Dissonance - Chapter 24

After Dad stormed out, Mom locked herself in their room, only mumbling sorry a few times as she left. Although the ending was different, this was how I remembered large parts of my childhood. Dad getting angry, drunk, or both, taking a few swings at one of us, and leaving for more drinking while Mom found a place to hide, leaving me alone.

Of course, this had ended slightly better than that, since the only hitting that happened after that first slap was dad’s face against the refrigerator, but it still shattered the illusion I’d allowed myself to believe for the last and change. Although she was working herself to the bone, Mom had flowered once Dad was gone and it hadn’t seemed like he’d come back. She’d become more outspoken about what she wanted, for herself and for me, and she’d taken a lot more direct hand in parenting, to the point where I’d gotten several lectures last year on my behavior and choices.

It had been convincing, and I’d believed it. Now that Dad was back, though, all that progress was gone. She was back to weakly defending everything that man did, making excuses for why this time was different or okay. I wanted to go into her room and talk to her about it, maybe somehow snap her out of this hold he had over her, but at the moment, I knew that was a mistake. She hadn’t been like this since before he’d gone to jail, but when he’d wail on her and disappear, she’d gone almost catatonic. I’d never been able to get more than a few mumbled words from her. If I tried now, maybe I’d make things worse, since I knew she felt guilty about not standing up to him.

Although Dad left, I doubted he’d be gone for long. He never went anywhere, so it was unlikely he had any friends or anything to crash with, and unless he was planning on raiding the band account more, he wasn’t going to be able to afford a hotel, since he didn’t have a job. Even if he didn’t come back, I didn’t particularly feel like staying in the trailer, which is why I was on Hanna’s front step when her mother came home.

I think she could read how upset I was on my face, and that I didn’t particularly want to talk, because she let me in without a word and said I could use Hanna’s room. I appreciated her discretion, although as I was lying in Hanna’s bed, staring at the ceiling, I realized there was someone I wanted to talk to.

“Don’t mess up my room,” Hanna said when she picked up.

“What?” I said, surprised.

“Mom texted me and said she was letting you use my room. Everything okay?”

“No, but I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Sure, you called me, though. So what’s up?”

“Kent set up a meeting with me and our new manager on the eleventh. They’re giving me a chance to approve him before he’s assigned, I guess to make up for the whole mess with Brent. I know it’s a lot to ask, since classes just started and it would be a lot of driving, but could you come back and be at that meeting?”

“Sure,” she said, without even hesitating. “Do you think there’s going to be a problem with him?”

“No, I just trust your judgment and would prefer if you were there. You were the first one to notice problems with Brent, and I just want to get your take on this new guy.”

“I doubt Kent would assign you a second bad manager, so he’ll probably be fine.”

“I know, and Kent was good about dealing with Brent when we complained, but I still want a fallback opinion, just to be sure.”

“I get it. Count me in.”

“Okay. Thanks. How’s college?”

“It’s fine, although we’ve barely started. My roommate is okay, although we don’t have a lot in common and don't hang out or anything, she doesn’t annoy me. The classes are going to be less interesting than the stuff I was doing with Dr. Cross, but I expected that. First couple of years will be basics. Still better than high school though. Speaking of high school, I hear you have a new girlfriend.”

“Kat talked to you?”

“She mentioned it in passing, and since she calls me more than my best friend, it’s all the news I get these days.”

“Sorry, things have been busy.”

“I’ve heard, but I want to talk about this girl of yours.”

“She’s not my girl. We haven’t even been out on one date. She talked to me at Kat’s swim meet, and we really hit it off. We’ve hung out a few times as friends, but that’s it.”

“From how defensive Kat gets every time she talks about her, I thought maybe there was more. Or maybe the potential for more.”

“Maybe.”

“Ohh, so you like her. Come on, spill.”

“Nothing to spill. Yeah, she’s cute, funny, isn’t stuck up or self-centered, and it feels really comfortable to talk to her.”

“So, not Rhonda.”

