The roads we follow, p.26
The Roads We Follow, page 26
“A smoking radiator is pretty hard to miss.”
“I’m not just talking about the radiator.” She rocks back in the chair, her hands resting on the Bible in her lap. “I know what you did for Adele and me today. Consider me in your debt.”
I dip my head and chuckle humorously. “I think I might be calling in that debt sooner than you think.”
“That right?” She quirks an eyebrow. “What’s on your mind?”
My knee bounces on its own accord as I meet her gaze. There are at least ten different ways I’ve thought about approaching this conversation with Luella, but I push them to the side now as I work to reconcile the woman beside me with the one I spent reading about through the eyes of my mother in the wee hours of the morning. “I finished reading the journals.”
Immediately, her face sobers. “Ah. I’m sure you have questions.”
She can’t possibly imagine how many questions I have. “Have you read them?”
“Yes.” A simple answer, yet her tone is anything but.
“I figured so,” I say with an exhale, “seeing as this road trip is a mirror image of the one you took with my mother in 1975.”
“Until Kansas,” she amends with a thoughtful smile.
“Right. Until Kansas.”
A pang radiates from behind my rib cage as an image of Luella stepping out of my mother’s music room in April materializes in my mind. “Was this road trip something you discussed with my mother the night you came to see her in hospice?”
“It was certainly inspired by her, but no, we didn’t discuss it. I didn’t even realize I had her journals until after I started the renovation of the bus.” Her face turns contemplative. “As you know, it was a challenge for her to speak when I saw her, but forgiveness is in our hearts more than it’s in our words.”
“Forgiveness,” I repeat. “Is that what was happening behind that closed door?”
Luella takes a minute as she rubs her palm over the cover of the Bible. “Both given and received. It’s meant to come in a perfect pair, no matter how pride may tell us otherwise.”
Her admission is stirring, yet I’m still struggling to understand how an estranged friend for more than three decades would be granted forgiveness when the truth my mom held surrounding her son’s conception was buried with her.
“Would you tell me what happened between the two of you after that tour? It seems, from my mother’s journals, like there was a slow but steady decline in communication between the two of you, as well as some differing expectations as time went on. Which I suppose is understandable after a twenty-year partnership.”
Luella flashes me a knowing grin. “Are you always this diplomatic, Micah?”
“It’s always my goal, ma’am, but not always a reality.” Especially when the subject hits closer to home.
She takes a cleansing breath as she rocks back. “As you know, that summer was especially stressful, not only because Russell was caught in the red tape of the American embassy, but also because we’d used our life savings as collateral for booking that first international tour, seeing as our label was too new to secure a loan. Your mom had written a few songs to record for our new album, and the sound was raw and emotive and like nothing we’d ever created before. Russell and Dorian were excited to promote it.”
“But that album never happened,” I supply.
“No, it didn’t.”
Luella picks up her iced tea from a glass side table and takes a sip. “I used to say two bad fights is what ended us, but as I’ve reflected and prayed and read your mother’s journal entries, it’s just as you said: a slow decline of poor communication and unmet expectations. The fights simply revealed what was already broken.” She turns her glass and watches the ice cubes collide. “The first argument happened the morning after we pulled Old Goldie into Nashville. Ending a tour is always chaotic, and that one was no exception. Everybody was exhausted as we unloaded—our band, our crew, my girls, Lynn, and myself. The tension in the bus had been high, but I figured it would sort itself out once everyone was back home on a regular schedule again. But that next morning, just as I’d set the phone down after talking with Russell at the embassy, Lynn stormed into my kitchen soaked from head to toe from the rain, gripping a magazine. She demanded I tell her what Russell and I were really up to with her. I had no idea what she was talking about.
