Authors: K.T. Hastings
Jake took a step toward her and reached for her hand. She pulled it away and put it in her pocket.
“I love you, Jake," she said, “But I don't like you very much right now. It's not just about Janelle either. This wasn't even about her, I don't think. It's about you telling me what I can and can't do, even with my own body. You want to hold me back, and that's not okay with me.”
With that, she turned around abruptly and walked back toward the restaurant. Jake followed her inside and tried to put on a face of reconciliation to show the other people seated at the table.
“It looks like you have a ride," he said to Janelle.
Janelle squealed with delight and jumped out of her chair to hug him. Then she turned to Brandee and said, “You've made me happier than I've ever been. I don't know how to say thank you, Brandee.”
“You'll thank me when you're lugging equipment on and off the stage tomorrow. We're going to make you sweat, missy”
Janelle gave the blonde singer a snappy salute and said, “Aye, Aye Madame Captain. I'll report for duty whenever you say.”
The members of the newly-increased traveling party left The Ale House at about 12:30. Brandee dropped Janelle off at The Prospector Motel where she had made hasty reservations before the performance, with the admonition that she needed to be ready to go at 7:30. They had over 500 miles to go the next day and an 8:00 show to be ready for. She told Janelle that the first thing that she could do that would get her put on an early bus was to be late. 7:30 meant 7:30 sharp.
***
The Nissan purred its way back to The Rodeway Inn. The musicians kept to themselves, sensing that Jake wasn't in any mood for light conversation. Before Jake got out of the blue van, Bruce reminded him quietly that their van would be leaving town earlier than he was used to leaving. Jake nodded and assured them that he would be ready and waiting in the lobby at 5:45 AM
By the time Brandee was back in the room that she and Jake shared, the light was off and Jake had his face turned to the wall. He was either asleep or faking being asleep. Either way, it didn't concern Brandee. She suddenly realized that she was very tired. She fell asleep almost immediately and slept dreamlessly until morning.
***
Jake turned the alarm off quickly when it buzzed in the morning. He reset it for 6:30 and got up to take his shower. He had only been in bed for about 4 hours, and he hadn't slept much of that. He hoped to be able to catch some shut-eye in the Nissan.
One nice thing about being banished by your wife
, he thought. “At least it gets you out of driving.”
He went downstairs and, after a stop at the front desk, met the other members of his new traveling party. They went out the door that led to the parking structure, and walked up the ramp to their van. Diane turned the nose of the Nissan out of the parking garage and headed west.
Jake looked out the window at the windswept terrain and saw the sign that said, “The Beehive State Welcomes You to Utah”. His mind did a fast rewind and he remembered how different things had been just 46 hours earlier when he and Brandee had left Salt Lake City. It was incredible to him just how many things had occurred in those two short days.
At that time, no one except Suzi had known that she was going to have Bruce's baby. Jake remembered how everyone had seemed to come together when they had found out about that. Bruce, who until a short time before he met Suzi had been a confirmed bachelor, was now doting on her like a hen over brooding chicks. It had been quite a transformation. When Jake and Brandee had left Salt Lake City, he was still under the impression that she would be open to having a family with him. That whole discussion hadn't yet taken place.
He and Brandee had gone at one another in a way that they never had before. Hurt and anger had played out in harsher words than they had ever exchanged. Jake knew the time would come when he would need to ask Brandee's forgiveness for the way he had spoken to her outside The Ale House.
Then there was Janelle. Jake was sure that Janelle was just a distraction that Brandee was using to get back at him. Janelle herself was the least of his worries. Three or four days from now, she would be out of his life forever. He would use the time until then to get his head back on straight. Maybe Brandee would have mellowed by that time, but even if she didn't, he needed to get his emotions under control. He didn't want to lose Brandee over this. They had built a foundation too strong to allow this to break them up. Jake leaned his head against the window of the Nissan and drifted off to sleep.
***
Brandee was momentarily disoriented when her alarm went off. Jake always pressed the “off” button and made that horrible buzzing noise stop. Why was it droning on today? After about a half minute, though, Brandee remembered all that had transpired. She missed Jake's presence in the first moments of being awake, and hoped that he was learning his lesson. She quickly got ready to go and went downstairs to check out. When she got to the front desk, she found that Jake had already taken care of the exit procedure. He had told the man at the desk to have housekeeping not bother Room 211 until Brandee had turned in the key. Glad that she didn't have any paperwork to do that would slow her down, Brandee fired up the Sprinter and headed for The Prospector to pick up Janelle.
