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“Brit makes her own decisions,” I said around my last bite of cookie. “I told her I’d make phone calls for her if she wanted, but she said no. She said she wasn’t ready.”
“And yet, there she is,” Ellen said. “In L.A., doing the thing she thought she wasn’t ready for. Something must have motivated her.”
I shrugged.
“Do you know what I told her when she said she was getting on a plane to California?” Ellen asked. “I told her that she could be a force of nature if she chose to be. She could be unstoppable. I also told her not to break your heart.”
Well. I dropped my gaze to my mug. I didn’t really want to talk about this, but if there was one thing I knew about Ellen, it was that she would have her say when she wanted to, no matter what. So I didn’t interrupt.
“Brit said I had it backward,” Ellen went on. “She said thatyouwere the one that could breakherheart. I told her no, that’s not how this works. I could see it from the first. It was always going to be her who had that power.”
“I don’t know, Ellen,” I said. “It’s complicated.”
“So uncomplicate it.”
“I can’t. She needs time. She told me as much.”
“A little time, yes. But not too much. You’ll have to figure that out.”
I took Brit’s folded letter from my back pocket and handed it to her without a word.
Ellen unfolded it and read it. The moment stretched on, quiet.
She folded the page again and handed it back to me. “Well. I think that just proves I’m right.”
“Not really. I think I screwed everything up.”
“Not even close,” Ellen said, in her no-nonsense tone. “You made everything better, trust me. When it comes to Brit, you always do. She’s in L.A., all alone. Yes, she chose that, but who do you think she would like to have there with her, cheering her on?”
I scrubbed a hand over my face. I was going to be late for sound check, and then I had to play a show. I put the letter back in my pocket. “I’ll think about what to do.”
“You do that,” Ellen said. “My great-niece deserves the best, and I find you acceptable. Also, I’m quite sure you slept with her, thank god. That girl needed some proper sex with a gorgeous man who knows what he’s doing.”
That should have embarrassed me, but almost nothing embarrassed me. I waggled my eyebrows. “You think I’m gorgeous, huh?”
Ellen shook her head. “My god, men never change. Get out of here.”
* * *
All through soundcheck and in the hours before the show, the Road Kings talked strategy. Denver had brought his idea to the others, and they were in, but we needed to plan.
We’d never had conversations like this before. In the years I’d known my bandmates, we’d talked about life, music, and the direction we wanted the band to go. The last year we were together we barely talked at all, and then there were five years of near-silence.
But now we talked about real estate, collateral, and interest rates. We talked about business plans, property taxes, loans, and lines of credit. It didn’t matter that the calculations we were doing were scribbled by Neal on the back of the setlist—they were still calculations. Big ones.
“Jesus,” I said when I looked at the numbers Neal had put into a column. “We did it. We became a bunch of fucking grownups.”
Stone shook his head. “I never thought I’d see the day.”
“Me neither.” There was a long time, when we were younger, when we would have laughed at the idea of living to see forty. It didn’t seem like something we’d ever do.
“Hale is the wild card,” Neal said, opening the green room fridge and taking out a bottle of water. We were thirty minutes to go time. The crowd was rowdy, we had the setlist ready, and we were about to play our final show.
I handed the paper to Denver, so he could tape the setlist to the floor onstage where we could see it. One of us would have to remember to retrieve it at the end of the night so we wouldn’t lose our calculations. “Since none of us actually knows him, who’s going to call him?” I asked.
“I’m not calling him,” Stone said.
Stone was hardly our best ambassador. “I nominate Neal,” I said. Neal was our nicest guy, the closest thing we had to someone halfway normal. He had a kid and everything.