“Definitely not Rhonda, although she’s popped up again. She stopped Sydney and made a bunch of rude comments to her.”

“Ignore her. She’s just jealous you aren’t out there pining away for her. She’ll never be happy unless she’s the center of attention.”

“I know.”

“So why haven’t you asked her out yet? From everything I’ve heard, she’s into you.”

“What do you mean, everything you’ve heard? Who else have you talked to.”

“Megan and Fatima may have texted me.”

“Man, you girls can’t help but gossip.”

“Your two best friends are girls, and you’re just figuring this out? This is prime-time stuff. They all know they’d get an ear full if I got left out of the loop.”

“I’m glad I can be a good source of entertainment.”

“It’s why we keep you around, but you’ve dodged the question. Why haven’t you asked her out.”

“There’s just been a lot going on. Dad being here has kind of thrown everything else out of whack.”

“I get it, but don't let him get in your head so much that you let life pass you by. Letting life pass you by because of him gives him the win.”

“I guess.”

“Good. See, if you just called me more, I could knock sense into you.”

“Yes, clearly that was my mistake. I’ll try to do better,” I said in a deadpan voice, making her laugh.

We stayed on the phone for another hour, mostly spent alternating between comments about asking out Sydney and talking about what she’d been doing since she left for college. She was right, I did need to call her more. I appreciated Kat, but our relationship was different. She wouldn’t tell me stuff I didn’t want to hear but needed to hear, and I was overly self-conscious about dumping too much on her, since she needed the space to be able to fix her own issues.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t just hide out at Hanna’s house forever, even though her mom probably would have let me. For one, I needed a shower and a change of clothes before school, I needed my change of clothes for working out with Chef and for our gig at the Blue Ridge that night, and I needed my instrument. While I was at it, I also should probably grab my backpack with my homework and all my textbooks in it too, since I’d probably need them for classes.

I tried to just sneak in and grab my stuff and get out, but mom was in the living area sitting on the couch when I walked in. She looked like hell and I seriously doubted she’d slept at all. I looked back towards the rear of the trailer where her room was, listening to see if Dad had come back. There wasn’t much to hear, but I wanted to avoid any more confrontations if possible.

“He’s not here,” she said, figuring out what I was doing.

“Good,” I said, starting to head back toward my room.

“He’ll be back tonight, though.”

“Why?” I asked, much more aggressively than I intended to.

“Because he’s your father and my husband, and he gets to live here.”

“Not after he puts his hands on you. I mean, Jesus, Mom, if I hadn’t have stopped him, he would have kicked the shit out of you. How can you let him come back here? Why are you even still married to him?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“No kidding! I don’t understand, and it’s not because I’m a kid. No one would understand, because it’s crazy. He’s a drunk who was in prison for killing a man, and this is far from the first time he’s hit you, or me for that matter. You had the perfect opportunity to get rid of him, and instead, he gets out on a technicality and you go back to being terrified of him, and accepting whatever bullshit he wants to dish out, because … what, you love him? Here we are on the verge of you only needing one job, something good on the horizon, and you’re ready to throw that all away. He takes a bunch of money that’s not his, fine. He verbally abuses you any chance he gets, fine. He slaps you and tries to kick you in the ribs, fine. Where’s the line. Does he have to kill someone else for you to decide he’s a lost cause?”

“You’re young, Charlie, and you don’t really understand what it’s like to be in love. Has your father made mistakes, yes? he’s not a perfect man. But he knows it and he’s going to try and do better. He even agreed to go to a marriage counselor this time.”

“Can you even hear yourself? This is insane. There isn’t enough counseling in the world to fix that man. He’s dangerous, Mom. You need to drop him.”

“I can’t,” she said, but with a lot less force, looking down at her hands as she did.

She was a broken woman. I could see it. I imagined this must be what it was like to learn your parent was a drug addict. She knew it, too. I stared at her, trying to will her to be a parent and do the right thing for us, and she wouldn’t look up.

After a few more moments I could only give an exasperated sigh and storm back to my room. I needed to get to school and had a long day ahead of me, and there was nothing I could do about this but try to avoid them as best as I could.

