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“I’m never going to live that down, am I?” Adam turns away from me and scoffs.
“Nope,” I tell him. “That moment in the club when you came face to face with Keelin will live rent-free in my head forever.”
Adam gives me a knowing look and points towards the door where Cash left to take a call. I shake my head at Adam, signifying that I haven’t told Cash that I slept with Keelin while we were apart. It didn’t seem significant, nor would it have made either of us feel better. I don’t want to think about Cash with someone else either.
Adam looks at me thoughtfully. “You’ve come a long way too, baby.”
I tamp down the emotions because they flow so easily these days.
“Do you miss being in the band?” I ask Adam.
“It’s different than your situation,” he says sympathetically. “We were never as close as the four of you were. I wanted to take the band in a different direction, and they didn’t. Now I get to do what I think I was always meant to do.”
“How did you know what you wanted to do next?” I ask thoughtfully.
“I didn’t want to give up music. This was my way of staying connected, and I really like working with all different kinds of bands.” He motions to the studio and the office beyond that he built from the ground up.
I look down at the new carpet and toe my Converse at a snag in the Berber. Adam walks over to me. “How is the songwriting coming along?”
I haven’t talked to Adam about working with Peter, and I shouldn’t miss him. He was annoying and a jerk most of the time, but why do I feel like a piece of me is missing? That piece is inside Peter’s album. I wonder if it will feel like that with every artist and album I work on, until there are no more pieces of me left to give.
“It’s been keeping me busy,” I explain to Adam. “And more emotional than I ever thought it would be,” I admit.
He squeezes my arms. “I get it.”
“Could just be my hormones. They’re all over the place,” I admit with a sigh. I’m far enough along now that we’ve told a few close friends, Adam being one of them.
Adam looks at me thoughtfully. “Everything is gonna be okay. You’ve always got Uncle Adam,” he teases but the reassurance is nice. Underneath, the worry still grows like a pebble tumbling down the side of a snowy mountain, growing bigger.
“Does this mean you’re going to babysit?” I smile at him.
Adam contemplates this and his eyes soften as if he’s imagining something in his mind. “Yeah, actually.”
The door opens and Cash comes through before I can interrogate him more.
“Everything okay?” I ask, knowing how hard it is for him to leave someone else in charge of the store while he’s gone. Hiring a manager wasn’t in the budget, but he can’t be there 24/7. He needs a break every once in a while, but there’s always some crisis he needs to fix, whether it’s a wrong shipment, the plumbing backed up, or some kid breaking an instrument.
“Yeah, there’s a place out in Pasadena that’s going out of business and I can get some equipment for a steal, but I gotta head out there now.” Keeping a record store in business has proved to be more difficult than we thought. The industry is changing and everything is going digital, cutting out a lot of the revenue stores would get from physical albums and CDs. Cash decided to focus on getting his hands on instruments for cheap, fixing them, and using them for rentals or to sell. With a lot of stores going under in this economy, he’s been taking advantage of it.
Of course, he still likes to be old school or ‘a purist’ as he calls it, and stocks albums because there are people out there who still like to have something tangible.
“I can drop you off at home if you don’t want to go with me,” he offers, raising his eyebrows at me.
“That’s in the opposite direction for you.” I furrow my brows. I don’t want him to have to take me all the way home to Santa Monica and then backtrack through all that traffic to get out to Pasadena.
“I’ll just go with you,” I tell him, but I know my body betrays me. I shift on my feet, ready to sink onto our couch and my eyes feel heavy.
“It’ll be boring and I can tell you’re tired,” Cash says, frowning at me.
“Adam has a comfy couch I can take a nap on until you get back,” I suggest half-heartedly.
He turns to Adam, dismissing my suggestion. “Mind if I take your car so Mia can take hers back home?”
“I don’t mind,” Adam says. “I’ll be here for a while and I can drop you off at home when I’m done,” he tells Cash.
He hands me the keys and then pulls me in for a hug. “All settled,” he says. “I’ll be home as soon as I’m done.”
I grumble a goodbye into his chest not hugging him back, annoyed that he just dismisses me. Cash just takes it like he tolerates everything I do, and suddenly I feel bad.
