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Nothing he’d done to get to this point had been easy. Signing his name should be. It wasn’t.
“Kyle,” Daddy said. “What are you afraid of?”
“What if this isn’t what I should be doing?” he asked. “I mean, I’m busy at the ranch. I like the job. I love setting up the concerts, actually. I still get to do my music. Maybe not on the big stage, with the big contract, but do I need that?”
He turned away from the view he hadn’t been enjoying anyway. “Maybe the dream isn’t to be the country music star anymore.” He wasn’t sure what dreams he had if not this one, and he once again felt like he’d been pushed out of an airplane without a parachute. “Tell me what to do.”
Daddy wouldn’t do that, and Kyle knew it. When he said, “I can’t do that, son,” Kyle sighed heavily. “Listen to what your gut is telling you. Your heart. The Lord. If it’s not right in all three of those, come home. If it is—if this is just fear, Kyle, then do whatever you need to do to push past it so you can hear and feel better. The fear mutes that, son.”
“Yeah, I know,” he muttered. Intellectually, he knew. When he was down in the mire, it was impossible to know, to hear, or to make these decisions. “I love you, Daddy.”
“I’ll love you no matter what you choose,” Daddy said. “If it’s wrong, you’ll know that soon enough, and you’ll still have a place here. If it’s right, then you’ll be on your way.”
He wanted to ask his father where he’d be on his way to. Could Maddy come? Would Kyle have to do everything alone, like he had before. He’d had a manager assigned to him, and he’d tagged along with That Little Texas Band and their families, but he’d still been alone.
Always a plus-one for dinner. Always that odd man out people forgot about.
He didn’t want to do this alone.
“Mama’s calling,” Daddy said. “Call me back when you’ve signed or when you haven’t, okay?”
“Okay,” Kyle said, and his father switched over to Mama’s call. Kyle lowered his hand and met the secretary’s eyes. She wore worry in hers, and he wasn’t even sure why. He approached the desk and leaned against it with both palms, one of them covering his phone. He felt it give a little, and he suddenly wanted to break it so he couldn’t report to anyone that night.
“Does anyone just not sign their offered contracts?” he asked.
She nodded, her ruby-red lips parting. “Yes, of course,” she said. “They sign with other labels, or they don’t like the terms. There are a lot of reasons, actually.”
“What’s another one?” he asked. He’d gotten his way with the contract. He didn’t have other labels wooing him.
“They want to bring their families, and they can’t. The timing doesn’t work out. They only have one good song.”
Kyle nodded along with each one. She’d just given voice to his greatest fear—that he only had one good song in him. He didn’t want to buy someone else’s song and sing it. He wanted to be the songwriter and performer of every piece on his album. He hadn’t made them put that in the contract though.
“Thanks,” he said. “Will you tell Jolene I just ran down the street to get a smoothie? I’ll be back in twenty minutes, I swear.”
The woman reached for her phone. “I’ll let her know.”
Kyle knocked twice on the desk to say thank you, and then he headed for the elevator. Inside, he rode solo, and he exhaled heavily and ran his hands through his hair. By the time the doors opened on the first floor, he’d reset his cowboy hat and put a smile on his face.
Everything inside stormed, and he didn’t know how to make it settle. When he was little, Mama had made him a strawberry banana smoothie whenever he aced a test at school. It was simple, and he realized as he got older that she did it for all of her kids to make them feel special, but it had still accomplished exactly that.
He’d felt special. He’d worked hard on the next test, because the promise of that smoothie meant a lot to him.
At the smoothie shop he could see from the fifteenth floor of the record label, he ordered a strawberry banana smoothie and took his number to wait for it. A couple stood nearby, having ordered before him.
“Howdy,” the man said to him, and Kyle nodded at him. He wasn’t trying to be rude; he was trying to find the answer he needed.
The woman leaned into her boyfriend and said something, and they both looked at him. Kyle wasn’t sure why. He didn’t have a recognizable face—and where would they have seen him besides?
He turned away from them and closed his eyes. Lord, he thought. He was trying not to be afraid, but the worries and fears gnawed at him. They whispered things like, You’re just starting out with Maddy. How can you walk away from her now?
She definitely took up a big corner of his mind, but so did his family. Who would do what he did for the ranch if he signed this contract and left Chestnut Springs?
He wouldn’t flatter himself. He’d left before, and the ranch had gotten along just fine. Blake was capable of making phone calls and sending emails, and if he didn’t want to handle the concerts, he’d hire a new Entertainment Manager. Simple.
Kyle already knew he was replaceable, on every level. Maddy could get a new boyfriend. The ranch could get a new Entertainment Manager. The record label had literally hundreds of demo tapes to choose from.
His eyes popped open. His pulse sped again.
