The quick bleat of my VW Bug’s pitiful horn sounds as Danny pulls in.

“One sec. I gotta go out and give Danny a hand,” I tell my dad, grateful for the interruption. I need an extra second to brace myself for whatever he has to say, especially since it’s almost certainly news about my band. It’s the most important thing left in my life, and after losing Andy, and then Granna, I’m full up on bad news for the year.

I swing through the door and jog down the sidewalk toward the driveway. Danny grins up at me, sun glinting off his retro sunglasses, and his black hair in nearly atomic disarray from the wind. I laugh when I realize he took the top down on my convertible for the five-minute drive to the coffee shop.

“Apparently, my father’s dirty mind never quits,” I say when I get close enough. “I had to set him straight about us. Again.”

“Ah, really? I kind of love freaking him out with the idea of my dirty, tattooed hands all over his precious only daughter.” Danny passes me the two coffees from the cup holders, retrieving the last cup from where it was propped between his thighs.

“He’s more hopeful than freaked out. He’s worshipped you since the day you outplayed Bear.”

“Hank likes me. But I only outplayed his band’s old bassist.” Danny bumps the car door closed with his ass. “If I could show him up on the guitar, he’d hand over his wife with full blessings. When we auditioned Jax and he opened with that crazy fast solo, I swear I caught Hank drafting your betrothal contract on the back of a Safeway receipt.”

“Still, I’m fairly sure chlamydia is not in the future he envisions for me, so Jax is out.”

Danny takes a sip of his tea and gives me an uninflected look that somehow manages to make me feel catty as hell. “Jax always flies safe.”

I turn back to the house. “Please don’t enlighten me as to how you know that.” If Danny’s decided to tag along during our lead singer’s legendary sexcapades, I’d rather not hear about it.

I try to juggle the cups and turn the doorknob at the same time, and Danny takes one from me just as it begins to spill. “Jax is a good guy,” he insists.

“I know that.” I duck inside. “I spend more time with him than most wives spend with their husbands.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think you—”

“Large latte!” I put on a smile to smooth my interruption as I nod to Danny to pass over the drink. Whatever he was about to say about Jax, it is almost certainly not something I want to discuss in front of Dad.

Danny swipes his face against his shoulder to push his sunglasses up onto the top of his head, then passes a cup to Dad.

I reach over to straighten the sunglasses on Danny’s head, mouthing, “Later,” so he knows I’m not just being an asshole and cutting him off from whatever he wanted to tell me about Jax. He shrugs and takes a seat on the couch.

“So, is the news a gig?” I ask, trying to be positive. “Is it at The Basement again?”

I can’t quite meet my dad’s eyes, because I don’t want to look ungrateful, but The Red Letters have been playing the same three crappy dive bars forever. At some point you cross the line between working your way up, and realizing for you, there is no up because you’re only Dive Bar Good. My band is getting perilously close to that line.

“I mean, it’s a decent-sized venue. It’s just...”

“That every breath you take for the next three weeks tastes like stale Keystone Ice?” Dad pops the top off his coffee to blow across its surface. “Trust me, I know. Their ventilation system probably hasn’t been updated in twenty years.”

I pick at the lid to my latte. Why does he have to remind me that his band played all the same venues first? I already know the staff at The Basement remembers him, that they’re comparing The Red Letters to The Heat every time we perform.

He takes a sip and winces when he burns his tongue. “You know, while I’ve got you two here, I really think we should talk about hiring a keyboardist to lay in a track or two for the new album.”

“For the last time, we do not need a freaking keyb—” I pause, squinting at him. “You’re stalling. What’s going on?”

His eyes twinkle above his coffee. “Well, it just so happens your poor old dad scraped up a gig for you. At a little music festival I like to call Things That Go Bump In The Night.”

I shriek.

I’m not proud of that reaction, but at this moment, I am not dignified either. As clearly evidenced by the caffeinated-koala impression I proceed to execute, leaping on my dad as he laughs and swings me around the living room and doesn’t say a blessed thing about the chiropractic bills I probably just cost him.