“I remember having to tell my girls to stay upstairs while the two of us went out on the patio in the storm. I’d never seen her so enraged. She accused me of going behind her back with Russell and trying to steal her songs while slowly edging her out. The suggestion was so ludicrous to me I laughed, but then she threw the magazine at my feet. She told me someone had alerted her to an article in Country America magazine. In it was a statement supposedly quoted by Russell alluding to some big changes with our upcoming album, changes that would make Lynn little more than a backup vocalist instead of an equal partner in our band.” Luella shakes her head. “It’s what your mom feared most, and it was right there, printed in black-and-white. Even our picture looked distorted, me in the front, her pushed off to the side. I swore to her I knew nothing about it and that there was no way Russell would ever say anything of the sort—he loved her like family. But she refused to believe me, and why wouldn’t she? I was the wife of the man she’d accused of breaking the foundation of our friendship.”
Luella takes a deep breath and seems to center herself again. “I told her I would get ahold of Dorian and figure out how this botched quote made it into such a reputable magazine in the first place and get it retracted.”
Dorian’s name strikes a match in my gut, and it’s an effort in self-control not to cut in with more burning questions that need answers, but I take a breath and coach myself to wait. “I’m guessing the retraction wasn’t as easy as you thought,” I conclude.
“No,” she says. “Three days later, I heard a rumor from a reliable source that Lynn was seen at a bar downtown we used to frequent with an old associate of ours, discussing the legalities of breaking her contract with Farrow Music so she could go out on her own—as a solo act. I’d never felt so betrayed.”
“Wait, you’re saying my mom wanted to break her contract with you to secure a new one?” My brows furrow at this. “That doesn’t seem right. She became a music teacher at a private elementary school in her hometown the year after I was born. I never knew her to have any ambition toward fame. She wouldn’t even join the church choir.”
“Yes, but remember: you have the gift of hindsight now. Back then this was fresh, and I was fueled by stress and betrayal—two dangerous factors. When I went to her house to confront her on the rumor, she was gone and nobody seemed to know where she’d went or with whom. My anger grew by the day, and with Russell still detained, the entire world felt like it was crashing down around me. The idea of her leaving us high and dry with no explanation enraged me. Then one day, about a month later, I saw the tabloids in the supermarket. The front page was a picture exposing Lynn and Franklin’s secret Las Vegas wedding.”
The match strike catches on fire as I contemplate the dates she’s referring to now, knowing that sometime between their initial fight and my mother’s Vegas wedding was a conception date with a man that wasn’t her husband.
I’m just about to say this when Luella hits me with “I told her for years that Frank would be a man who would treat her right, a man nothing like her own father. But she was adamant she’d never marry, so to realize she’d married him without even telling me they were involved was . . . extremely difficult. We’d kept so many secrets for each other. For heaven’s sake, she was the only person I’d trusted with my own secret marriage to Russell, and yet she hadn’t confided any of this to me.”
“Is that what your second fight was about then?” I ask. “Their wedding?”
“You know as well as I do that a fight is never really about the subject we claim it to be.”
“Very true,” I say.
“When your mom finally showed up in Nashville in a large moving van with her new husband, I was ready for her. There are few things I regret more than the ugly words we exchanged that day. I threatened to sue her for breach of contract, while she threw all our lyric books off the shelves and told me she was done. She wanted nothing more to do with anything we’d created together. At one point, your dad stepped between us and pleaded for us to stop and consider our history instead of throwing away twenty years of friendship. But our pride proved stronger than our loyalty. By the time we settled out of court, Lynn agreed to sign over all her rights to our songs—even the ones she wrote under our shared name. She also signed over any and all royalties those songs might accrue in the future.” Luella lifts her head. “We signed a no-contact agreement with our lawyers, and that was it. Our songs were the first and last connection we shared.”
“Until you sent the award to their home last spring.”
Her nod is solemn. “Yes.”
For several minutes, the only sound on the patio is the whir of the overhead fan.
“I’m sorry, Luella,” I say. “I know you had to file for bankruptcy to cover the cost of that canceled tour and that Russell had to start the label from the ground up again. My mom was wrong to leave you like that.”
