Love Will (67 page)

“Here,” Tavo says, giving me his phone where a picture of a mainly-black puppy is looking back at me.

“Oh, hell, Tav. It’s cute.
So
cute. So they have one?”

“His name is Minnie. He was the smallest of the litter, but they say he’s not a runt or anything. He’s perfectly healthy and good-tempered, they said. He’s the only one they have left of this round of pups. He’ll be available in two weeks. If you want him, they’ll hold him for you.”

“They named a boy dog
Minnie
?”

“It’s a tradition for their kennel. They always name the smallest one Minnie. M-I-N-N-I-E for a girl, and M-I-N-I for a boy. This is Mini the twenty-first. You can change its name, you know?”

“Mini’s kind of funny, actually. We met in Minneapolis? It’d be for Shea. For protection, while I’m gone. I want her to feel safer when I’m not there.”

“I’ll tell them you want him, if you do.”

“Will they hold him until the next week when we get back?”

“For you, yeah.”

“Sir, you need to turn off your cell phone,” the flight attendant warns me. I quickly hand the phone back to Tavo, looking completely innocent and shaking my head while I put all the blame on my friend.

“Fuck you, man,” he mumbles, turning off his phone.

“I definitely want the dog,” I tell him, nudging him in the side. “Whatever he costs.”

“You better name him after me.”

“You want me to call the dog Tavo?”

He thinks twice about that. “No, man, I’m fucking tired!”

“Take a nap… and I’m not naming the dog after you.”

“Okay,” he says, stealing the blanket off my lap, even though he already has one.

“It’s yours.”

“Yeah, it is.”

Chapter 28

A heaviness has settled over the bus in the last hour or so. It’s our last leg of the road trip, and we played our final show last night. It’s good to know we have a little over a week of recording in LA, so our time together isn’t up yet, but the tour is over, and it’s a little melancholy to know we’re done playing like this for what may be a few years. This has been our lives for half a decade now. Granted, the first two years we played tiny clubs and local parties, but we played together and invented our sound and wrote our songs. Damon and I were already best friends, but we invited two other guys into that friendship, and I’m going to miss them all as much as I’ll miss my brothers.

The decision to do what I love was easy. The decision to leave my friends behind was not. I’m just lucky in that I’ll get to come back and hopefully be part of the band again someday. Over the past few weeks, we’ve all decided that a four-man band sounds good, but a five-man band is the way to go. When I’m back, we definitely want Bradley to stay with us.

My phone rings quietly in my pocket. I slip in my earbud and answer it after I check to see who it is.

“Hello, Shea-
soleil
,” I answer softly.

“Why do you keep calling me that?” she asks, clearly smiling. I know she likes the new moniker, and she knows what
soleil
means in French, but she hasn’t seen the tattoo yet, and I’m saving the full explanation until then.

“It sounds pretty, just like you.”

“Oh, you get sweeter and sweeter the longer we’re apart.”

“I swear I’ll be like raw sugar the second you’re in my arms up until I have to leave you.”

“I don’t want you to be sweet
all
the time.”

“I’ll be whatever you want, then. Just say the word.”

“Are you homesick?”

“I can’t wait to see you. Nine days, Shea. Nine more days, and we can fucking live together.”

“For a couple months.”

“Until you’re sick of me.”

“Never.”

I sigh into the phone. “How’s the business? Still doing okay?”

“It’s great, Will. I get more and more orders every day. We’re having to borrow Livvy’s uncle’s kitchen, too, so it’s kind of a blessing that they’re letting me stay here.” Matty and his husband, Nolan, have always been so generous to me and my family.

“Shit… what kind of a place are we going to have to find, I wonder?”

“Just a regular place, Will. Don’t worry about it. I’m looking into some shared-use kitchens. There are two in Long Island City, two in Manhattan, one in Brooklyn and one in the Bronx. I’ve already talked to all the owners. I just need to find some time to go look at the spaces.”

“We may need a car…” I realize aloud.

“A van…” she says. “I’ve been renting one.”

“The band has one… but, uh… yeah, we should just buy one.” I won’t tell her what’s gone on in that van.

“It would be a business expense. A tax write-off.”

“It’s fine, Shea. We’ll work it all out.”

“Nolan’s been helping me since Livvy’s kind of too pregnant these days to be on her feet that much,” she explains.
So generous
.

“I’d love to help when I get back.”

“You’ll be busy working and reading and solving problems. Nolan says he doesn’t mind, and I’m starting to make enough money where I could pay him a decent hourly wage. He says he won’t take it, but I have to do something.”

“I’m sure I’ll have some time to help with some things. And yeah, we’ll figure out a way to repay Matty and Nolan. Matty got me interested in music the summer my mom and Max and I lived at the loft. I’ve been trying to thank him for that forever. Speaking of Max… I talked to him yesterday before my show.”

“About your dad?”

“Yeah.”

“What did he have to say?”

“He was upset with me about the whole thing until I mentioned Laramie and Harmon. I think Callen has talked about them to Max before, too. He seemed to soften a little, and I thought I was making him see that we should be there for them, to try to be positive role models for them, and then he shut me down again saying he wanted nothing to do with William’s family. I wish I had taken a picture of Harmon, though. If he could see how much she resembles him… I just think it would change his mind. I mean, I just see so much of him in her, when he was that age. I think that’s a huge reason why I want to help.”

A little chirp notifies me of a text message. I pull my phone out of my pocket to see that Shea has sent me a picture. I tap on the message to open it, and it’s a photo of my sisters in the sandbox.

