Shattered Chords (The Encore Book 3) Page 3

  “I guess I better get going.” I gave her a flirtatious smile in hopes she’d pick up on my signals.

  Ask for her number, dumbass.

  “Our set is at eight thirty,” Ally said matter-of-factly, rocking on her heels. “It’d be cool if you came by.”

  “I might.” I gave her a fist bump. “Keep practicing.”

  “Totally.”

  I’d never had a problem asking a woman for her number. I’d asked them for bolder things—blowjobs, drugs, threesomes. You name it. But I couldn’t figure out how to ask for a simple phone number with a starry-eyed kid in the picture.

  “It was a pleasure meeting you.” Camille held out her hand. I shook it.

  Our gazes locked for a second.

  Ally’s phone buzzed and her attention suddenly shifted to the incoming message.

  The moment was perfect. I just had to say it out loud, the words that were on the tip of my tongue, ready to leave my mouth. And then the silence between us was split by a cluster of loud voices. A family of four needed to get into their van that sat next to Camille’s 4Runner, and continuing this conversation while two toddlers were boycotting the ride in their car seats seemed inappropriate.

  We parted quietly, exchanging smiles and light headshakes.

  When I got home, I called Eden, the new publicist I hired after severing all ties with Jay Brodie PR. They’d been good to me, but in my new drug-, cigarette-, and alcohol-free life, I needed fresh faces, preferably ones that didn’t remind me of my turbulent past.

  Eden Romano was perfect, and she’d come highly recommended.

  “How are you feeling, Dante?” her voice, small and crackling, said over the speaker.

  “I’m still breathing.”

  “Oh, good!”

  “Don’t expect to get rid of me that fast.”

  “Absolutely not. We should meet next week. Melanie Dworski from People magazine reached out to me the other day about an interview.”

  “Let me think about it.” No way in hell was I doing a fucking interview.

  “There’s a lot of interest, Dante,” Eden urged. “Your fans want to know how you’re doing.”

  “How the fuck do you think I’m doing?” I barked out a bitter laugh. “I’m eating broccoli five times a week.”

  “Broccoli is good for you.”

  I steered the conversation in a different direction and got to the point of my call. “Who’s handling my social media?”

  “We are.”

  “Can you send me my Instagram login info?”

  2 Camille

  “Did you at least get his phone number?” Ally inquired from the passenger seat.

  Hands on the steering wheel, I was still buzzing from my strange encounter with the brooding rock star I’d apparently never heard of. Or maybe I had. I just wasn’t like my daughter, who spent hours in front of her computer googling bands and their members. For someone as musically challenged as myself, it seemed like such a waste of time. I couldn’t carry a tune to save my life, nor could I play an instrument. I had no idea who Ally took after, but it definitely wasn’t anyone on my side of the family.

  “Mom?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why would I?”

  “Because he has a lot of connections. Duh.”

  I caught a hint of irritation in Ally’s voice. Totally normal, I reminded myself. She was a teenager. A little rebel without a cause.

  “I still can’t believe I let you two talk me into this,” I muttered. My eyes remained on the road, but my mind had drifted back to the man in the guitar shop who’d just bought my daughter a six-thousand-dollar guitar.

  Calabasas attracted plenty of famous people. Basketball players, actors, entrepreneurs, pop sensations. The city offered stunning mountain views and the Pacific Ocean was just a short drive away. At Dream Bride, I dealt with my fair share of high-end clients, but real-life rock stars were hard to come by. When not on tour, they hid in the privacy of their hillside mansions, away from the racket of shopping centers and restaurants. Seeing one of them at the plaza where I’d been getting my nails done for over ten years was like seeing a unicorn. Seeing one of them talking to my daughter was like seeing a defective unicorn.

  Yet, he was sublime.

  A true dark horse. Tall and very lean but finely cut. With olive skin and calloused fingers. His thick, black shoulder-length hair looked like a deliberate mess, as if he’d just gotten out of bed. Never mind that it was the middle of the afternoon. He wore expensive designer clothes that were only meant to look tattered and most likely came with an outrageous price tag. He was a man who’d obviously seen and done it all.