“We were both wrong.” Her voice is watery and thick. “And it cost us both dearly. I would pay back the money we lost on that tour twenty times over if it meant getting to have Lynn in my life these past thirty years. To have stayed close with Franklin and been able to watch their two sons grow up.”
As her last words stab into my subconscious, I lean forward and stake my elbows on my knees. This is going to be harder than I thought. For a moment, I can’t decide if Luella being able to provide the answer I need will hurt more or less than her not being able to. In theory, I know how I should feel. But theories are often proven wrong because people aren’t theories.
“Luella, I wish there was an easier way to say this, but part of why I agreed to drive the bus for you this summer is because . . . I’m searching for my biological father.”
There’s a long pause followed by a look of denial and then, “But Franklin—”
I shake my head. “Is my dad in all the ways that matter, but we don’t share blood. My brother ran the paternity test at the hospital himself, twice. Just to be sure.”
“I don’t . . . I don’t understand. When? Who?”
I lift my head and meet her stunned gaze. “By all my calculations, I would have been conceived sometime by the end of the tour and before their wedding date in Vegas. I know this is a lot to take in. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t you dare apologize to me. I’m—I’m the one who’s sorry. You just found this out?” Her eyes soften and leak at my confirmation with a sympathy that shreds through the top layer of my composure. “You were hoping I might know who? Oh, sweet boy.” She shakes her head several times. “I wish I could give you that.” She covers her mouth then, her eyes growing round. “You’re saying she was pregnant with you the day we fought at her house?” I give her a moment to process these events again through the lens of this new filter. I’ve had weeks to think on it, yet it still feels like a foreign object being shoved into my brain.
I scrub a hand down my face as a sticky breeze causes a sheen of sweat to dot my brow. Luella’s skin appears flushed, as well. “I do have a working hypothesis that it could be Dorian Zuckerman.”
“Dorian?” Luella’s protective pushback is stronger than I anticipated. “No, it’s not him.”
Obviously, I’ve hit a nerve. I approach with caution, knowing she’s still close to Dorian’s family. “I know he was your friend and that he was married at the time of the tour, but affairs often occur when—”
“It’s not that.” She sounds flustered, and I’m about to tell her we can take a break from this for now, that maybe getting a refill on her iced tea and moving inside where it’s cooler would be better, when she says, “Dorian was injured in Vietnam. It left him unable to father children. They struggled for years trying to have a family of their own, undergoing dozens of tests and procedures back east.”
I sit up straighter. “You’re saying Tav was adopted?”
“No,” Luella says patiently, “I’m saying Dorian and Donna did in vitro and used a sperm donor to become pregnant with Octavian. In vitro had quite a stigma back in the ’90s so they rarely volunteered that information. Honestly, with as close as Tav and Raegan are, I’m not even sure if she knows.”
The present tense of their combined names in Luella’s sentence is like three shots of espresso hitting my nervous system all at once. Somewhere a voice of reason tells me to leave it alone, to move on with this conversation, but that voice doesn’t have a chance now that every neuron is firing in the same direction. “It sounds like your two families have meant a lot to each other?”
Luella nods absently. “The older girls were always a bit annoyed with Tav—he was the stereotypical only child, and they weren’t used to having a little boy around the house. But Raegan.” Luella clucks her tongue. “That sweet girl of mine has been smitten with him since the day she learned to say all four syllables of his first name, Oc-tav-i-an,” she emphasizes with a smile. “I’m rarely surprised when it comes to my youngest daughter, as she’s always been my easiest child to please, but she about shocked my curls straight the day she broke off their engagement last fall.”
Engagement. The word is a freaking neon sign shorting out my frontal lobe, zapping weak brain cells left and right before I can even process what Luella’s just said.
The opportunity doesn’t come.
The patio door slides open, and Billy, Dottie’s brother, steps out.
He removes his ball cap and dips his head toward our table.
