“Alright fine,” he said. “I’m happy to blame you and only you.” He folded his arms. “I would tell you to leave, but I need as many people here as I can get so that I can prove to recruiters that I can fill up a room.”
“I understand why you’re mad,” I said. “I shouldn’t have just showed up without telling you I was coming. That’s on me. But please, Cal, if we can just go talk somewhere after your set. There’s a lot of things I have to say, and clearly you have a lot to get off your chest as well. I don’t want to go on being mad at each other, not if we’re going to be working together.”
He scoffed. “Mad ateach other? What do you have to be mad atmeabout? No—” He put a hand up. “No, you know what, don’t answer that. I am not interested in hearing anything you have to say right now. I have to go get ready to finish my set.”
“Calvin wait—”
But he was already storming off. I thought about running after him, but something told me that would only make things worse. Neither Becca nor I said anything for a few seconds. Then she smiled at me with pity. “That was… rough. If you want to leave, that’s fine.”
“No,” I said. “I want to stay. It’s like he said, he needs to show he can fill a room, and if I leave now, I’ll just be validating all the terrible things he thinks about me.”
“What exactly are those terrible things?”
I sighed. “It’s just one terrible thing, really. He thinks I bailed on him just when he needed me the most. And whether or not there’s any truth to that, I can’t leave him tonight.”
“Alright, well, in that case, I am going to go get us another round.” She grinned and walked over to the bar. I watched her go. She made a point to stand right next to Jonah as she ordered. They chatted while she waited for our drinks, and when she came back to the table, she motioned with her head for him to follow her.
Oh God, Becca, what are you doing?
I had a plan! A carefully laid plan, and she was ruining it!
“Kat!” she said excitedly, handing me my beer. “Look who I ran into over at the bar. It’s Jonah. Your boss. Isn’t that wild?”
Jonah smiled at me. “I saw you earlier,” he said. “I was going to come over and say hi, but I wanted to wait for a break in the songs.”
“What are the odds of you both being here tonight?” Becca said. “Small world, huh?”
I raised a brow. “Not really. Jonah is the one who told me about the show in the first place.”
He looked surprised. “I thought you said you already knew about the show, that Calvin had told you about it.”
Shit.
“Oh, yeah, right. No—he did. But you reminded me about it, and if you hadn’t, the whole thing would’ve totally slipped my mind.” I took a big swig from my beer.
“Either way, I’m glad you decided to come,” he said. “Your brother is really bringing down the house.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “He is. I’m so—” My voice caught in my throat for a second, but I managed to push through the sudden onslaught of emotions and finish my sentence. “—so proud of him.”
Jonah appeared as if he was going to say something else, but then Calvin appeared on stage again and tapped the microphone a few times. He smiled at the crowd, introduced the next song, and settled into his seat with his guitar resting on his legs.
“This song is about my mother,” he said. He looked down at his hands and started to strum. The melody was familiar. It sounded a lot like something my brother used to strum when we were teenagers, and he was just beginning to learn.
My mom was the one who taught him how to play, and as he played, I realized this was the melody of the silly little tune she made up to help him get down the basic chords. He’d taken this tune and turned it into a real song, changing the lyrics from “and this is a G, and this is a D,” and so on, to lyrics about the way our mother used to dance in public without worrying what people thought. The second verse, he sang a story about the time we got a flat tire, and she somehow made a whole day out of it. We were stranded in a town on the Western side of Massachusetts, and it could’ve been the most boring afternoon of our lives, but instead she made it more fun than we could’ve imagined.
That memory brought back a slew of others, both happy and sad ones, and it was all too much at once. I downed half my beer in one sip, picked up my purse, and smiled at Jonah and Becca. “I’ll be right back. I just have to use the bathroom,” I whispered. Then I did a 180 and practically ran towards the back corner of the bar and slipped through the door to the ladies’ room.
There was no one inside, so I felt free to take a couple deep breaths, in, and out, and lean my weight against the sink. I locked eyes with myself in the mirror.
“Don’tcry,” I said, through gritted teeth. “Whatever you do, don’t cry.”
I knew if I opened my tear ducts, even ever so slightly, that it would be like opening a floodgate and I wasn’t about to break down in a bar bathroom while my estranged brother played music outside and the man that I was trying to get with stood around waiting for me.
No ma’am.
“You’re fine,” I said. “You’re better than fine, you’re great. Everything is great. Just go out there, and whatever you do,don’t cry.”
The door to the bathroom opened up and I saw Becca in the mirror walk inside. “Hey,” she said. “Are you okay?”