As I stared into space, waiting, a tall figure appeared around the corner across the street. I couldn’t make out colors or details outside my pool of light. He could have been a college student coming to my concert at the bar. He could have been anybody. The first thing I noticed about him that alarmed me—besides the fact that he’d been lurking in an empty lot—was that he stepped out into the street without looking both ways for traffic. Granted, there wasn’t any traffic and he wasn’t in danger, but most people would have looked all the same. And if he’d been headed for the bar, he probably would have walked down the sidewalk on his side of the street first before crossing. He wasn’t headed for the bar. He was headed for me.
I didn’t panic. Julie’s phone still rang in my ear, and there was a chance she’d pick up any second. As the figure drew closer, I could see that he was an older man, not a college student. He had a full beard. His clothes were shabby and looked way too warm for this hot night. He was homeless, maybe, but I had no way of knowing that. And even if he were, that didn’t automatically mean he was racing across the street to assault me. This is what I was thinking. I knew I ought to be alarmed and I also knew if I was alarmed I was making a lot of baseless assumptions.
Meanwhile, I should have felt a spike of adrenaline—he was coming closer, he was running now, he’d reached the center line in the street, I could see his face, his eyes on me—but I didn’t feel a thing, just watched him coming and thought this was how I would die.
“You’ve reached Julie Mayfield!” Julie’s voice mail chirped. “Shout out!”
As the man loomed in front of me, I still didn’t run. He would catch me. I just wanted to click my phone off before Julie’s voice mail beeped and recorded what happened next, so she wouldn’t have to listen to it. My thumb hit the button to end the call. The man entered the glow of the streetlight, his face dark with dirt and shining under sweat. I could smell him just before he reached out one hand to touch me.
“Back off!” Sam shouted, shouldering himself in front of me, knocking me so hard that I nearly dropped the phone. He was between me and the man now. Down by his side I saw the flash of a knife blade. I meant to cry out or pull him back to stop him, but the man had seen the knife. He backed into the street, again without looking, then spun around and ran.
Sam returned his knife to his pocket. Breathing like he’d dashed all the way here from the bar, he watched the man until his shadow disappeared behind a temporary wall around the new construction at the end of the street. I’d thought all day that Sam’s young face belied the old beard he was trying to grow, but at that moment, dark eyes narrowed against danger, he looked as world-weary and tough as Johnny Cash himself. He scanned the area, turning in a slow circle—something I hadn’t thought to do. If a second man had wanted to attack me from behind, I never would have seen him.
“Walk,” Sam barked, giving me a little shove on the small of my back. I started down the sidewalk in the direction he pushed me, toward the bar. Normally I would have protested being pushed around, but he still looked furious. As he walked beside me, he demanded, “What were you doing?”
“Making my phone call, like we discussed.”
“Did you have to walk to Georgia? You were calling your boyfriend, weren’t you?”
“My boyfriend?” I repeated, confused and disgusted at the thought of running out of a gig with Sam to convey some breathless secret message to Toby. “No.”
Sam was jealous. This registered with me on some level, blank as I felt.
But the next thing he said made me think he wasn’t jealous after all, only wary that I was manipulating him. “You called someone who you didn’t want to hear the music,” Sam insisted. “Someone you didn’t want to figure out where you are.”
“It was just my sister.” I caught the pointed toe of my boot on the broken sidewalk and tripped. Sam saved me from falling with a hand on my elbow. He held me for a few seconds while he looked over his shoulder again in the direction the man had gone.
Several minutes too late, the little good sense I usually possessed came rushing back. I began to realize how close we’d both come to tragedy. I squealed, “Were you going to knife that guy?”
“No,” Sam said firmly. “I was going to show him my knife and get you away from him. Which I did. Were you going to let him grab you?”
I didn’t know. Now that I had my wits back, I couldn’t quite puzzle out what I’d been thinking when the strange man stalked like a shadow into my bright circle.
“You were going to let him grab you,” Sam said incredulously. “Do you have some sort of death wish?” As we walked, he looked behind us, then to our right at the empty lots, then to the left across the street, ahead of us at the bar, and behind us again.