When he sets me down, I run both palms over my totally numb cheeks, and then my hair.

“As an opener, right?” I ask him, eyes huge. “Or one of the side stages, maybe?”

“An opener...” He taps a finger to his lips, pretending to consider. “If you consider being the top billed band for the pub crawl an opener, then yes.”

Danny’s still sitting down but nodding...and nodding, his smile growing with every second.

Bump In The Night is the biggest off-season music festival in the Pacific Northwest, and while playing as an opener on the main stage might be a bigger crowd, the pub crawl bars are more intimate venues. That means it’s easier to get the audience stirred up, and if we do that, we can draw in the crowds passing on their way to the other bars. Including, hopefully, the record label scouts who swarm to this festival.

I grab Dad and press a near-assaultive kiss into his cheek. “You’re a band-management genius. I have to call Jax. He’s going to tattoo your name on his ass when he hears this.”

Dad laughs as I pull out my phone and speed dial. I bounce on my toes, grinning over at Danny, but it goes straight to our bandmate’s voicemail.

“Jackson freaking Sterling!” I yelp into the phone. “The sky is falling, the birds are singing, and I have the best damn news of your life. Call me. Call me, call me, call me!” I hang up.

Dad, still smiling, glances toward the door. “I should head back to the office. I was showing a house to a client a few blocks down and I wanted to see your reaction in person.”

Danny jerks to his feet, holding out a hand. “Thanks. Uh, thank you.” He pumps Dad’s hand a few too many enthusiastic times, and I can’t hold back a snicker.

“I’ll call you tonight and we’ll talk details.” Dad goes to let himself out.

Danny looks at me, blinking like he’s still trying to process what just happened. I shake my head, grinning hard enough for both of us. “Holy shit.”

My best friend chuckles, the sound a little lightheaded. “Hey, breaking a mirror is supposed to be seven years of bad luck. Maybe breaking a picture window is the opposite.”

Reminded with a jolt, I reach in my back pocket and yank out the envelope, eyeing it with even more nerves than the first time I saw it. There’s no way it contains anything good. Dad’s news probably just ate up my next decade’s share of good karma. I need to go cure some hamsters of AIDS or something to stock back up.

“And the Oscar goes to...” Danny prompts as I continue to stare at the envelope clutched in my fingers.

There’s a bounding, sparkling sensation deep in my belly that has nothing to do with our upcoming show and everything to do with knowing this envelope came from Jake Tate’s house. Maybe even from his bedroom. And I’m officially not thinking about that.

I rip open the envelope. Instead of notebook paper, there are bills inside. I leaf past them, but there’s not even a scrap of paper on which a note could be written. Okay, well, money’s good, too. I guess.

Danny retrieves my notebook out of my backpack and flips from the back until he finds the lyrics and chord notations on the last used pages. 

I count the money. Thirty-seven dollars.

What the hell? Not enough to pay for the window but not a nice round number for a payment against the full amount. What is the significance of the extra two dollars? Emotional damages? Rental fee for use of my hammer? A poor substitute for the nude picture I maybe sort of wish it was?

Maybe since Jake quit the team and lost his scholarship, he didn’t have enough money to pay for the whole window and was too embarrassed to admit it. It makes sense—in my experience, family drama usually comes along with bills. One of the reasons I moved in with Granna instead of living in the dorms was because her insurance wouldn’t approve home health nurses until the very end. Whatever Jake’s family faced, it left him chucking newspapers instead of baseballs.

Unless none of this is about budgets at all and he just ran off because he caught on to my bicep-ogling ways and he thought if he paid at least a few bucks, maybe I wouldn’t contact him again for the rest.

My toes curl in my sneakers as an image of soft brown eyes flashes through my mind. It’s just that...he seemed nice. Of course, Andy was nice, too. And handsome. I am not about to get sucked into second-guessing another guy’s actions, trying to decide what he’s thinking about me. What matters is what I think about me.

I toss the envelope onto the table and lift my guitar out of its stand. “Come on, let’s see if we can finish that song before we both have to go to work.”

Unlike men, music has never let me down.