“Shea…”

“I didn’t know if you would think it was intrusive, so I didn’t tell you. But I thought you might want that some day.”

I study the innocent smiles of my little sisters. Max had a smile very much like theirs. We shielded him as best as we could in those early years. My smile never looked like that, though. There was always a certain sadness in my eyes, even when I was that young. Jon’s, too.

I think that must be the resemblance I see in my youngest brother and sisters.

“This is just what I need. How do you always know what I need?”

“That’s what a good relationship is all about: anticipating the needs of the person you love.”

“Do I ever do that?”

“All the time, Will.”

“Thank you so much for this. I think I’ll save it for when I get home and talk to him in person.”

“I think that’s a good idea. Listen, I’m calling because Livvy’s parents wanted to throw you a party at their house when you get home. She wanted me to make sure that was okay with you.”

“It’s not necessary, but I’d love to see everyone again. Their house is big enough to hold everyone. Have you been there yet?”

“No… I’m dying to see the Holland house, though,” she whispers into the phone.

“It’s not what you think. They don’t live extravagantly. It’s not like the McNair mansion–or their beach house. Now if we ever get invited to those places, then you can get excited. They’re ridiculous.”

“Still. Emi Holland has good taste and a lot of style. I bet it’s a lovely home.”

“It is. I actually vandalized a wall there when I was sixteen when I got back from Utah. My mom couldn’t pick me up, so she sent Jack to get me, and since she’d caught wind that I’d taken my aunt’s car and snuck out of her house, she’d decided to ground me. Jack had to deliver the sentence, so I was confined to their basement for the night while Mom was out of town.”

“That sounds a little archaic,” Shea says.

“Oh, no. It’s a nice basement. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a home theater and a game room. If a kid’s gonna be grounded, it’s about the best place to be.”

“And here I felt sorry for you…”

“Yeah, don’t,” I tell her with a laugh. “In the corner of the game room, I took a Sharpie and wrote
Will Rosser was here
. I dated it, too. They’ve updated that room twice since then, but they’ve left that little mark of rebellion there.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Nope.”

“You didn’t get in trouble?”

“We’ve never talked about it. It’s behind a chair, so I doubt anyone else even knows it’s there. Jack and Emi are the parents every kid dreams of having. I always acted like a jerk when Mom made me go over there with my brother, but I secretly liked it. I was a teenager. The handbook said I had to be a jerk.”

She laughs lightly into the phone. “They only have good things to say about you. They've been coming over in the evenings to check on Livvy and to play with Edie.”

“Have you seen my mom at all?”

“She comes over, too. Not as often because she works a lot. I’m supposed to go to her house on Saturday to teach her how to bake bread like the stuff I sent at Christmas.”

“I hope that’s not too much trouble.”

“Not at all, Will. I’d love to do it. I’m happy she invited me.”

“When do you have Shea-time?”

“In the evenings and at night. I’m a working girl,” she says proudly. “This is the life I’m used to. And I’m taking Sunday off to explore the city. I’m gonna ride the subway to some different neighborhoods. Jon gave me some suggestions on places we should look at.”

“Yeah, he showed me the list. Skip number four.”

“Okay. Will do.”

“Write down what you like and don’t like about each place.”

“I’m a step ahead of you. I have my note-taking app already organized, labeled and ready to go. I’ve already populated it with facts about crime statistics, time it takes on the subway to get to NYU, to Perihelion, to Jon and Livvy’s loft, and to your mom’s house. I’ve plotted parking garages nearby for the van we’ll have to buy. I also made notes of parks that are close and restaurants that I’d like to work at.”

“Okay, then. You don’t need my help. I had no idea you were that much of a planner.”

“I’ve got this. Download Evernote on your phone and I’ll share everything with you,” she says.

All of a sudden, I feel lighter. I hadn’t even realized I was worried about us finding a place, but it had apparently been weighing on my mind. “I’ll do that.”

“Good. All right. I need to go. Let me know when you make it to Hollywood.”

“I fucking love you, Shea.”

“I fucking love you right back.”

“My niece better not be in the room with you,” I tease her.

“She’s not. Of
course
I’ll leave you to teach her the colorful words. Have a good day.”

“I’ve corrupted one child too many,” I confess to her, referring to my brother. “I’ll talk to you tonight. Bye.”

Noticing that Peron and Bradley are set up to play, I grab my acoustic and join them. Bradley voices his concern for his solos, and asks for my help to add something to them. He’d tried emulating how I play, but his fingers just don’t work quite as quickly and lithely as mine do. The three of us come up with some other very original-sounding licks that he
can
play very well, and by the time we make it to the home we’ll be staying in for the week, he’s got two of them nearly perfect. I suggest to Damon that we let him play one of them on the album instead of mine, even though it’s not as intricate. After explaining it will keep Bradley’s confidence up, my best friend finally agrees to it.

Plus, it’ll be what people expect on the tour in the fall. Damon doesn’t seem the slightest bit concerned that the album versions of the songs won’t sound the same as they do in concert. I know they never do, but for the guitar solos to be
completely
different is a little strange. Still, it seems to be no one’s worry but mine, and I won’t be there to see the reactions, so it doesn’t seem to matter. Damon explains that the producers are adamant to have me on as many tracks as possible. Of course, I’m not complaining.

Damon and I are sitting with Trina, one of the sound techs, on our final day in the studio, listening to the latest cut of
Oleander Petals
. For some reason, it was the hardest one for us to get right. Every take sounded too polished for the grittiness of the song. As she tightened a screw in her black-rimmed glasses, I finally asked if Damon and I could sit with her, strip down the effects, and give us control of the board.