  And I was pretty sure my daughter had his poster up on her wall.

  Ally’s obsession with older men, even if it was purely professional, drove me nuts. Her room was a horror palace, a mini metal-goth-emo museum with glossy photos that showcased all sorts of male bodies in outfits from coats to spandex. There were women too. Dressed in black, in corsets, and ripped jeans. But men prevailed.

  It’s just a phase, my own mother said to me a few years back when Ally put up her first poster.

  No, it wasn’t a phase. My daughter desired to pursue a career in music. She’d always wanted to sing, but her dream of being the next Lady Gaga was crushed during her first lesson with a vocal coach I hired to work with her seven years ago.

  I’m sorry, but she just doesn’t have it in her, the mean woman had said. Have you considered piano or guitar lessons? She has perfect hands.

  I didn’t sleep for a week after that conversation. Telling my eight-year-old daughter she had no singing voice was the hardest thing I’d had to do in my entire life. Not counting the decision to keep her when I was a green college freshman.

  “I think I should teach you some basics,” Ally announced, staring out the window with the guitar case settled between her legs. She’d refused to put it in the trunk and held on to the instrument as if it were her lifeline.

  “Teach me?” I laughed.

  “Yeah, remember School of Rock?”

  I shook my head.

  “The movie with Jack Black where he assumes the identity of his roommate to train kids for a band competition?”

  I sifted through my mind. The film sounded vaguely familiar. “He assumes his roommate’s identity? Isn’t that illegal?”

  “Everything is illegal with you, Mom. Talking to people, accepting gifts.”

  “When they’re expensive and from strangers, yes.”

  “Dante Martinez isn’t a stranger.”

  “He’s a stranger.”

  “He’s one of the biggest rock guitarists in the world.”

  “And he could be a pervert who preys on young girls.”

  “But that’s not the point, Mom!” Ally totally dismissed my argument. She switched to selective hearing every time I tried talking about serious things. “Your lack of knowledge is embarrassing. Especially in front of important people.”

  There was no malice in her voice. Like most teenagers, she just couldn’t put her thoughts and ideas into the right words. Sometimes, I wondered whether she really wanted a mom or a girlfriend. I tried to be both, but without a father figure around, my parental side always prevailed.

  “How am I embarrassing you?” I was pulling her leg now.

  “You threatened Dante Martinez with cops and took a picture of his driver’s license. Who the hell does that?”

  “Mothers with teenage daughters who have posters of half-naked guys on the walls of their rooms.”

  “What if you scared him off and he won’t come to a show?”

  “I’m sure he will if his schedule allows it.”

  I didn’t really mean it. Or at least, I thought I didn’t. Famous people hardly had the time for local bands made up mainly of high-schoolers, but as a parent, I said a lot of things that weren’t exactly true. I’d learned that skill in my early twenties when Ally started to talk. She asked too many
questions a kid her age had no business asking. I lied to her about Santa Claus. I lied to her about her father. I even lied about Harry Potter. She believed he was real and lived in England until some kid at school told her he was just a book character. Ally was devastated. Then she found out Santa wasn’t real either. One after another, the childhood myths were broken. It made me want to wrap my little girl in a blanket and keep her in my room—where she’d be safe from the rest of the world and the cruel people who lived in it—forever.

  Sadly, she’d grown up too fast. With each passing day I noted changes in her body. She was becoming a woman and it pained me to think about the day she’d turn eighteen, the day my ability to protect her from all the bad would cease to exist.

  “I bet twenty bucks you know this song.” Ally’s voice dragged me back to reality.

  The light ahead turned yellow. I hit the brakes and the tires of my 4Runner skidded against the asphalt. This car didn’t like me. I didn’t like it either, but with Ally constantly asking for a ride to a rehearsal or an audition, I needed extra room for her amps. Having a larger vehicle also made it easier to transport dresses. Overall, the Toyota was a decent upgrade from my stuffy Nissan, but even after three months of driving the car, it still felt too big and unruly.

  We didn’t fit well.

