Studio Time: Thirty Eight

Broken things and when not to fix them

Fourteen hours after his brother left, Nate stepped under the stairs to the second floor and growled into the phone, “Where the hell are you?  Is the car okay?”

They sort of shared the car.  It was Nate’s car though, the car he’d saved for, the one he’d bought without his father’s charity or help or whatever.  They negotiated who got to use it and today Eric was using the car.

Eric had the car because Rayne wanted a ride out to Sandy Point to get something out of her house. It was a long way but he’d been gone a long time, a lot longer than it would take to get there, make Rayne get out of the car and grab her shit, make Rayne get back in the car, and drive home.  

“We had sort of a problem.  Not with the car.  I’m on the way about an hour maybe less.  Make sure there’s beer.”

After driving Rayne around all day he would probably want to sit in a dark room by himself and drink.  He started to say goodbye and all right when he realized Eric had hung on up him.

Nate drew a breath, uneasy, then took a step out of the dim stairwell and into the old brick walled place living room thing with the iron columns that didn’t seem to hold up anything.

Three people were sitting at the table in that room, all of them occupied trying to find a drummer for him. Devlin Holloway was one of his oldest friends.  He had a cute new girlfriend and the girlfriend was helping.  She had a whole spreadsheet with every drummer dead or alive or zombified on the face of the earth and all the planets in the visible - make that also the invisible - universe. She had them all mixed up.  She didn’t know one damned thing about music or drummers.

And the third was Alice, his other guitarist.  She wasn’t doing much.

His attention wandered.  He wondered if it was even worth the trouble looking for a drummer since as soon as he found one, someone else would probably quit.

Alice was moving between beer and coke, drinking both of them, eating the chicken fried rice and what was left of the spring rolls.  Dev and Eva laughed about something they were watching then tabbed away from it and pulled up more mystery drummer data. 

“He moved away last week,” Alice pointed out, “that one, Aaron.  They have a new baby. Cross him off.  I don’t think that leaves more than a handful of even remote possibilities.”

Dev leaned back, finished his Heineken, and added, “Nate can go through them later.  I’ve been out of that whole business for a couple of years now, don’t know who anybody is anymore.”

Eva tapped the keyboard gently. “Well I guess that leaves Woody at the top of the list like we said when we started.  I do have one more - Stevie Holloway. She came up on a list but looks like she retired years ago.  It’s funny because of the name.  I was going to mention it to you Dev but didn’t have time before we got here." 

Nate almost gasped.  It was like an evil curse thrown by a witch with a mean sense of humor.  Get three people in a room and talk about bands and up comes one of Cooper Stanfield’s girlfriends.

He’d been 15 when he saw his dad and Stevie Holloway together in the men’s room at that photo shoot.  It was one of those things you see that you’re never going to unsee no matter what kind of mental bleach you use.  At the time he just froze.  Now he would have thrown whatever he had at hand at them.  Since they weren’t wearing much in the way of clothes almost anything would have left a nice bruise.

"What’s the matter with you?" he demanded. "Don’t you know who Stevie is?”

The three of them stopped and stared at him.  Eva didn’t move. Alice sat there  open-mouthed and speechless. 

“I said don’t you know who she is?!  It’s bad enough that fucking Woody is at the top of the list, but there’s no way Stevie should be on it at all!”

Dev, looking stunned and then angry, glared at him then turned his attention to his girlfriend.

 "Nate means that Stevie Holloway is my mother.  She might help out with a benefit but she’s not going to join Nate’s band.“  He glanced up at Nate and then back at Eva.  "Nate’s fucking COLLEGE band.”

Eva pulled back from the computer and glanced around nervously.  "Oh.  I didn’t know she was your mother.  I didn’t know Stevie was that old so I didn’t make the connection.  I should have asked  I’m sorry.“

Nate tightened his grip on the table’s edge.  Cut it out, he told himself. Don’t start something by acting weird. Let it go.  "Yeah okay no big deal.  You know what, I think we’re done.  I’m going to have to kick everyone out early tonight - Eric’s run into a thing. A problem.”

