Say Goodbye Read online

  The answer was that it sounded good. Still jazzy, yet anchored by a rhythm guitar on 2 on 4. Still her song, only now a complete thought, with an edge to the words. And he’d used the B7 instead of the F on all but the last line of each verse.

  “Works, doesn’t it?” he said.

  “I can’t believe you’re really this good,” she said, hung up between her renewed pleasure in the song and her annoyance that she hadn’t found it on her own. “I think you’re just lucky. I think sooner or later your luck is going to run out.”

  “Sweetie,” Skip said, “if I was lucky, I wouldn’t be in a garage in Whittier.”

  “Untrue,” Laurie said. “If you weren’t lucky, you’d be in a garage in Whittier with somebody besides us.” Gabe and Jim whistled and applauded quietly.

  She strummed idly through the chords again. They not only sounded better, she liked the way they made her hands feel. “This is so amazing,” she said. “I can’t believe you did this in fifteen minutes.”

  Skip uncoiled a slow, cocky smile. “I’m a fast worker.”

  For an instant it seemed to slip her mind that she and Skip were not alone in the garage. Since the night they’d first met, Skip had been pulling rugs out from under her—flirtatious, then hostile, then indifferent, running hot, cold, and lukewarm—and she’d begun to suspect it was deliberate. She had no choice but to call his bluff, or at least that was what she tried to tell herself later, after she had looked straight at him and said, “You couldn’t prove it by me.”

  He flinched first, glancing down at his guitar and saying, “Maybe we could roll a little tape on this one?” in a cramped voice.

  Jim attended to the tape deck and Laurie faced the wall, feeling the flush burn across her face. What in God’s name had she been thinking, swapping high-school double-entendres with a man the same age as her father? At least, she thought, the tape hadn’t been running, but when she was finally able to look around again, she saw that Gabe was not laughing at her but in fact looked sad and scared, and she saw that this, in the words of her sixth grade teacher, was going to go on her permanent record.

  They practiced again Friday. Laurie taught the band her favorite of Summer’s songs, “Tried and True,” and one of her own stalwarts, “September 19th,” a song she’d written in the gloom of her 18th birthday. Skip was dressed in new jeans and a tattersall shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, pacing while he played, conducting with the neck of his guitar, drinking a lot of beer but actually seeming to enjoy it for once. It was drizzling outside and the garage was warm and dry and no one seemed to want to leave it.

  “We could play through what we know,” Jim said.

  Laurie nodded. “Or…”

  “Or what?” Skip said. She’d been feeling his glances all night.

  “Or we could do that Tim Hardin song.”

  He smiled privately, as if he’d seen this coming. “Okay. I’ll write the words out for you.”

  “Okay. Or…”

  “Or what?”

  “Or we could try singing it together? Like a duet?”

  “Shit. For a minute I thought you were going to let me sing the whole thing.”

  “Do you want to?”

  Laurie saw that she had successfully called his bluff again. “Nah,” he said at last. “You’re Laurie Moss. I’m just a Mossquito.”

  They worked out the arrangement as he showed her the words. It seemed to fall naturally into place: they began alternating verses, then lines, then sang the chorus together. After a couple of false starts they pushed on through, watching each other intently, finding themselves at the end trading the title line back and forth, slightly overlapping each other, each time changing the feel: accusation, admission, promise, acceptance.

  When they were finished Laurie could not manage to get her breath.

  “Once more?” Jim said.

  Skip was looking at Laurie. “No,” he said. “I think we got it.”

  In unspoken agreement they began to wipe down guitar necks and unplug patch cords. Laurie had the Duck the next night and Gabe had a gig in San Diego. They all agreed to the following Monday and Laurie walked out the door with Skip close behind her. She couldn’t remember the two of them ever leaving at the same time before. The rain had stopped and the air was cool and sweet with the scent of something flowering. She was acutely conscious of the movement of her hips and thighs as she walked, feeling gangly as a heron.

