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“Ready,” he said. He found himself picturing her on her bus, all the lights on,House Huntersmuted in the background. She was sitting on the edge of her couch, he wagered, and he wondered what she was wearing—designer jeans, or something else that looked like casual clothing but cost ten times as much? It was impossible to picture her in something like the ancient pajama pants he was wearing—impossible to picture her messy, her hair unbrushed, her face free of makeup.
“Hey,” he asked, curious, daring, “where are you?”
“On my bus,” Vivi said as her fingers danced across a chord—she’d been just about to start.
“I mean, where on the bus? I’m trying to get the whole picture,” Remy said, grabbing someone’s—Parish’s?—jacket from a chair to sling over his torso and fight the chill.
“I’m in my bedroom,” she said cautiously.
“Oh. Well,” Remy said, acutely aware of how creepy his question had just become and simultaneously disappointed he couldn’t truly picture this—he’d never been into the back of her bus. Any lingering sleep was pushed aside to make way for feeling fumbling and awkward.
Vivi paused then said, “White quilt. Peach walls. Too many pillows on the bed. And the phone is on the dresser opposite the treadmill.”
Remy grinned, the room coming into view in his head. “You have a treadmill on the bus?”
“Britney Spears had a tanning bed,” she said defensively.
“I wasn’t questioning it, just…I wouldn’t have thought to put a treadmill on a bus,” Remy prodded back.
“They notice if I put on three pounds. That’s the magic number—three. If I stay under three, I’m good. If I go over three, they say I lookwell-fedor something like that. If I go over five, it gets mean.” She said this practically, without any emotional attachment—just the facts, ma’am.
“Hence the Razzmatazz yogurt?” Remy asked.
“Hence the Razzmatazz yogurt,” she said. “Ready now? For real?”
Remy took a breath, locking the imagined picture of her room in his head. He managed to picture her in pajamas—the type with a matching top and bottom, yet not the sexy sort—but couldn’t imagine her without the lipstick. “Go ahead,” he said.
Vivi played through “Maybe It’s Me,” playing confidently and singing loudly, no longer working her way through a draft of it. It was lovely—melancholy and pleading and touching. When she sang the chorus, Remy noticed that her voice went huskier, like she was singing in Tuesday’s voice. Better yet, it was the type of song that could take on multiple meanings. It was about Tuesday, but when Remy let the song sweep through him, it became about Val. It could be a love letter to anyone.
“That’s how pop songs work,” she told him when he commented on this. “That’s why they work. They’re about everyone.”
“Val would say they’re about no one,” Remy said with a slight laugh.
“That’s because Val doesn’t want to be connected to anyone but you. And Celeste,” Vivi answered knowingly. She paused. He heard the click of her guitar case closing, and then her voice got closer and clearer. “Thanks for working with me on it, Remy. I kind of don’t want to ever be finished with it, you know?”
“It’s been my pleasure,” he said. He leaned as close to the window as he could without pressing against the cold glass, trying to see her bus—it was, in theory, the next one up in the caravan, but the most he could get was glimpses of the red brake lights now and again. They bounced off the water that slicked the sheared rocks bordering the road.
“We’re here,” Remy said a little suddenly, when his eyes rose to the horizon.
“Huh?”
“Nashville. I can see the AT&T Building,” he said. “When Val and I first left Florida, we drove straight here—something like twelve hours, and we just traded off. We didn’t want to go to our first meeting looking unprofessional, so we pulled over and painted the band name on the side of the van and changed shirts.”
“And that made you look professional?” Vivi asked.
“No, apparently it made us lookhomegrown. That’s the word the label execs kept using. Nouveau garage band! Homegrown rock! The band next door!”
“When I moved here, I thought I’d hit it big,” Vivi said.
“She said from her exquisite tour bus.”
“I know, I know, but that’s not what I mean—I thought I’d get here and more or less be famous. That was sort of what my parents let me think. But I ended up playing festivals and bars and this little twenty-four-hour cafe near Vandy about three dozen times. It was amazing.” Remy was about to ask what, exactly, was so amazing about Cafe Coco—he knew that had to be it—when she went on, “It was amazing, looking back, I mean. I had all that time to figure out who I was and what sort of music I wanted to play. I wrote my own songs and played them and changed them depending on how people reacted. It’s so different than someone like Tuesday—she came off the Disney show, and people sort of told her sing this, wear this, be this. But I got to find my own way. With a bunch of high Vandy kids cheering over mochaccinos.”
Remy laughed. “I played there a few times.”
“Oh, yeah? Did you like it?”
“Loved it. Val is good with that sort of crowd—college kids, hungry people, caffeine addicts. He sort of appears and hypnotizes them. You really should come see him at a show,” Remy said then stifled a sound of alarm when he pictured Vivi Swan at a Quiet Coyote show. Even in LA, where the shows usually had twice the sparkle and three times the deodorant, she would look ridiculous, a real diamond in a shaken box of cut glass.