As I started to pack my changes of clothes, I just kept putting more in there until the bag was overfilled and I had enough clothes to make it until Tuesday, including performances and working out with Chef all weekend. I didn’t really have a plan and hadn’t even thought about it consciously until I realized I had so much stuff in my duffle bag that I could barely zip it closed. What I did know was, if dad was coming back, I didn’t want to be here. At least not for a while. I also loaded up all of my music stuff and any school books I had and piled them in my backpack. I’d have to unpack some of it in the back of my car before I went to class, but that was fine.

I hadn’t talked to Hanna’s mom about it, but as I walked through the living room again, I stopped and said, “I’m going to stay over at Hanna’s house for a few days.”

“Fine,” mom said, having regained some of her composure. “That’s probably for the best. After a few days, the two of you will have calmed down and we can deal with this more rationally.”

I couldn’t fathom how much she was deluding herself, trying to put a happy face on all of this, but I just didn’t have the energy to deal with it. I just shook my head and left, not looking back.

I was in a bad mood as I made my way to the Blue Ridge to practice with Chef. I knew he could tell I was in really upset, but in typical him fashion, he didn’t ask me about it or want to sit down and hash it out. Instead, he tried to sweat it out of me.

Honestly, I’d expected that, and I appreciated it. I didn’t want to talk about my dysfunctional family, and even if I did, there wasn’t anything he or anyone else could do about it. I was a minor, and beholden to seriously flawed people for the direction of my life.

Instead of talking, Chef just barked specific exercises at me, apparently deciding that today would be all conditioning. After an hour of that, I wasn’t thinking about Mom anymore, mostly just willing my screaming muscles to stop hurting. Chef was fond of saying that, at some point, the pain was all mental and could be ignored if I focused enough. I’d never found that to be really true, but maybe I was just too far from enlightenment to see it.

“Good job,” was all he said as he released me to go upstairs and take a shower while he went back into the kitchen.

As I took a shower, the anger I had been feeling towards mom and the hate I’d been feeling towards dad had subsided into a dull grumpiness. I probably wouldn’t be the most enjoyable person at practice, but at least I’d be able to focus once we got on stage and started putting on a show. At some point I’d need to talk to someone about what to do about the situation, but I just didn’t want that to be now.

I think my bandmates could feel the tension coming off me, because they also gave me a wide berth as we began setting up for our practice. So few people were talking to me today, in fact, that I almost jumped out of my skin when a hand tapped me on the shoulder.

I whirled around, and paused as I was confronted by Sydney, who was grinning from ear to ear.

“Hey, you said I could come see one of your practices, so, uhh … Surprise!” she said, making a ta-da gesture with her hands before dropping them and getting a concerned look on her face. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, not wanting to involve her with my bullshit. “I’ve just had a rough day. It’s better now that you’re here, though.”

“Yeah?” she said, brightening again.

“Yeah.”

I actually meant it, too. She was so cheerful and full of life, it was hard not to be infected by it.

“Good. So, how does this work?” she asked, looking at everyone else getting their equipment hooked up to amps and set up for that night's set.

“Practice before we play is more about making everyone comfortable with how it’s going to go tonight. Everything we’re going to play, we’ve either already played in a gig or worked out in our weekly practice. I give them the set for tonight, and we run through everything, just to make sure everyone remembers. Especially here, where some people come see us every weekend, I try and vary up the sets every night, but that means we work through a lot of songs, so we’re always pulling in stuff we haven’t played in a while. It’s good to have everyone play it once when it’s not for real, just to make sure.”

“Do you have enough songs to do that?”

“Of our own? Hell no. We’ve settled on about fifty-percent covers, fifty percent our own stuff. That means we play about half of all of our songs every night, so if someone comes to see us regularly, they will hear some of the same songs every time, but I try to mix them around, to keep it from being in the same order. I also try and shuffle around the covers a lot, so there’s some variety. I usually work up the weekend set lists Monday, and we play through them at our weekday practices, just to make sure it works.”