  She set her guitar and amp by the trunk and turned toward Skip as he passed. “ ’Night,” she said.

  He seemed to slow just long enough to smile at her. Not unaffectionate, she thought, but a trifle condescending. And then he passed her and got into his Mustang and drove away with a guttural roar.

  Sunday morning

  Though things had gone well enough at the Duck, Laurie still woke with a sense of foreboding. She had promised herself she would get the Sunday Times early and call the likeliest ten jobs, and instead she lay for another two hours with the covers over her head.

  Her life in San Antonio had not prepared her for the intensity of the Southern California spring, a continuous ambush of brilliant color and delicate perfume. It was a day to stay in bed, preferably not alone. It was not a day for financial responsibility, even if her rent was now two weeks overdue and she’d given up hope of ever being able to pay it. Still, a deal was a deal, and the price for breaking a promise to herself was guilt, depression, recrimination, then a little more guilt for good measure.

  She put on her ugliest clothes to teach somebody—she was not quite sure who—a lesson: oversized sweatshirt, jeans that had suffered a Clorox accident, Docs. She tied her hair into a loose ponytail and drove down to the market at the bottom of the hill for a paper, a cup of bad coffee to go, and a blueberry muffin.

  She spread the paper out across the dining room table and started on the Classifieds while she ate. She wanted three things: part time work, because she was making some money already with Summer; an afternoon shift, so she could sleep in after a late night in Whittier; a decent place, so the tips would actually signify. These did not seem like impossible conditions to her, but then she had not had her compassion surgically removed so that she could become the manager of a restaurant and treat all staff, past, present, and potential, like an ancient, tedious aunt that she hoped would die soon.

  She started her own pot of coffee and made her ten phone calls, from which she gleaned one unlikely interview the next day in Pasadena. Then she pushed the phone away and pillowed her head on her folded arms. How had she gotten to the point of complete financial disaster? What would be the end point of this metamorphosis? She’d developed weird habits from living alone too long, like snacking on cold leftover Kraft Macaroni and Cheese at all hours, and leaving her underwear to dry in the dish drainer next to the sink. She’d come to structure her days around the back-to-back Brady Bunch episodes every weekday at noon.

  Worst of all, she’d begun to ponder the metaphorical dessert cart, and more and more it was Skip she saw bringing it around.

  When the knock came, however, her first irrational thought was that it was the landlady, possibly with the police. It wasn’t until she looked through the peephole and felt her knees weaken at the sight of Skip leaning against the door jamb that reality collided with fantasy and completely uncoupled her train of thought.

  It was entirely too late to repair her wardrobe. She could only open the door and stare at the bright yellow Tower records bag in his right hand.

  “I found a CD with all the really good Tim Hardin stuff on it,” he said with a nervous smile. “Only I don’t have a CD player.”

  “Come in,” she said, slipping into autonomic hostess mode as she tried to remember if there was anything he shouldn’t see in the dish drainer. She backed into the living room, reflexively grabbing clothes off the furniture as she went. “Sit down.”

  “I should probably go,” he said unconvincingly. “Maybe this is a bad idea.”

  “No,” sh
e said. “No, it’s great. Want some coffee?”

  “Please. Three sugars.”

  As she snatched a pair of errant panties and stuck them in a cupboard above the kitchen sink, she could hear Skip pace the living room. His boots seemed to stake a claim to everything they touched. Her heart pounded and the smallest tasks—finding a spoon, say—confounded her. “I like this place,” she heard him say. “Kind of early Swiss Family Robinson. You probably never heard of them.”

  “The Disney version’s on video,” she said. She brought him a cup with a Boynton kitten on it.

  “Thanks,” he said. “How bad would it piss you off if I smoked?”

  “I’ll risk it,” she said, and gave him the brown clay ashtray that had come with the place, made in summer camp by some stranger’s child before she was born. Her hand didn’t touch Skip’s, not then and not when he handed her the CD, but she knew within a millimeter exactly how close she’d come.

