Days Like This (6 page)

“I believe being polite with each
other for the sake of politeness went out the door around 1975.  Believe me
when I say that if I had any objections, you’d know about them.”

“Good to know.”

“I also believe it’s crucial that
we’re open and honest about this situation.  Because if we’re not honest—with
each other, with ourselves—that’s when things will start to go sour.  And that’s
the absolute last thing we want.”

“Agreed.”

“I’m not sure how I’m supposed to
feel.  I’m absolutely one hundred percent behind you in this.  She’s your
daughter, and we will take her into our home and raise her.  I’ve never for an
instant considered not taking her in.”

“But?” 

“But.  You pointed it out
yourself.  This will change things.  Now that I’ve had more time to think it
over, it makes me a little nervous.  Fear of the unknown can do terrible things
to your psyche.  And—”  She paused.  “Even the act of admitting this makes me
feel small and petty, and I hate it.  But there’s a part of me that’s jealous.”

“Jealous?” he said blankly.  “Tell
me you’re not afraid I’ll cast you aside in favor of my daughter.  Because if
you are, I can assure you that hell would freeze rock solid before that would
happen.”

“It’s not that.”

“Then what?”

“You have this wonderful
opportunity to get to know your daughter.  To watch her grow up.  To have a
relationship with her.”

“And?”

She gazed out the passenger-side
window, away from him.  “And my daughter is buried up on that hill beside her
father.”

It struck him without warning, a
hard, sharp pain, somewhere in the vicinity of his breastbone.  That beautiful
little girl, who’d inherited the best of both her parents, had broken so many
hearts when she died.  Including his.  “I’m a cretin,” he said, wishing there
were some way he could apply his size-eleven foot to his own posterior, and
kick hard and repeatedly.  “I never even thought about Katie, or about how this
might stir things up for you.  You cannot know how sorry I am.”

“You have your own daughter to
think about right now.  I wouldn’t expect you to be thinking about mine.”

“But I should’ve been.  It just
didn’t occur to me.”

“Don’t beat yourself up over it. 
This has nothing to do with you.  This is me being petty and small and
selfish.  And that’s just a fraction of what I’m feeling right now.  My
emotions are springing around like a pinball out of control.”

“Mine, too.  And you are not
petty, or small, or selfish.  You’re a bereaved mother.”

“I should be over it by now.  It’s
been five years.”

He set down his coffee cup,
reached out and took her hand, threaded fingers through hers.  “It’s not the
kind of thing you get over, babe.  It gets easier, but it doesn’t go away.”

“The only reason I survived it is
because you were there.”

Squeezing her hand, he said, “I
know.” 

They were both silent for a
while.  Sometimes she went away, to a dark place where he couldn’t follow her. 
And it killed him that he couldn’t, but there was no changing it, no matter how
much he loved her.  She was a mother who’d lost her child, and nobody, except
another parent who’d gone through the same thing, could ever understand.

“But let’s not be maudlin,” she
said.  “Because another part of me feels as though I’ve been given a second
chance at motherhood.  I don’t expect to take the place of Paige’s mom.  But
the opportunity to give her the guidance and the love she’ll so badly need…I’m
excited about that.  I know we’ll hit rough patches, bumps in the road.  Yes, I
need to be a mother, and yes, I want your babies.  But Paige
is
your
baby.  And I get to help you raise her to adulthood.  I feel so honored.”

She was a truly amazing woman,
his wife.  He brought their joined hands to his mouth and kissed her fingers.  “I
love you,” he said.

“I love you, too.  So what are
you feeling about all of this?  Now that you’ve had some time to think it over?”

He dropped her hand, wiggled his
shoulders around a little to ease some of the tension.  “How do I feel?  We can
start with terrified, because I don’t know where to even begin to be a father. 
Pissed off at Sandy for keeping me in the dark for fifteen years.  Resentful
about having my life disrupted like this, just when you and I have finally
found our way to being
us
.  Excited to have a kid.  I’ve wanted kids for
so long, and I’m bringing her home with me, where I can be her dad.  A little
giddy, because from here on in, she’s ours, and you and I get to watch her grow
up.  Sad, because she’s lost her mother, and Sandy won’t have that same
opportunity to see her grow up.  Then I remember she deliberately denied me the
opportunity to experience those first fifteen years, and I bounce right back to
pissed off again.”

