroom.

I spent the next couple of hours on the porch with Willie and the rest of the guys. About half an hour before we were scheduled to go on, Rhonda and Jordan showed up. Jordan headed inside to talk to Hanna when she had a moment between her tables, and Rhonda stayed with me. One of the guys offered to get up and give her his seat, but she chose to plop herself down on my knee, a solution I particularly enjoyed. As I listened to the guys, occasionally adding a sentence or two before shutting up again, Rhonda scooted back and leaned against me, pulling my arm around her, across her stomach.

Had someone told me that morning that I would be bummed when it came time to get on stage, I would have thought they were crazy, but when Willie said it was time to go, it was all I could do to keep from groaning. While all we’d done is basically both sit quietly, listening to others talk, the comfortable closeness had been intoxicating. There were many times when I lost track of the conversation, more focused on the sensation of Rhonda pressed up against me, smelling a slightly sweet fruit smell coming from either her shampoo or some kind of body spray, I wasn’t sure which.

Rhonda didn’t say anything, just gave me a kiss on the cheek before getting up and slipping inside to find a seat. I hadn’t really been watching people arrive, both because my chair had been faced away from the stairs up into the restaurant and because of Rhonda, so I was somewhat surprised by the turnout. There were noticeably more people in the restaurant tonight than the night before.

A lot of them were people I recognized from school, including nearly everyone from our lunch group, except Hanna of course, gathered around a table with Jordan. There were several other people I didn’t know by name, but whose faces seemed somewhat familiar. It wasn’t just people from school that made up the increase in audience, however. There were a lot of older faces, with the vast majority looking to be in their mid-twenties. The previous Saturday, the fifty-plus crowd had made up the majority of the people watching. Tonight, it was about fifty-fifty, with every table and almost every bar stool taken. Some were eating, but a lot weren’t, which meant they’d paid the cover that Chef had mentioned. Most of those were drinking, however, which was probably good for Chef’s bottom line.

We got up on stage and Willie introduced me again, which we hadn’t practiced. I glanced around at the other guys, none of whom got their own introductions, and was a little worried they might be offended, since they had all been playing here a long time and were all way more experienced than I was. Thankfully, none of them seemed to take offense at it.

We started on the set as planned, with most of the first hour taken up by blues, although Willie had worked in a few more popular, if not actually modern, R&B songs that they all knew. The older people in the room, and a handful of the twenty-year-olds, were enjoying themselves, but there was a slight din from people murmuring while we played, something that hadn’t happened the previous Saturday.

We ended that portion of the set, and Willie handed the microphone over to me, switching places, just like we had before. I was a little embarrassed when my lunch friends all stood up and started clapping. I especially thought Rhonda’s, who’d joined them, wolf whistle was inappropriate. She grinned ear to ear when she saw the look, I gave her.

“Before I start, I want to apologize for my friends over there. We don’t normally let them out in public, so they get a little excited. If they get too close to your table, just whack them on the nose, and they’ll be good.”

It was a lame joke, but it got me a few laughs. From there, I started my set. It was essentially the same as the previous Friday, with a few songs shuffled around to keep it from getting boring. The only new song was the country song we’d practiced called Marks on the Wall, about marks made by parents as they tracked their kids’ height through the years. It was on the sadder side of country, but also had a slight pop bend to it. We’d decided on something with a more modern sound instead of the ‘my girlfriend left and my dog died’ type country fare that might have played well with the farm crowd but might not have worked for the younger audience. It seemed like a good compromise, and everyone seemed to enjoy it.