  The first song was “Don’t Make Promises,” faster than Skip played it, deadpan except for the cracks in Hardin’s voice. She stood at the mantel in front of the boom box and looked at the pictures of Hardin in the booklet: receding hair, rumpled shirt, halfway between a wino and a class clown.

  “You could turn it up a little,” Skip said. “If you don’t mind.” He’d slumped on the couch, eyes closed, and he hadn’t actually lit a cigarette, though he’d set the pack and a book of matches next to the ashtray. He’d made himself so thoroughly at home, and made her feel so taken for granted, that she hovered on the verge of annoyance.

  “What’s that?” she asked. “Marimbas or something?”

  “Vibes,” Skip said without opening his eyes. “Tim wanted to be a jazzman, so he had vibes on a lot of his stuff. Gary Burton, mostly.” He opened one eye to check her lack of reaction. “Gary was hot shit later in the sixties. Why don’t you sit down and listen?”

  She perched on the farthest edge of the couch from him, tired of the emotional hoops he had her jumping through, more tired still of the calm amusement with which he did it. She waited through a couple of songs and then said, “Tell me what happened to your daughter.”

  He sighed and took out a cigarette and turned it over and over in his fingers. “I wasn’t driving, thank God. But it amounts to the same thing. It was twenty-five years ago, fall of 1972. I was living in San Francisco, married to a woman named Carol. Everybody called her CC, like in ‘CC Rider.’ I was drunk and laying in the back seat and I started to throw up. It had been a long, long day and we were coming back from a party and CC wigged. I mean, she lost it. She turned around and started hitting me when she should have been driving. Our little girl, SueAnn, was lying on the front seat in a blanket, two years old—they didn’t have all those laws about car seats for kids back then. And CC rear-ended an eighteen-wheeler.”

  He finally lit the cigarette. “You got anything stronger than coffee?”

  She brought him a glass of wine and watched his Adam’s apple move as he drank half of it. Then he wiped his mouth on his sleeve and said, “SueAnn went through the windshield. The driver door came off and CC got thrown. I was sealed up in the wreck for four hours, they tell me. They had to use acetylene torches to cut me out. I never heard a thing. I wasn’t bad hurt—that was the booze, it really shows you how to roll with the punches—but there was this noise like a waterfall in my head, so loud I couldn’t hear anything else. It started to fade after a few days, and it took six months to go away completely. It was a mercy, really. Otherwise I would have had to listen to my own thoughts.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Hell, it surely wasn’t your fault.”

  “I mean I’m sorry I brought it up. Made you talk about it.”

  “I can talk about it or not. After a couple of years it got to where I could go on living with it, but it’s never going to go away. It’s not like I ever forget it happened.”

  He emptied his glass, and as she reached to refill it a new song came on, sad major-seventh chords on a piano, and she saw it hit Skip between the eyes. It was called “It’ll Never Happen Again,” and like most of the others it was only a couple of minutes long. She waited it out, and poured more wine, and then said, “What do you think of when you hear that song?” From where she was sitting, with one arm along the back of the couch, her left hand was very close to the warmth of his neck.

  “It’s not like that,” he said slowly. “There’s not one specific memory. It’s more the sound of his voice, the mood of the words. He’s got a song he wrote to Hank Williams where he says, ‘I never knew you, but I’ve been to places you’ve been.’ And I did know Tim, a little, but it’s the same thing. I’ve been to places he’s been.”

  He looked over at her with a look that seemed destined to end in a kiss. She was self-conscious, curious, scared, and terribly impatient, all at once, and she knew that she’d crossed the line into inevitability minutes, if not days, before.

  The phone rang.

  Skip was the first to look away. “Don’t you need to get that?”

  “It’s probably my mother,” she said. “We always talk on Sunday. I can call her later.”