She saluted him with her coffee
cup.  “That’s what I call honesty, my friend.  I’m so glad to know I’m not the
only one who’s bouncing all over the place.”

“What if she hates me?  What if
she hates you?  What if she’s more than we can handle?  What if she needs
psychiatric help to deal with the trauma of losing her mother?  What if—hell, I
don’t even know.  All these
what ifs
are circling around in my head like
vultures, and I’m the carcass they’re waiting to pick.”

“Don’t borrow trouble.  If she
needs counseling, we’ll get her counseling.  Your sister’s a social worker, she
knows everybody.   She’ll be a great resource if we need her.  And as far as
resources are concerned, we certainly don’t have to worry about money.  We’re
so lucky.  Whatever Paige needs, we can afford to pay for, including a decent
college education when the time comes.  This will all work out.  You’ll see.”

Traffic on I-95 was heavy, and he
popped in Mellencamp’s
Lonesome Jubilee
and focused on his driving.  Music
was an obsession for him.  He craved it, needed it flowing through his days the
way most people needed caffeine flowing through their veins.  But when Casey
was with him, unless he could find an oldies station, he never played the
radio, for fear the deejay would spin a Danny Fiore record and she would
freak.  Silently, of course.  His wife never said a word, but her body language
was eloquent.  Almost four years after his death, she still couldn’t handle
hearing Danny sing. 

And Rob understood.  He really
did.  She and Danny had been an institution.  She’d lost the love of her life,
and that wasn’t the kind of thing a woman ever got over.  If he had half a
brain, he’d get down on his knees and kiss the ground, because even though he
couldn’t begin to fill Danny’s shoes, for some crazy reason she loved him
anyway.  She just didn’t love him the way she’d loved Danny.  He’d long since
accepted it as truth, and did it really matter at this point?  Danny sure as
hell wasn’t coming back.  He, Rob MacKenzie, was the one who was upright and
breathing, the one whose ring she wore, the one who slept in her bed every
night.  So he accepted second place in her life, silently thanked the gods for
his good fortune, tiptoed around the elephant in the living room, and stuck to
the safety of cassette tapes.

His response to hearing Danny
sing was vastly different from hers.  Sure, he felt nostalgia and a little sadness. 
Danny had, after all, been his best buddy.  But beyond the sadness, there was
exhilaration, for every time he heard one of those hit songs, he was blown away
by the magic the three of them had created.  That magic had given him a life he
never could have imagined when he was a scrawny nineteen-year-old guitar player
with vague, unformed dreams about making a living with his music. 

Everything that was good in his
life today he owed to Danny Fiore:  the woman who was sitting beside him; the
career that was exponentially bigger than his wildest dreams; the money sitting
in the bank that allowed him to work when he felt like it and loaf when he didn’t;
even the house he was living in.  Without Danny Fiore, he would have none of
those things.  Without Danny Fiore, he would probably still be playing the
Boston bar scene.  Or worse, he would have given up his music years ago for
some dreary nine-to-five job that would have sucked the soul right out of him.

Instead, thanks to Danny, he’d
led a charmed life.  Oh, there had been a few bumps in the road.  He’d had his
heart broken a time or two, had gone hungry for a few years while they
struggled to achieve success.  That had been hard, but it was a cakewalk
compared to Danny’s death.  That was the toughest thing he’d ever had to face,
losing his friend, his front man, the guy whose voice gave brilliant life to
the music he and Casey wrote.  He’d loved Danny like a brother, and losing him had
felt like the sky falling on his head. 

But it hadn’t always been that
way.  He hadn’t much liked Danny Fiore at first. 

As cities went, Boston wasn’t a
big one, and in the summer of 1973, the local music scene was small and
incestuous:  if you were out there playing, sooner or later, you knew everybody
else who was out there playing.  And if you didn’t know everybody, you knew
everybody’s bass player, or everybody’s cousin who used to play with your
drummer’s college roommate.  That was the kind of place it was.  For a couple
of months, he’d been hearing about this singer named Danny Fiore, who had a
voice, they said, that could peel the wallpaper off the walls.  Rumor said he’d
been bringing down the house everywhere he played, and at the age of
twenty-two, he was already achieving local legend status.

