“I just meant that people might relate to you better if you came across a little humbler.”
He’d looked over at her sitting in the passenger seat. “Humble? The way you’re humble when you’re strutting around onstage under a spotlight?”
“That’s different,” she said. “The crowd is there to see a performance.”
“It’s not that different, Layla.”
“Yes, it is.” It wasn’t like she went around telling people how good she was. She performed and then she left it up to them to decide. “All I’m saying is that they’ll like you anyway, regardless of your accomplishments.”
But would they? She and Liam didn’t get together with Christine and Noelle and their husbands anymore. They had at first, but lately her friends always seemed to be busy when she tried to make plans. It wasn’t until much later that Layla could look back on that time through a different lens and realize that Liam was off-putting to a lot of people.
Liam did not propose to her in the Seychelles. He proposed to her in the airport as they were waiting to board their first flight. He actually raised his voice and asked the gate attendants if there was any way to delay boarding for just a couple of seconds because he had a question he needed to ask his girlfriend first. Everyone looked at him like he was annoying and delusional, but the question was all part of the performance. He asked again, loudly, and this time he caught the attention of the passengers clustered around the gate waiting to board. Then he took a knee right then and there and he whipped out a ring so big Layla felt certain she’d be mugged on the street while wearing it. The passengers cheered when he laid a big kiss on her after she said yes, and even the gate attendants smiled at him like okay, you got us good. The doors opened, everyone boarded, and Layla and Liam drank champagne in first class all the way to the Seychelles.
Despite Layla’s ease at being onstage in front of a crowd, she would have preferred a proposal that was a bit more intimate and private. But she accepted the well-wishes of the first-class passengers who had observed the spectacle with a genuine smile on her face, and the Seychelles really was a breathtaking place to visit.
* * *
Layla put on her coat and picked up her bag of guitar strings. “Thanks again for staying late and for reminding me how much I love playing with other musicians.”
“You’re welcome. See you soon, Layla. Remember, you’re my best customer.”
Layla laughed and Brian unlocked the door. As she drove home, she felt a little like maybe the roller coaster had started chugging its way back up the hill again.
chapter 23
Josh
Josh took care of the dishes and the laundry. The weather forecast was calling for snow, so he made sure the snowblower was ready to go and he filled up the gas can and stashed it in the garage. He went to the hardware store for salt and emptied it into a five-gallon bucket and then sprinkled it on the front steps and sidewalks. He made potato soup, which really meant opening a packet and pouring the contents into a pot once the water started to boil. At four o’clock he ran out of things to do, so he sat down on the couch and turned on the TV, even though the football game wouldn’t start for a few more hours. He might not have been interested in playing sports when he was younger, but he’d always enjoyed watching them, especially with his brothers.
The house was far too quiet without his daughter in it. Kimmy had called, and when she put Sasha on the phone she told Josh she was having a great time at the Mall of America. They’d already gone to the American Girl store and were headed to the amusement park to ride the carousel.
The last time they’d visited the mall, they’d gone as a family. But now vacations would be of the double variety, much like movies and Santa’s visit, which had gone okay and was probably aided in part by the double number of presents. Sasha was with Kimmy on Christmas Eve, and then he’d picked her up on Christmas Day and they’d gone to his parents’ house. He’d asked Kimmy if she wanted to join them, because no matter how he felt about the fracture of their relationship, he had a hard time picturing her sitting alone in her condo on Christmas Day. “I’ve got plans with Angie and her husband. They’ve invited me over to her parents’ house. I told her she didn’t have to invite me to everything, but she said it’s very casual, more of a drop-in kind of thing. But thanks, Josh.”
“Sure.”
I’m your family now, he’d said to her once. But that wasn’t true anymore, and family was something Kimmy had never really had much of in the first place.
* * *
It had been two years since their backyard wedding, and neither Josh nor Kimmy had much to show for what they’d been doing during all that time. They partied with their friends and kept working the menial jobs they’d settled into. Josh’s concrete-pouring job had a lot of downtime, because there wasn’t as much work in the colder months, and Kimmy was still working in retail. His parents were frustrated with his lack of ambition, but he’d never once asked them for help, so there wasn’t much they could say.
The start of 2002 was especially tough. Josh was all but laid off for almost eight weeks, and Kimmy’s shifts had dwindled to less than twenty-five hours per week, because the company she worked for had suffered a decline in their overall sales and was in danger of going under.
There was nothing to do that bleak dark winter but stay inside and party. Most weekend mornings, Josh and Kimmy would walk into their living room and be greeted by the sight of empty beer cans and at least one of their friends asleep on the couch.
They threw an epic party for St. Patrick’s Day despite neither of them having any claim to an Irish heritage. They started early, and by six o’clock that night very few of the people crammed into their tiny living room were sober. One of their friends had gotten ahold of a bottle of absinthe and brought it to the party because it was green, and that decision would change the trajectory of both Josh’s and Kimmy’s lives.
“This is supposed to make you hallucinate,” someone said.
“Nah, not really,” someone countered. “But this will fuck you up, no doubt.”
They all tried some. Josh seldom deviated from beer, but Kimmy didn’t really like the taste and often drank the higher-octane cocktails, the brighter-colored, the better.