“If you’re always practicing for performances, how do you ever work on new stuff.”

“We do that too, at the weekday practices. Someone will bring in a new song, we’ll look it over and see if it works, and then give it some play throughs. Whoever’s song it is will keep making changes until we all think it’s ready, then we’ll put it in rotation for performances, and then make more changes based on audience response, until we feel it’s good.”

“I didn’t realize you guys had so much going on all the time.”

“It’s mostly because we play at the same place every weekend. When we toured, we made only small adjustments to the set list, so if you followed us and listened to multiple shows, they’d sound essentially the same, which means practices could be used to work out new covers or new songs.”

“You must have played your songs a lot before you recorded your record. It must have made that easier.”

“Hell no. Us working through a song is not the same as having a producer work through it with us. Rowan, who produced our album, is amazing and heard kinds of things we were either doing wrong or could do better. The songs are a hundred times better after that week in the studio than they were before, even though some of them we’d played a hundred times on stage. Heck, Rowen, whose a friend of Mr. French, which is how I met him, helped me on some of them before I got the deal to make the album, and he still found a lot to fix once we were all in the studio. It’s a more intense environment and we can really break down parts of the song. It was exciting, but the days were really really long.”

“Ohh, I didn’t realize that.”

“Me either. It was a surprise. Still, it was a good experience. If I get to do it again, I’ll be more prepared and I think we’ll be able to get more out of it. Anyway, let me introduce you to everyone,” I said, walking her back to the edge of the stage. “Sydney, this is Marco, Seth and Lyla. Guys, this is my friend Sydney.”

“Hey,” Marco and Seth both said, almost simultaneously.

“Ohh, nice,” Lyla said, putting her base in its stand.

“Not for you,” I said, causing Sydney’s head to whip towards me, until she saw me smiling.

“I’ll be good,” Lyla said, Lyla laughed and hopped off the stage, sticking her hand out. “Nice to meet you.”

“Thanks. I love your hair,” Sydney said, glancing at the deep blue section of Lyla’s hair.

“Thanks, I’m thinking of changing it to something brighter, so it pops on stage.”

“No, don’t. The dark colors really bring out your eyes. Maybe you could do a thin line of lighter blue or even pink, kind of off-center.”

“Ohh, that’s not a bad idea,” Lyla said, pulling a strand out and kind of looking up at it cross-eyed. Looking at me, hair still in her hands, she said, “I lied, I’m not going to be good. I like this one.”

“No. Bad Lyla,” I said, taking Sydney by the shoulder and moving her to the other side of me, causing both girls to laugh.

“Well, if you get tired of this one and want something a little more wild, give me a call,” Lyla said to Sydney past me.

“She’s just joking,” I said to Sydney, who looked a little dazzled by the hard press from Lyla. “She’s fifteen, Lyla.”

“Damn, what is with you and only bringing around jail bait. Give a girl a chance.”

“I’m jailbait too, remember.”

“Yeah, I keep forgetting. Fine, I’ll keep my hands off.”

“I’ll be sixteen next month,” Sydney added.

“Ohh, in that case …” Lyla said, laughing as I pushed her back to the stage.

“I like her. She’s funny,” Sydney said as I pulled her away from them.

“Yeah, she’s a riot, but you have to be careful around her. She had a girl in every city we went to on our tour. So, are you staying for the show tonight?”

“If that’s okay.”

“It’s great. Kat should be here in a little bit, she usually finishes with the practice with her private coach around now, and comes by around the end of our practice.”

“Have you met her coach? He’s so good. I heard her dad was paying a ton of money for him to come out here three times a week to train with her.”

“Yeah, he seems okay,” I said, not particularly wanting to talk about Kat’s piece of crap father. “We need to get started. Will you be okay?”

“Yeah. I just want to hear some music.”

“Good,” I said.

My mood was one hundred percent better as we started practice. I knew I’d still need to deal with Mom and Dad, but that was a problem for tomorrow. Thanks to Sydney’s visit, I was able to push it all to the back of my head, and just have fun for a little while.