“Me!” I exclaimed. “He could have turned that knife around and used it on you. Why are you walking around with a concealed weapon, anyway? Is this neighborhood really that unsafe?”
“I didn’t expect you to walk a mile down a deserted road to make a phone call,” he said testily. Then, glancing sideways at me and looking almost sorry, he said, “I didn’t know it wasn’t safe. I think it would be safe if you hadn’t wandered in that direction alone.” When I glared back at him and didn’t give in, he sighed. “Okay.” He pulled his knife out of his pocket to show me. I drew back in surprise before I saw it was his shiny silver guitar slide covering his entire middle finger.
“Oh.” As relieved as I felt that he wasn’t actually brandishing a knife, my heart went out to him. When he’d seen that guy coming for me, he could have watched the shit go down and called 911. Instead, he came for me, armed only with sleight of hand. He might as well have threatened to slay a dragon with a banana. I was overwhelmed with warmth for him, and somehow unable to tell him so.
“Yeah, lame.” He examined the slide ruefully, turning his hand over to look at it from both sides. He deposited it back in his pocket. That was that, until somebody needed him to use a guitar pick to disarm a bomb.
I still wasn’t sure how he’d found me in the first place. “Were you watching me?” I asked.
“I just wanted to make sure you were okay.” He turned all the way around and walked backward beside me for a few steps, satisfying himself that the sidewalk was empty and the man wasn’t coming back. Then he put out one hand and touched my shoulder, stopping me. “Bailey. Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I said lightly. Maybe later I would think back over what had happened and feel the terror I knew I should have felt at the time. My heart had finally sped up, but only at Sam’s sudden appearance. That I hadn’t quite gotten over, and I was still panting shallowly. “Are you okay?”
He nodded, squeezing my shoulder. Then he seemed to shake the whole incident off, refocusing himself to sing.
“Do you need me to help you get in the mood?” I asked hopefully. I really wanted him to get me in the mood. I wanted my heart pounding for a different reason.
He didn’t bother to take off my glasses this time. He put both arms around me and pressed his mouth on mine, sweeping his tongue inside.
Initially surprised by the depth of the kiss, I recovered to meet him passion for passion, opening my lips for him.
As suddenly as it began, it was over. He let me go and took a shuddering breath.
I sidled forward and put my hand in the pocket of his jeans. Feeling warm as his eyes widened, I shoved my fingers as far down as they could reach into his tight jeans and fished out his guitar slide. I placed it on his middle finger and lifted his hand to my eye level so I could see my tiny, rounded reflection, then brought my lipstick out of my own pocket and reapplied it.
He laughed. “You have style, Bailey.”
“I ain’t nothing but class,” I agreed.
We waved to the bouncer and walked up the ramp again. Ace sat on one of the tiny stages with his legs hanging off the side. If I’d been sitting there—which I would not, because the stage was sticky—I would have been afraid of being crushed by the even larger crowd now. But Ace, while mild mannered, cut an imposing figure. Nobody would get close enough to him to crush him. Charlotte sat beside him, alternately cupping her hand over his ear, shouting above the throbbing music, and flashing the evil eye to girls who walked past them. Charlotte thought she should have not just one boy, not just the other boy, but all the boys. I hated to break it to her, but if girlfriend truly wanted to start a collection, she needed to do something about her hair.
They stood when they saw us. Sam stepped onto my stage and helped me up before grabbing his guitar and hat and returning to his place on the bar. We were clearly still messing around and tuning, and Sam took a moment to text us a playlist, but a cheer went up when the audience saw us. From my vantage point three feet above the floor, I spotted a white veil that hadn’t been part of the crowd before. In a white T-shirt with “Bride” bedazzled across her boobs was a girl flanked by a group of her friends wearing matching “Bridesmaid” shirts. To the bride’s left I spotted the girl who’d made the phone call outside the bar. The bride was very young and I had a fleeting wish that she wouldn’t settle for David, that she would wait for her Sam to come along.
But not my Sam. The girl was whispering in the bride’s ear as they both lifted their eyes to him.
And he was after me. “I’ve never tried to impress a girl with yodeling before,” he said into the mike.