  Ally connected her phone to the stereo and turned up the volume. “No cheating.”

  “No cheating. Promise,” I agreed, my gaze trained on the traffic light.

  The melody that poured out from the speakers was painfully familiar. I’d heard it before. Multiple times. On the radio. On TV. In my daughter’s room. At a few parties Harper had dragged me to. Even once at a wedding in Ojai.

  My tastes were very diverse. Pop, jazz, rock, some hip-hop. Unlike my kid, who didn’t accept anything beyond the realm of screaming hardcore, I didn’t care who wrote the composition as long as the song evoked emotions, be it sadness or happiness. The names and faces of the creators didn’t matter much. At least, not anymore. They seemed unimportant to a woman who was responsible for another human being, a mortgage, and a family business.

  Ally was playing an air guitar, head bobbing along with the beat and hair flying in all directions. She was possessed by the music and didn’t care that a snobby-looking older couple in a Lexus stared at her with eyes full of something between fear and judgment.

  As a promising designer turned single mother at nineteen, I was used to sideways glares and whispers behind my back. And I didn’t care.

  The light flashed green and when the cars in front of us inched forward, I hit the gas. We drove down the street edged by tall bare-trunked palm trees and wide fences that hid expensive houses. The sun was perched high in the cloudless, washed-out sky and the ragged mountain peaks were sprinkled with light snow. Which wasn’t unusual for California. Even in summer.

  When the song reached a guitar solo, Ally snapped out of her trance and turned to me. “This is Dante.”

  Curious, I listened to the wall of sounds that assaulted my ears. “He’s not bad.”

  “Not bad?” She rolled her eyes. “His riffs are sick.”

  Maybe that’s because of all the drugs he’s done, a voice in my head suggested. Psychedelics fueled creativity. It was a well-known fact.

  A chill zipped down my spine at the mere notion that my daughter’s idols were junkies. I tried not to overthink it. Addiction wasn’t a choice but a disease, and measuring a person's worth by their flaws and weaknesses didn’t seem fair, but at the end of the day, I still asked myself whether I was making a mistake by being so liberal with Ally.

  Was I a good mother?

  We spent the rest of the drive listening to Dante’s guitar magic and arguing over tattoos. Apparently, my teenage daughter thought fifteen was a good age to “get inked.”

  “Over my dead body, Ally,” I said, turning the corner.

  “But I’m in a band, Mom,” she squealed. Her voice grew high and meshed with the music. “No one’s going to take me seriously.”

  “Tattoos won’t make you play better.”

  “That’s not why people get inked.”

  “Exactly. And that’s why you don’t need any ink. We’ll talk about it in three years.”

  “You don’t understand anything,” Ally grumbled under her breath.

  Heaviness filled my chest. My little girl wasn’t little anymore. She was all attitude and sharp edges, an angry animal who wasn’t afraid to show some teeth.

  With the music still playing, we entered the driveway of our ranch-style two-bedroom house that sat on a small stretch of land on the cul-de-sac of a street in Woodland Hills. My family was well-to-do and Ally’s father provided agreed-upon financial support, but it wasn’t enough to buy real estate closer to Dream Bride. Even for a business-savvy person like me, Calabasas was too expensive, and I had a fifteen-year-old daughter who thought I was a millionaire.

  I parked the car and killed the engine. The music was replaced by tense silence. Part of me expected to hear more nagging from Ally, but she scrambled out of her seat, grabbed the guitar, and rushed inside without a word. Doors slammed. One after another in typical tantrum manner. Nothing this or any house with a teenager hadn’t witnessed before.

  Fifteen minutes later, when I was getting ready to start dinner, a rumbling noise came from Ally’s room. She was relentless. Even the walls I’d let her soundproof so she could practice at home didn’t contain her anger. The guitar screamed for a good hour. Maybe longer. And I had no choice but to bake chicken and chop salad surrounded by the roar of rock classics instead of my usual new age playlist.

  At a quarter to eight, Ally sauntered into the kitchen with a demand. “Can I have my twenty bucks?”

  Don’t let her push you around, my voice of reason that often failed me said.