“I apologize for the interruption,” Billy says in a relaxed timbre I could easily mimic after spending hours with him yesterday. “But I’m afraid I have some bad news about the bus.”
“Oh no.” Luella sits up straighter. “Are we not good to leave later this evening?”
“I’m afraid not, ma’am.” Billy looks to me. “There’s been a shipping mishap at the warehouse. Part we need is currently en route to Florida.”
“Florida?” Luella shrills.
“That’s right, ma’am.” He nods again. “I’ve secured us a new replacement part. Only, thing is, we have to drive west of Denver to pick it up. At this point, it’s an overnight trip. They close in a couple of hours. But once I have the part in hand, I should be able to fix you folks right as rain in roughly a work day. Best case, I can get you back on the road within forty-eight hours.”
“I’ll go.” I’m so desperate for fresh air and a fresh perspective that I practically jump out of my chair. “If you can help me secure a rental car in town, I’ll pick up the part in Denver and bring it back to your shop.”
“No need for a rental, son. I’m happy to take you myself, though according to Dot, I’m not as good with night driving as I use to be.” He winks. “Might need you to be my eyes come nightfall.”
“I’ll grab my bag.”
21
Raegan
Pulling an all-nighter on a writing deadline must take some practice because mine ended with twenty pages’ worth of the letter g and a stiff neck. How on earth can it be after noon? I yawn and stretch my torso side to side in the hard desk chair, careful not to knock the open journals to the floor, and wonder at what point in my delirium I decided my keyboard would make for a decent pillow. I drag my cursor through the manuscript and highlight the evidence of my failed attempt to work till dawn and delete it back to the ten pages I managed to write before my forehead crashed into the middle of the alphabet. I blow out a frustrated sigh at the words that remain. Something’s off with the story, and I don’t know what. I used a template to create a digital timeline, inserted every important date I came across in Lynn’s journals that pertained to my mama, and even drew out a plot web to get the creative juices flowing. And still, what’s here isn’t as compelling as I want it to be—need it to be.
The remnants of a dream linger in my subconscious, but it’s not until I push the chair back in search of my morning caffeine fix that I feel the quilt slip from my shoulders and fall to the floor. The same quilt I’d used to cover Micah with last night.
Micah.
I spin and stare at the rumpled comforter where he’d slept as my mind replays the dream as if it’s being streamed on a device with poor WiFi: Micah and Tav in the same room together, making uncomfortable small talk, all while Tav loops an arm around my waist and Micah refuses to meet my gaze.
I shake my head. It was just a dream. A nightmare is more like it, one that could easily become a reality if Micah’s newest hypothesis is true. Where is he now?
After a quick stop to freshen up in the bathroom, I follow the lingering aromas of breakfast in search of coffee, but Dottie is the only person I find, and soon I’m locked in a discussion about the wonders of technicolor cinema. The woman is so gracious and hospitable, but after three attempts to escape in the name of a much-needed shower, my only hope is a one-for-one exchange: me for Hattie. When my sister comes down the stairs freshly showered and asking if she can hitch a ride into town to find some WiFi to call her children, I don’t hesitate to slip away and return to my room.
Only when I do, I’m not alone.
I freeze in the doorframe of my bedroom, my mind short-circuiting in my verbal command center at the sight of my niece bent at the waist reading my secret project. And she’s apparently so engrossed in the chapter she can’t hear the alarm bells ringing inside my skull. I close the door behind me, and she jolts upright, whirling around with a hand pressed to her chest. Her smile comes instantaneously, as if the sight of me brings sweet relief. I wish I could say the same about her in this moment.
“Good morning, Auntie Rae. I was coming to brainstorm some lyrics with you”—she points to her Martin on my bed—“but when I saw Chapter One on your computer, I got completely sidetracked. I was hoping it was the sequel for Birch Grove.” Her smile brightens. “How come you didn’t tell me you were working on something new?”
