Thankfully, no matter how strong the urge to lose my cool, I stuck with my usual MO—a calm and clearheaded approach.
“Could you please stop playing for a second?” I questioned, making my voice the loudest it had ever been in the middle of a restaurant.
“What was that, sir?” he called toward me, his voice even louder than mine.
Jesus Christ.
“Stop playing!”
“Stop playing?” he repeated while he, in fact, kept playing.
“Yes! Stop playing the fucking music!” I shouted, bringing Armando, his brothers, and the monkeys to a screeching halt, and the eyes of every patron over to me.
I breathed a sigh of relief, no matter the sour reception from everyone around us at my uncouth yell.
“Listen, Armando,” I said, my voice much quieter now as I gestured for him to come closer to the table. He did. “Who arranged this…lovely music for us?”
Armando simpered. “I wish I could tell you, Mr. Brooks, but we signed a contractandan NDA when we agreed to play for you and Mrs. Brooks this weekend. Both explicitly stated that we wouldn’t reveal who hired us.”
A fucking NDA?
That was it. I was convinced.Thatch was definitely behind this, the fucker.I was going to make him wish he’d never been born.
“Armando,” I began, my voice as diplomatic as humanly possible for a man whose brain, right at that very moment, was plotting a gruesome murder. “While we’ve loved every minute of your music today, I can assure you that Mrs. Brooks and I do not need you to follow us around any longer.” If they did this all weekend, I would drown myself in the ocean and take Georgia with me—obviously, as a sympathy killing.
“Oh, but we do, sir,” Armando refuted. “Like I said earlier, we signed a contract and an NDA.”
“Don’t worry about those,” I assured. “I’ll make sure you’re not held to them.”
He grinned at that. “I was told you’d say that.”
“Let me guess,” I said, laying my cards out on the table. “A man by the name of Thatcher Kelly is behind all this?”
His grin only grew. “Good try, Mr. Brooks, but I cannot divulge—”
“Listen, Armando, we truly enjoyed the music,” I lied, because let’s face it, it was one thing to love mariachi music, but it was another thing to be stalked by an actual band. My fucking eardrums were already ringing, and it had been only a little over an hour or so since they showed up at our door. “But you don’t need to stick with us any longer. Consider your talented job completed.”
He started to open his mouth to refuse again, but I cut him off at the pass. I was done with Thatch’s bullshit, plain and simple. I didn’t care if it cost me a million fucking dollars to call it all off, this would be the end of it.
“Mr. Brooks, my brothers and I cannot back out of our agreement. That would be like getting paid but not doing our job.”
I looked across the table at my wife, who was now feeding the rest of her pancakes to Bobo Buttons and Mr. Boots, and a tiny part of my brain exploded. I was going to call that big giant on his bullshit right now.
I grabbed my cell phone out of my pocket, scrolled into my messages with Thatch, and found three unread bubbles in the thread. I’d forgotten I’d set his contact to Do Not Disturb at the office and never turned it back.
Right there, in the messages he’d sent me after I’d hung on him, was the proof that I wasn’t completely out of line. I read through them one by one, my anger growing with each successive text.
Thatch: Talk about being disrespectful, bro. Hanging up on me without warning? Not cool.
Thatch: I’m just trying to help. Trying to salvage your marriage before you shoot it into the dumpster like a flaming arrow.
Thatch: Ignoring me still? You’re lucky I love you so much. If I didn’t, I’d let you dig your own hole with your bomb-ass wife, and you’d be divorced by the end of the year. Not to worry, though. I’ll make sure Georgia girl hangs around until your balls are saggy little prunes.
“Kline?” Georgia asked, handing a piece of pancake to Mr. Boots and glancing nervously between Armando and me. I held up a single pointer finger, hit send on a call to the only person who could be behind this fucking circus, and took a deep breath as Georgia turned worried eyes to her monkey friends.
It rang.
And rang.