“Nobody has,” Ace yelled across the aisle.
The people who’d been in the bar for our first set laughed at this exchange. The newcomers didn’t know what to make of it and tittered impatiently. Sam sized them up with one sweeping glance from wall to wall. “ ‘Long Gone Lonesome Blues,’ ” he murmured. He glanced back at Charlotte. The crowd’s whoop was cut off by the sudden two-step beat of the drums.
After the intro, I settled into my usual staccatos for the verses. But as he entered the chorus and started yodeling, I decided to stick with my short chords for that section, too. He didn’t need anyone competing with him, for one thing. And I wanted to hear him.
Sam’s Hank Williams imitation wasn’t so much of a yodel as a very controlled falsetto. I could tell he had practiced this. Depending on how early he got the idea to tap me for his band, he must have been punching the air and yelling Yes! internally when I mentioned Hank that afternoon, because he had this song ready. The fake Hank at the mall had been off-key. The real Hank had howled like a stray dog, which was his appeal. He was a poor boy from Montgomery who spent too many nights boozing on an Alabama lake, and he looked it. Sam’s voice was rich and full, a bad imitation but a great interpretation, and the crowd loved it. He nodded to me so I would take a solo. During the first few measures, I could hardly hear myself over the cheers for Sam.
I didn’t think, just let the bow flow over the strings to the rockabilly beat with a hint of funk, Hank’s original modernized by Ace and Charlotte. At the end of the solo I glanced down the body of my fiddle at Sam. He briefly took his finger off his strings and twirled it in the air: Go again. I kept fiddling. The crowd grinned up at me. On the second level in back, the Texas two-step had resumed. Sam twirled his finger with an offer of another solo. I moved my head shortly: No. The music was for the audience, not me, and they would get restless. I’d had my turn.
Because of Sam’s expert yodeling, the song ended with much louder applause than we’d gotten in the whole first set. But when his “Thank you, thank you” finally broke through the crowd noise, he added, “Miss Bailey Wright, ladies and gentlemen.” I felt the force of their cheers in my chest.
“Thank you,” I said into my own mike, grinning and taking it all in and not quite believing my luck. At the same time, “Miss Bailey Wright” echoed in the back of my mind. For the first time, I was glad my parents didn’t allow me to have social media accounts for fear of what I might post about Julie. If I had, and I’d had the poor foresight to label myself Bailey Wright Mayfield, these folks might have searched for me and found me and posted pictures of me on my own page for my parents and Julie’s public relations team to see. As it was, I was caught between feeling safe and exposed, between wanting the crowd’s praise and wishing I could squeeze into my fiddle case to hide.
Charlotte started the next song before I was ready, which broke me out of my downward spiral. We played country megahit after hit, interspersed with funk classics that I thought were strange choices until I saw how the crowd loved them. Sam motioned for me to pass around the tip jar earlier in the set this time. He’d been right: while I pasted a confident smile on my face, which was so much easier wearing makeup and a dress that felt like a costume, nobody treated me disrespectfully, not even the drunks. And the bridesmaids tipped great, twenty upon twenty tumbling into the jar.
Back onstage and about ten songs in, I thought we must be nearing the end of our night. I didn’t want to stop. Sensing my sadness, maybe, or reacting to his own, Sam announced a slow song that hadn’t been on the playlist, then looked pointedly at Charlotte and Ace to make sure they’d heard him. He looked at me.
From under the shadow of his cowboy hat, his dark eyes lingered on me a little too long for this to be a signal between band-mates. He was asking me if I was having the best night of my life.
I mouthed, “Yes.”
He glanced at Charlotte, who launched the ballad. If yodeling had been an obstacle course for Sam’s voice, the ballad was his weight-lifting competition, just him and the song with his every weakness exposed. But he had a strong voice, a little husky, a voice anybody could pick out on the radio and say, “That’s a Sam Hardiman song.” He might need me to get attention for his band, but he didn’t need anybody if he ever wanted to get voice work for himself. I bent my chin to my fiddle and enjoyed the last few minutes as the set closed down. My bow stroked the strings and sent the rough vibration through my body. Sam’s voice filled my ears.