"Do you have to tell them about your last job? Can't you just go in with your certificate --"
Her right hand chopped air. "Small town. You know every musician in this piss-ant burg, right? Played gigs with most of them, one time or another? Same thing with the architects and engineers. It's a frigging club, everybody knows everybody else. I've been blackballed. For cause."
Then she turned deadly calm. "What are you doing about a job? Or are you pulling a Maureen on me?" He could cut himself on her voice.
Maureen. Maureen used to live in this apartment -- eating half the food, drinking nine-tenths of the booze, sucking out about five times what she put in. Certified crazy, fit only for a part-time job at minimum wage. Dumping her in the Summer Country had solved a major problem for Jo. Kid even seemed happy there.
And now Jo saw him the same way?
"I've got cards up at all the music shops and clubs, spread word around that I'm available again. Give it a few weeks, I'll find some gigs."
"Available. Available? Fucking a-vail-a-ble?" Now she was shouting. "Mother of God, you think you're Adam fucking Lester? I'm slinging hash browns to hung-over drunks at five AM in fucking Dom's so you can sit home and wait for the fucking music fairy to tap you on the shoulder with her fucking magic wand?"
Normal conditions, Jo cussed maybe a tenth as much as Maureen. Profanity served as a psychic barometer with her, and right now the needle pointed at "Hurricane." David found himself backing away.
"Look . . . here . . . mister . . . man." She bit each word off, stabbing her forefinger at him. He expected blue flame to shoot from it. "Get yourself a fucking job. There's probably twenty guitarists in this hick town looking for work. Ten of them are better than you. You wait for the fucking music fairy, the Red Sox will win the World Series first. I like eating at least once a week."
Her hand scrabbled around on the table, as if searching for something to throw at him, some way to discharge the lightning she'd been building. "Fuck this!" She closed her eyes, gritted her teeth, and stood up. She grabbed her coat, wrenched the door open, and turned back. "Get a fucking job, already!" And the door slammed shut, with her on the far side of it.
God. Almighty. Damn. David squashed his impulse to throw the deadbolt and chain the door behind her. She'd just blow it open, anyway, if she wanted in to get a clear shot at frying his ass. He dropped into a chair, hands shaking, sweat chilling on his back. That woman could kill him.
She didn't even have to be mad at him. PMS or a bad day at the office, anything in the neighborhood could get scorched. He'd known that, back before the world twisted around him and dumped him into magic. But now her temper came with built-in tactical nukes.
His hands started the mechanical process of sorting the mail she'd dumped. Wet cold floppy mail, any of it he didn't drop directly into the trash bucket would need a spell on the radiator to dry out. Well over a hundred years and the damned postal service still hadn't figured out that mail satchels needed rain covers.
Ads. Ads. Bill, electrical service, David winced at that one, time to check into the winter shut-off laws. Credit card application, "transfer your balance," brought a wry snort. As if they needed that particular quicksand pit added to their swamp. Ads. Envelope with a PO Box return-address, Naskeag Falls, no other info. Probably an offer of investment advice. David almost tossed it unopened, then noticed the Elvis stamp and figured a stockbroker who pasted Elvis on his mail might at least be amusing.
Letterhead, Adam Lester Productions. Offer to buy nonexclusive rights to perform certain original songs, royalty schedule attached, with further offer that the principals would like the chance to review any future work with right of first refusal on an exclusive basis. Performances to be by Adam Lester and Ayisha Powell, with selected local musicians backing up.
What the fuck? David stopped, blinked his eyes, and read the letter through again. Songs? David had never written any songs. He wrote poems, when they forced themselves into his head, and he tended to keep them mostly to himself. Some members of Dé hAoine might have copies from when he'd lived with the band before he met Jo . . .
A handwritten note scrawled across the bottom of the page, "Call me when you get a chance -- Adam." A phone number followed, looked like a cell phone from the code.
He shook his head and frowned. Adam and Ish were Names, capital "N," big-money performers. Wicked good. They made a true musical fairy tale, guitar wizard and princess royal of the blues who had climbed out of the grungy Naskeag Falls bar scene and onto a world stage. The best set Dé hAoine had ever played was the time Adam had borrowed David's guitar, leaving him to sit and watch and tap his feet. That reel had been magic, true enough, but he hadn't played a note of it.
But Jo's blood warped the world around her. What she really wanted, happened. Like she'd said, Naskeag Falls was a small town and the music scene a tiny fraction of it. If you owned an instrument, you were family. Family gossip, family feuds, family ties you could lean on when life turned shitty. And, once or twice a lifetime, family connections that opened doors . . .
Adam had lived on the grimy end of it all for years, an army vet blinded by a head injury in the Gulf War. He'd worked the same bars, starved on the same