  The ringing seemed to put Skip on edge. He knocked back the last of the wine, took a last drag off his cigarette before crushing it out. The answering machine clicked on and a voice said, “Laurie, it’s Gabe. If you’re there, pick up, will you?”

  Something in Skip’s look make her pick up the phone. “Is Skip there?” Gabe said.

  “What?”

  “Don’t play coy with me, Laurie, is he there or not?”

  “Yeah, he’s here.”

  “Put him on, will you?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Just put him on. Please?”

  She held the receiver out toward Skip, who looked as guilty as a dog caught with its head in the kitchen trash. He got up and took the phone and said “Yeah,” listened for a while, then said “Yeah, okay,” and hung up.

  “I got to go,” he said to Laurie.

  “What’s going on? How did he know you were here?”

  “I didn’t know where you lived. I had to ask somebody.”

  “Well, what did he want?”

  “He…reminded me of something I have to do.”

  “This is all way too mysterious for my taste.”

  “It’s no mystery, Laurie.” She couldn’t remember him ever actually using her name before. She loved the sound of it in his mouth. It was like a caress. “I got to go,” he said again.

  She followed him to the door, befuddled, unable to think of what to say, either to make him stay or to make him explain himself or both. “Your CD,” she suddenly remembered.

  “You might as well hang on to it,” he said. “I got nothing to play it on.”

  “But—”

  He touched one finger to her lips. It sent a wave of heat all the way down to her ankles. She reached up and took his right hand in her left and kissed it, just behind the thumb.

  “You got to stop that now,” he said. He didn’t take the hand away. She took one more step toward him and he backed quickly out the door. “I’ll see you,” he said. “Tomorrow night.”

  She had to hold on to the door frame to keep her balance. Skip hesitated as he opened the door of his Mustang, looked at her but didn’t speak or wave, then got in and drove away.

  She slammed the door and dialed Gabe’s number. “What the hell was all that about?” she said.

  “Down, girl. I just reminded him of something he had to do.”

  “That’s what he said. So what was it he had to do?”

  When Gabe didn’t answer she felt her muddled emotions snap into focus. “You’re treating me like a little kid, and that really sucks, Gabe.”

  “Yeah, okay, you’re right. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  She was listening to a dial tone. She slammed the phone down and furiously cleaned the apartment until Gabe arrived.

  “So what was it you had to reminded him about?”
she said to him at the door.

  “Hi, Laurie, it’s nice to see you too. Come in? Why yes, I’d love to.”

  He sat on the couch where Skip had been and put a brown clasp envelope on the coffee table. “Something to drink? Why, yes, that’d be lovely. What do you have?”

  She stood in front of him with her arms folded across her chest. “What did you remind him about?”

  Gabe sighed. “I reminded him not to break up the band by screwing the lead singer.”

  “Whoa,” she said. “Back up. Start at the beginning. Remind me when I appointed you my nursemaid. Convince me this is any of your business.”

  “I never wanted to be in somebody’s band before. Part of what makes this different is your songs and part of it is this thing between you and Skip, that tension. If you two get in bed together you’re going to end up not talking to each other and it’s going to screw everything up. If you’re lonely, need a boyfriend, I can sympathize. But not Skip. For God’s sake, not Skip.”

  “Because he’s in the band?” She looked at the manila envelope. “Or is there something else you’re not telling me?”

  Gabe seemed to lose his momentum. He picked up the newly-cleaned clay ashtray and turned it over in his hands. “Did you make this yourself?”

  Laurie grabbed it away from him. “Talk to me, Gabe.”

  “Did Skip tell you any stories while he was here? About his deal with Warner, maybe?”

  “No, what about it?”

  “Later. Did he mention his daughter?”

  “He said she died in a car wreck in San Francisco. His wife was driving and he was throwing up in the back seat.”

  “Interesting,” Gabe said.

  “Is that all you can say? ‘Interesting’?”

  “It’s just, it’s a story he likes to tell a lot. When he told it to me, it was set in New York City. His wife had just left him and taken Janey with her.”