A Fistful of Rain

“Home,” I said. “Sleep.”

“You sure you want to go home?”

“Don’t know what else my choices are. I mean, I either go home, or I never go home, right?”

“I’m just asking if you’re up to it.”

“I’m upper to it now than I was before I called you. Daylight makes it better, I think. I should probably do some shopping, get some groceries in.”

“I’ll keep you company.”

I glanced at him suspiciously. “Overprotective much?”

“Only when you let me.”

“Mikel.”

“Let me keep you company,” he said gently. “We’ll go shopping, I’ll go back to your place with you, I’ll look around, we’ll call the Scanalert people and tell them to turn your system back on. It’ll make me feel better.”

I thought about protesting, but didn’t really want to. I didn’t want him to see that I thought he was being really sweet, either, so instead I shrugged and headed back to my Jeep, telling him I wanted to go to Fred Meyer. He followed me down Sandy Boulevard, and when I checked in my rearview mirror, I could see him behind his wheel, watching my progress and the traffic, all the while talking on his mobile phone. He caught me looking at the light and gave me a grin.

I grinned back and shook my head. For all his many faults, I adore my brother.

He almost makes up for our fuck-awful parents.

We stopped by the bank first, so I could get some cash out of the ATM, and I checked all my accounts, not just my savings. It was the first time I’d actually seen my balance in months, and I was a little surprised at the numbers. According to my checking balance alone, I was maybe a very rich girl, indeed.

The machine only let me withdraw four hundred dollars, and I took it to the Fred Meyer on Broadway. Freddy’s is a mammoth combo-store, groceries and clothing and household supplies, and a couple of them even have electronics and jewelry departments, and I’ve never been in one when it wasn’t busy, no matter what time of day or night. Freddy’s also has the slowest checkers in the world, which doesn’t help things. But for one-stop shopping in the Portland metro area, it can’t be beat.

We were there about an hour, getting everything I needed or might need to reactivate my life at home. It would have taken less time, but I got cornered early in the cereal aisle by three teens, two girls and a guy who should have been in school. Either the news hadn’t broken yet or they hadn’t heard, because they immediately started looking for Van and Click, as if we all three did our shopping together.

I asked them their names and introduced them to my brother. We talked about how amazing Van and Click were, and then I told them that I had to get back home because it was past my bedtime. They laughed.

“You’re my favorite,” one of the girls told me. “You kick total ass.”

They went away, toward baking supplies. Mikel was smiling slightly.

“It’s not a thing,” I told him.

“You can be very nice when you want to be. Very gracious.”

“They’re not asking for much.”

“Suppose that depends on where you’re standing.”

I dropped two boxes of shredded wheat in the already full shopping cart. The baking supplies aisle was down below our position on cereal, and I could see the three kids picking out bags of chocolate chips. One of them was looking back at me, speaking to the others, and she waved when she saw my look, so I waved back, then turned away.

“I’m twenty-six,” I told Mikel. “I own a house, I could buy five or six others just like it. I own more guitars than I could ever need, more amps than I can possibly use, I’ve got a platinum American Express card life. I don’t have to look at the prices when I’m shopping for groceries at Fred Meyer, because they will never stock something I can’t afford.

“That’s all because people like them like Tailhook enough to pay eighteen bucks for an album, or eighty for a seat at a concert, or twenty for a forty-five-minute compilation of very bad, very overproduced music videos.”

Mikel was listening, his head down a little, as if to keep it closer to my own. When Tailhook had left on tour, we’d been popular, but nothing like we were now. Our third album, Nothing for Free, had just been released, and we didn’t have any idea how it would do. Certainly neither Click nor I had ever been stopped while doing our shopping. It had happened to Van, but only rarely, and only at home, because we were, by and large, a local band.

“Never bite the hand that feeds you,” Mikel said.

“Not even that.” I glanced back down the aisle, saw that the three of them had gone. “You want to know what that was all about?”

“They wanted to tell you how much they like you.”

“Yeah, but do you know why?”

“It’s a way of saying thank you?”

“That was about how they want to be my friend. They shake my hand and tell me their names, and I tell them mine, just to remind them I’m a real person, too, that we should act like real people act when they first meet one another. And then it’s small talk, weather, music, movies, shit like that.

“Then there’s the pause—and there is always the pause, Mikel—the moment when there’s nothing else to say, because they’re done, and they’re waiting for me.”

“To do what?”

“To say something like, hey, you guys seem totally cool, why don’t we go get a pizza together. Or, hey, you know what would be fun? Let’s go back to my place and watch DVDs. They want to be more than fans. They want to be special to me, and that’s when I offer them my hand again, and I say thank you so much for saying hello, and have a very good life. Most of the time, they go away happy.”

“Most of the time?”

I started pushing the cart again, heading to dairy. “Sometimes they don’t get the hint. Sometimes they get cranky—‘you wouldn’t be where you are without me.’ Or ‘you love all the attention, don’t pretend you don’t get off on it.’ But maybe ninety percent of the people who stop me, all they want to do is say, hey, thanks.”

“I couldn’t do it,” Mikel said, after a couple seconds. “I couldn’t keep it up.”

I was trying to decide between low- and nonfat milk. I went with the skim, placing it next to the cereal, so they could get used to each other’s company.

“You should see Van do it sometime,” I told him. “She’s very smooth, always smiling. I’ve seen her in a Virgin Megastore signing autographs for six hours straight, no breaks, no pauses. Always makes eye contact, always says, ‘May I sign that for you, please?’ and then always says, ‘Thanks so much for coming to see us.’ She’s better at it than I will ever be.”

“You seemed pretty smooth to me.”

“No,” I said. “But it’s nice of you to say so.”

We filled the back of my Jeep with the groceries, and when we got back to my house, I put the car in the garage. We unloaded the bags into the kitchen through the back door, and while I sorted and stored my purchases, Mikel took a wander through the house. I was still at it when he came back into the kitchen, and he picked up the phone and used his PDA to find the phone number for Scanalert, and I heard his half of the conversation. He had to give them his name and then a password—“Renderman”—to verify his identity, and then requested that they switch the system back on. He hung up happy.

“Done,” he said.

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. They just throw a switch or something.”

We finished with the unpacking, making light conversation. I finally remembered to ask about Jessica, and he told me that they had stopped seeing each other during the summer, that he was going with a girl named Avery now. I felt bad that I hadn’t known about the switch, and he told me about the new girl, and how she was a dancer, and how much he thought I’d like her.

“You need a dancer for a video, you should get her,” he said.