I shut off the water as an idea strikes, my stage mascara still running down my cheeks as I replay his words a few more times.
That’s it. That’s how I show up for Josh: we tag in our grownups.
I’mupwiththedawn the next morning, hoping that Grampa Jim is an early riser like most of the Sunnyside residents. He’d made sure I had his number before he sent me off on Wednesday with a promise to call him if I had any trouble on the icy roads.
The phone rings, two times, three times, and I’m about to hang up and try back at a more normal hour when he answers. “Hello?”
“Grampa Jim? It’s Sami.”
“Sami-girl, everything okay?”
“Okay with the possibility of greatness. I’ve hatched a plan.”
He gives a chuckle, and I imagine him moving toward the edge of his seat. “All right, then. Let’s hear it.”
I lay it all out for him, then ask, “What do you think?” His job is to get his son and daughter-in-law to Pixie Luna’s festival stage performance. I’ll get my mom there. In both of these scenarios, the grandparents involved will be more than happy to apply any and all emotional blackmail to make it happen.
Once they get our parents there, the rest is up to me and my band. We’ll deliver a show that makes them all believers. We have to. My mom needs to know that this isn’t a long shot. And Steve and Elizabeth Brower need to know that Josh has chosen someone who is excelling in her field, even if that field is music, not law or even nursing.
If they see for themselves that Josh isn’t going back to his party boy ways, that he’s still putting in the time at work, that he’s still demonstrating excellence, that he’s still showing up for family stuff, that he’s not choosing me over them . . . maybe they’ll believe.
And in case that’s not enough, I’m going to engineer a way for them—especially Mr. Brower—to see how much Josh is learning about the legal side of my industry. Then maybe, just maybe . . .
I don’t even want to articulate it in case I jinx it.
“You’re hanging an awful lot on a single performance,” Grampa Jim says. “You sure you want to take that on?”
Not at all. But it’s the only plan I’ve got.
The next two weeks are basically my training montage. This is the part of the movie where every hour I’m not at work, I’m at rehearsal. We’re practicing not until we get it right but until we can’t get it wrong. We have four shows before Southwest Fest, and we go harder for each one.
Josh and I touch base when we can over more bowls of cereal, tired Saturday mornings while we binge shows that don’t require anything from us; there are a lot of very average sitcoms in rotation.
That’s not to say things between us have cooled. The boy can melt me with a look, and it takes nothing at all for him to send me up in flames. The graze of his hand against my back. The touch of his fingertip trailing over my cheek. Maybe that’s why I keep us in my living room so much; it’s a safety zone, and I need things between us to go slowly while everything else in my life is moving at warp speed.
Even if all those touches and looks and long, hot kisses before we separate are driving me fricking crazy. It’s the best kind of crazy. Melt-your-bones crazy. Tie-your-stomach-in-knots crazy.
The closer Southwest Fest gets, the more nervous I get. We’ve got one last show to practice, the Tuesday before the festival, a midsize venue with an audience of about two hundred. When we take the stage, I smile out at the crowd, recognizing faces.
It’s not just Josh or even Ruby, who has brought Charlie because Niles finds our shows “loud.” It’s the faces of people who have made a point of coming out for Pixie Luna for weeks, who have found us over the last few months, and now our shirts dot the crowd as they roar to greet us. Togreetus. We’ve won crowds over by the end of a set, but now they roar in anticipation.
Like we have at every performance for weeks, we open up another artistic vein and let it all flow, pouring everything we have into it. This? Is magic. It gets better every time. I sing “Dumb Boy” for Ruby and hope she knows that’s who Niles is, “Treat You Right,” a song that’s gotten better every time we do it because it’s become more and more about Josh and no longer a hopeless plea like it was when I’d written it about trying to keep Bryce.
We tear through the rest of our songs, ending on “Here For It,” a love letter to every fan in the audience, reminding them of what they deserve.
When we finish, they arewild. We wave and laugh and finally leave the stage, but the club manager meets us in the wings. We can barely hear him over the screams as he shakes his head and points to the stage, saying, “Encore.”
Luther and I grin at each other. Jules and Wingnut fist-bump. We all turn to look at Rodney, who says, “Bad Reputation”? It’s one of our favorite covers, a Joan Jett and the Blackhearts song that we do for fun in the band, and we run back out, slip into our places, and grin at each other as the screams surge with the opening notes.
This time when we leave the stage, the manager smiles at us. “I’m glad I knew y’all when,” he says with a wink, then he heads back to the club floor. We were the last act of the night, and it feels amazing to send people home on that kind of high.
Josh is waiting when we step backstage, and I fly right into his arms. We’re all so busy high-fiving and congratulating each other that it takes a few minutes before I realize there’s a man waiting for an opening, leaning against the wall like he’s been there for a while. I recognize him. It’s the A&R guy—Jonny?—from Big Time and he’s got a woman with him. She’s dressed right for the club, but something about her screams authority.
Maybe it’s the expensive haircut or her perfect makeup application, but it doesn’t surprise me when I tell him hello and he steps forward to introduce me to Marisol Navarro, the president of the label.
“Nice to meet you,” I say, shaking her hand.
“Incredible show,” she says. “I was wondering if we could head over to the Driskill Hotel bar to talk.”