They got up and pushed the chairs around.  Eva silently pocketed her flash drive.  Dev got in front of her, visibly furious.  “You get your own drummer if you can find anyone wiling to put up with your shit. We’re out of here.”  

Nate didn’t move, silent, letting them move past him. He thought Alice might stick around but she left too. 

He went out on the fancy front porch and leaned on one of the fancy columns.  His mother had picked out the place. He’d pretended to love it, didn’t make as good a show as Eric did, and she probably knew they didn’t care, but it was okay. She seemed happy. She’d been struggling for years to make his dad happy, and it didn’t seem to work most of the time, so it felt good to see her happy. 

Where the hell was Eric with his car?

Easing his cell out of his pocket in case Eric called again, Nate set it down carefully on the steps next to him. He ran his fingers across the cell’s cracked screen to make sure it hadn’t cracked even more.  He always broke things.   Keyboards.  Guitars.  Stuff in the kitchen.   He’d started trying to watch himself around fragile things but somehow a lot of them still broke. 

He was breaking his band, too.

But here, finally, was his brother. The relief he always felt when his twin came back briefly flooded him. At least he hadn’t broken that. 

Eric parked the car, got out, slammed the door and stood leaning against the rear fender.  He glanced around, looked up at the house, down the street, then down at the ground.  It was too dark to tell if anything serious was wrong with him, he wasn’t bleeding, but something was wrong.

“Everybody gone? I expected a party.”

“Nobody’s here and it wasn’t a party. Something’s wrong, what’s wrong? You run into some kind of trouble?”

His brother stretched his shoulders and walked away from the car.  "I’m good, just wiped. The trip was a bitch.“ 

They headed toward the front door, climbing the steps side by side the way they’d done since they were little kids who matched footsteps on the stairs at home.  It became a habit.

"I need a beer before I get into it but she ran off to Jimmy’s house and had her usual breakdown. Get this though, Gemma Wilson was there and Rayne got into a fight with her. I had to get between them and basically shut Gemma up to stop it.” 

“That’s all that happened?  She got into it with Gemma?  That doesn't sound like something that would knock Rainie down.”

Eric strode across the room avoiding that damned column, heading for the fridge. “I know but she was crying.  I wasn’t sure she was going to be able to drive back.  I followed her home to make sure.” He paused and added quietly, “Jimmy’s sister Remy was there.”

All right, that clarified pretty much nothing but it fit his sister’s general reaction to everything. Cry over it or annihilate it.  Or get drunk and contemplate one of the above, then go ahead and annihilate it.  He didn’t know what Jimmy’s sister had to do with anything but let that slide. 

Eric took another long gulp of Guinness and leaned back and very calmly and without looking at him said, “I’m going to take a break. I’m not going to be in the middle of this anymore. I'm getting out of here for a while.”

Confused, surprised, wondering if something happened today to cause this, or if he’d done something bad enough this time to chase him away, Nate asked, “You mean take time off like a vacation?  The semester’s just starting, the first classes start next week.”

Eric set the empty beer can down on the table and shook his head.  "I’m dropping out.  I don’t want to do any of this, none of it, not the classes or the family or anything related.  I want to get away from all of it, everything. There’s no problem, we’re okay, I want to do something else, that’s all.“

What… 

Stunned, confused, struggling with guilt - he’d been an ass, he’d always bullied Eric, he’d ruined his twin’s life when he jabbed that stick in his ear when they were six years old, he shouldn’t have pressured him to do that paper on art - Nate watched him get up and go up the stairs.  Hopefully, he asked, "Is this about a girl?”

“You would come up with that.” Eric glanced down then kept on going. 

Eric kept on climbing the stairs.

“So okay, you’re going to take a break, not for any particular reason, just a break.”

In a quiet voice, his twin responded, "It’ll be all okay Nate. We’re brothers and that’s never going to change.”