  Hands on hips, I spun to face her. “You just received a six-thousand-dollar guitar.”

  “That doesn’t count.” Frustration pinched her features.

  “Yes, it does.” I heaved out a loud, exasperated sigh.

  We locked gazes and stared at each other for a long moment. This was our thing.

  I dined alone on the terrace under the dark, star-littered sky. Obviously, my back yard couldn’t compare to the lush lawns of the Malibu mansions and Calabasas estates, but it was cozy. Every week, a gardener came by to take care of my flowers and orange trees. Ally’s old swing, which she hadn’t used in years, hung from the branch of an old oak tree spread over a good portion of the property. A couple sets of string lights that I’d been promising myself to put away since last Christmas still decorated the fixtures and dangled from the roof of the porch. The house didn’t come with a pool, but it had a small barbeque and a picnic area, and in the summer, when school wasn’t in session, we loved having meals outside.

  Opening a bottle of wine Harper brought me from Napa Valley a few months ago seemed more than fitting tonight. Sunday was my only day off and a war with my daughter over tattoos and money had turned my homemade dinner into a lonely and depressing venture.

  Lately, I’d been having a lot of those.

  My phone sat on the table next to my glass, screen dark. Then the wine I’d been nursing for what seemed like an eternity finally hit the sweet spot. A pleasant haze swirled in my head and stomach. I felt at ease and rather curious. My mind leapt back to my earlier encounter with the rock star Ally idolized. I still couldn’t understand how I’d agreed to his offer. Silly me, I’d fallen for his words. He was unlike anyone else I’d ever met. Too charming. Straightforward. Ruggedly handsome and impossible to resist.

  Don’t go there, Camille. Men are full of shit. All of them.

  Setting my glass aside, I grabbed the phone, opened a browser, and typed in his name.

  Let’s see who you really are, Dante Martinez, and why the hell you needed to buy my daughter a guitar that costs more than my mortgage payment.

  The moment I hit Enter, countless headlines came up on the screen. Tabloids loved him. He was all
over BuzzFeed, TMZ, and other less than reputable publications that specialized in celebrity gossip. He was also in Rolling Stone, People, and Time.

  Scrolling down to the bottom of the first page of search results, I skimmed over the text.

  Dante Martinez Exits Hall Affinity in Light of Health Crisis

  Hall Affinity Guitarist Enters Rehab

  Dante Martinez Makes Appearance at Dreamcatchers Premiere in Los Angeles

  Dante Martinez Talks About Reconnecting with Frankie Blade and a Hall Affinity Reunion

  Dante Martinez and Frankie Blade Cringeworthy Meltdown

  I was tempted to click the thumbnail of a YouTube video beneath the last headline, but something told me it wasn’t fair to the man in question. First impressions were everything and seeing something ugly before seeing something nice didn’t feel right.

  Instead, I scrolled back up and tapped the images tab.

  My heartbeat accelerated. It’d been a long time since I’d stalked someone famous online and I’d forgotten how overwhelming looking at a well-dressed man with a jaw-dropping smile could be. And Dante Martinez was exactly that. Damaged eye candy wrapped in denim, leather, and shiny jewelry.

  I squeezed my eyes shut for a brief second to regroup and whispered into the warm night, “You’re a grown woman, Camille. You’re not drooling over some man who’s probably twice divorced and has done all the drugs that exist.”

  I wasn’t sure why my imagination went straight for his relationship status. Rock stars were notorious for marrying a gazillion times, and the older they grew, the younger their spouses became. It was almost like an unwritten law in the world of rock’n’roll. Maybe with the exception of Jon Bon Jovi. I knew those facts unwillingly only thanks to my mother. She loved him. Once when I was a kid, she dragged me to see the band’s show in Inglewood, but that was as far as my parents could stretch their limits. The kind of music Ally played scared them. They didn’t participate, but they tried to be understanding.

  Snapping my eyes open, I returned my attention to the tiny screen of my phone and ogled photos of Dante Martinez. In most, he was pictured with various guitars, but in some, he was with much younger women. Very few appeared in more than two shots. This man was a player.