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The call ends on a sour note. Julian, the prospective manager is originally from Raleigh. He’s interested in relocating to be closer to his southern roots and is searching for the right opportunity. The salary I’m offering is on point. The proximity to the state capital makes Sweet Caroline’s his top choice… If it weren’t for his girlfriend.
She’s not keen on Julian working at agentlemen’sclub.
I can’t exactly say to someone who is taking his partner’s opinion into consideration that my club has any advantages over your typical titty bar. Although I’m certain that seeing the club, interacting with my staff, and understanding that—even though I’ve been an asshole—I tried to treat my dancers right when I had an exceptional management team, the girlfriend might change her mind. It took a while for my girlfriend to come around to that conclusion herself.
The thing is, I can’t blame Julian. I’m in a funk without Paisley around to fight me for what she wants. Where neither of us has attempted to make contact, I’m halfway across the country nursing a broken heart so that hers can mend. The last person Paisley wants popping up at an inconvenient time is me.
I straggle back into the house Cris and his wife share. Diaper bag in tow, Daveigh waved to me on her way to drop off their baby at the sitter while I was on the phone. I’m surprised to see Cris in the kitchen rinsing the kids’ breakfast bowls. He’s finished his calls as well.
“Come on.” He dries his hands and throws a thumb over his shoulder. “Refill your coffee and we’ll go hang out in the studio.”
I do as he suggests and follow Cris. I’d gotten the cook’s tour when I arrived. The studio’s control room is the size of a closet, but the size of the vocal room makes up for that. Hidden in someone’s home, the equipment and layout are damn professional.
I’m still awed by it.
“It’s not much, but it gets the job done,” Cris tells me in a self-deprecating manner. He flips a few switches on the control board and turns the lights on.
We enter the vocal room. Cris moves a microphone and takes a spot on a stool. I spy a video camera near the ceiling that must tie into a studio monitor. The guitar he used when he sang lead vocals for our band stands in the corner. There are more, plus a keyboard, and a baby grand. Opposite the acoustic, electric and classical guitars is a drum kit.
I slide behind it out of habit, push the throne back to accommodate my long legs, and straighten my spine. This is the distance we sat apart from one another in a cramped room like this one over a decade ago.
My fingers itch to pick up the sticks.
“Feel free.” Cris nods, acknowledging my long-standing addiction. “Give it what you got.”
My foot presses the bass pedal. I have to adjust the set-up that’s for a shorter person. Then I twirl the sticks. They fly in tight circles through the air. My wrists loosen. Tighten. Snap. The cymbals crash.
Cris leans, snatching his guitar from the stand.
I soften mytap-tap-tappinguntil I’m able to pick up the chords that Cris is strumming of a familiar song. Broad grins stretch our cheeks. The ease of syncopation after all these years makes us laugh. We don’t finish any of the tunes. One song blends into the next. Sometimes Cris belts out the lyrics. By the time we give up, our faces ache from smiling and joking.
“You still got it.” Cris compliments me. “Why didn’t you start a new band? Go out on the road?”
His question is deflating. I don’t know how much got back to Cris about my father going to jail, so I start with a succinct answer. “My mom was in a bind. I took over their club.”
“You’re the only man I know who’d look downtrodden if he owned a dancing girls club.”
“Dancing girls.That’s a nice euphemism.” I sigh and scrub my face. “When I went back to North Carolina, I didn’t intend to stay. I’d worked my ass off to get to the point where I could be a successful musician and stay the hell away from Brighton.” Running out of reasons not to, I lay the truth on the line. “Your refusal to sign the contract seemed like the worst thing that could go wrong. But then my dad got arrested. His sentence was the fallout from a longstanding feud.”
Cary Cass’s father, Rex Stanton, frequented Sweet Caroline’s before Cary was born. Rex developed a fascination for Caroline. He wanted to marry his soon-to-be wife and keep Caroline on the side. Exotic dancers aren’t precisely known for having high morals. Rex expected my mother to be looser with hers. After all, she was a married woman who stripped for a living, so her hesitancy to begin an affair with Stanton wasn’t something he could fathom. Caroline refuted his advances and wouldn’t leave my dad. They were a team. We were family. So Rex joined in with the rest of Brighton’s elite in making her life hell.
My parents weren’t seeking acceptance—the sense of legitimacy it would bring—by being members of any country club. But they had the income and understood the connections it would afford them with Sweet Caroline’s. The “you rub my back and I’ll rub yours”, if you will.
It was my mother, not my father, who barred Stanton from the club. A dancer who Rex favored to show him a good time attempting to gain Caroline’s attention and make her jealous came in with unexplained bruises. It wasn’t that the dancer refused to tell Caroline the truth. It was that past Rex paying her in advance for a private show and then taking her elsewhere, she had no recollection of the night before.
Then the stories from the other girls surfaced. He’d offered them their drug of choice, or slapped them around. Some were raped, but because of their work, and Stanton’s overarching public crusade to destroy a business he claimed as sinful, it was their word against his.
An upstanding businessman, Rex Stanton had the ear of the judges. The judges, who were in favor of fulfilling their fantasies by watching young women undress on stage, ignored seeing him sitting at the table across the theater.
I grew up in a household where there was nothing wrong with sex, sexuality, or sexual expression. My mother had a passion for dancing and she did it on her own terms. She raised me in that club and I never recall seeing Caroline so close to the edge of the stage that anyone could touch her. My mother didn’t have the same proclivities that I’ve shown. She didn’t entertain random men in the office or behind a curtain. And once Rex wouldn’t leave us be, she was careful to never be alone with any man for any reason. Luckily, my father was there to protect her.
You might think I’m stupid. That I saw what I wanted to see to justify my upbringing. I was a kid who found solace from bullying by banding alongside society’s predicted losers. The kids who’d be hard-pressed to claw their way out of poverty. I listened to bullies wax on about how superior their lives were, often right before their parents’ tumultuous divorce. Yet any time I accidentally walked in on something I shouldn’t have, it was my parents in the throes of whatever they were doing. That was the stuff that had me ready to gouge my eyes out.
Stanton acted in his own self-interest, saying my old man threatened him. The police filed a restraining order against my dad. Rex violated it. He tried to come into the club to see my mom, anyway. To force her to choose between her business and becoming his mistress or my dad. Knowing that even though the law should have been on our side, it wasn’t likely to help, Caroline kicked Stanton out and increased security, so that any attempt he made to return was in vain.
The changes my dad made to keep Mom and all the other women who worked for them safe are why my employees have escorts to their cars if they want them. Why, while my personal reputation is as a scoundrel, my club has a reputation for caring for its girls. It’s also why Carver acts the way he does. Why he selects mill girls… And why Carver lost his shit on Trig when Kimber had bruises.