One Saturday night when they had
nothing better to do, Rob and a couple of his friends went out to Somerville to
check out Fiore and his band.  The bar was crowded, the audience about
three-quarters female, and the instant Fiore stepped up on stage, Rob
understood why.  The guy was a total chick magnet.  He had a face like a Greek
god, and he oozed sex appeal like ketchup from a bottle.  Disappointed, Rob was
ready to dismiss him as just another pretty face.  All flash and no substance. 
He figured he’d stay for a couple of songs, finish his beer, and find some
better way to spend what was left of the evening.

Then Fiore opened his mouth to
sing, and any thought of leaving went
cha-cha-cha
right out the door. 
It was strictly garage band stuff, but holy mother of God, could the guy sing. 
Rob instantly forgave him for the pretty face because it didn’t take more than fifteen
seconds to realize that Danny Fiore was going places.  But not with this band. 
The bass player wasn’t bad, but the drummer was weak, and the lead guitarist
sucked.  Rob nursed his beer and watched and listened and ruminated.  When the
set ended, acting on an impulse that came from someplace he didn’t even
recognize, he thrust his beer bottle into his buddy Eric’s hand. 

“Hold this,” he said, and stalked
resolutely through the crowd to the stage.  “Hey, Fiore!” he shouted.

The Greek god glanced up, eyed
him from stem to stern, took in the tangled mess of curly blond hair, the long,
scrawny legs encased in ragged denim, the scruffy army jacket and the wrinkled
Led Zeppelin tee shirt underneath it.  And said, “What?”

“Your guitar player’s for shit.”

For five long seconds, they took
each other’s measure.  And then Fiore said, “So, Junior, do you think you can
do better?”

He snorted and said, “With one
hand tied behind my back.”  He might be barely nineteen and still wet behind
the ears, but he knew his way around a guitar.  “How about I show your friend
here how it’s supposed to be done?”

Fiore raised a single, cynical
eyebrow.  “Hey, Trav,” he said to the bass player, “this kid thinks he’s Jimmy
Page.  What do you think?  Should we put him to the test?”

The bass player grinned and said
something that sounded like, “This should be fun.”

“Come on up, kid.”  Into the mic,
Fiore said, “Eddie, get your ass back up here, we need you on the drum set. 
Dave?  This kid here says he wants to show you how it’s supposed to be done.”

Rob sprinted up onto the stage,
shrugged off the army jacket and tossed it to Dave, and picked up the guy’s
piece-of-shit guitar.  When Fiore said, “You have a name, kid?” he just
shrugged. 

“Okay, then,” Fiore said into the
mic.  “Looks like we have an anonymous guest guitarist tonight.  Let’s see what
this kid can do.”

There was a smattering of
applause, a few catcalls, a handful of beer bottles raised in salutation.  Rob
ran his fingers up and down the neck of the guitar to get the feel of it,
plucked a couple of notes, tightened his B string, and launched himself into
the opening riff of Clapton’s
Layla
.

He didn’t have the bottleneck
slide Duane Allman had used to play that legendary guitar riff, but he managed
to do a damn fine job without one.  The look on Danny Fiore’s face was
priceless.  Their eyes met, and something passed between them, an
acknowledgment, an instantaneous understanding.  Rob lifted his bony shoulders
as if to say, “Told you so.”  Fiore nodded and, without missing a beat, jumped
into the vocals.  The rest of the band fell in, and Rob MacKenzie closed his
eyes and just played, making that piece-of-shit guitar sing and wail and scream
like a woman in the throes of ecstasy.  It was a beautiful thing, and when they
got to the piano solo, because there was no piano, he improvised, made the
guitar weep as sweet and as tender as a mourning dove at the break of day.

When he was done, the applause
was gratifying, but that was never what it was about for him.  For him, it was
about the music.  Always, it was about the music.  He hopped lightly from the
stage, handed a stunned Dave the guitar in exchange for his jacket, and walked
away into the crowd. 

“Hey, kid!” Fiore shouted into
the mic.  “Who the hell are you?”

He didn’t answer, just kept
going, out the door and onto the sidewalk.  If Fiore wanted to find him, it
wouldn’t be hard.  This was, after all, Boston.  Everybody knew somebody who
knew somebody who knew somebody.  What he’d done was a little over the top, not
his usual style.  But he’d always believed that if you wanted something, you
had to go after it.  And he’d never been fazed by a challenge.