Actually, she didn't have to get all the way to The Prospector. She came upon Janelle walking up the sidewalk toward The Rodeway Inn. Brandee did a quick U-Turn and stopped beside the wide clean sidewalk that lined North 1
st
Street.
“Get in, Janelle," she said, opening the front door of the Sprinter.
Janelle clambered into the van's front seat and buckled her seat belt. She looked at Brandee and spoke her words in a rush.
“I got excited to go. I looked at the map in the phone book and knew that you were just a couple of blocks away. I wanted to surprise you and meet you there so you wouldn't have to come and get me.”
Brandee smiled at the younger woman. Janelle's face was flushed and her eyes were bright. Her hair was only partially combed, and her collar was turned under on one side. She looked to Brandee like a little girl with her first glimpse of what was under the tree on Christmas morning.
“I'm just glad you got up on time. You didn't have enough hours to get very much sleep.”
“I hardly slept at all, Brandee. I'm way too excited to sleep. This is just the best thing that's ever happened to me.”
Brandee nodded as she steered the Sprinter on to the on-ramp that would take them out of Grand Junction. She could tell that staying awake while she was driving wasn't going to be a problem with this live wire along.
“You're pretty excited to see your folks, aren't you?” she said.
For just a moment, Janelle couldn't figure out what Brandee was talking about. If Brandee hadn't been occupied with merging onto the freeway, she would have seen a completely blank look come over her passenger's face. Before Brandee could become aware of this, though, Janelle had regained her composure.
“I sure am. My sister and my mom will be really excited. My dad will be too, but he won't say as much. Men are like that.”
Brandee snorted at that. “Sometimes men say more than they should. When you want them to talk, they don't say a damn word. When you want them to listen, they won't shut the hell up!”
Janelle listened to Brandee, then reached over to touch her right arm. She knew that she needed to handle the next thing that she intended to say with some delicacy.
“I don't want you and Jake to fight because of me. I feel like he should be sitting here right now and I should be with the others if I'm going to be here at all. I can't believe how nice you are, but I don't want anything to be hard on you because I'm here.”
Brandee shook her head. When she did, Janelle lost concentration, seeing her blonde hair shimmering in the morning light. She snapped her mind back to what Brandee was saying.
“Jake needs to have some time without me so he can know how much he needs me,” the singer said. “That's how a man has to learn now and then.”
Janelle then fell silent, and the two young ladies rode in companionable silence as Brandee steered the Sprinter through the desolation that is eastern Utah.
***
Jake slept most of the way to Spanish Fork. Bruce shook him roughly when it was time to wake up.
“Hey! Pretty boy! Wake up! I'm hungry!” Bruce said into Jake's ear.
“All right, all right, I'm up! Holy God! Stop yelling at me! What a sight to wake up to!” Jake said when he saw Bruce within inches of him.
Bruce grinned. “I may not be pretty as a picture like you, but I don't snore like a damn freight train either. I don't know how your wife stands the racket! God, you sound like the Amtrak coming into Chicago!”
“I don't snore. Those are just healthy exhales. Where are we anyway?”
Diane answered, “I'll tell you if you two boys will stop fighting. You two are worse that Bruce and Suzi. I thought it was both of them but now I see that Mr. Jackson is the common denominator here, so I guess it's him.”
Suzi joined the conversation. “Damn straight it's Bruce. He'll argue with a wall if it looks like it might disagree with him.”
Bruce looked at Jake with mock horror, making the international “Blah Blah Blah” sign with his thumb against his four fingers.
“Can you believe the way they talk to me? I'm glad you're here. You can be my witness that I am abused to end by these two women. I should get disability or combat pay or something for putting up with these two natterers.” Bruce shook his head in exasperated indignation over his mistreatment.
“You're about to be a father, my friend," Jake said, throwing his arm around the shoulders of the older man. “My dad always told me that there are only two sentences that a man with a wife and a kid needs to know. He needs 'Yes dear,' for his wife and 'how much do you need?' for the kid. He can never go wrong if he remembers that.”
Bruce nodded sagely and looked in his pockets. “I need to remember to take notes from you, Jake. All of that wisdom and a pretty face in one package. I should kiss you on the lips.”
Jake couldn't get out of the van fast enough. He was followed out by the three musicians, the sound of their laughter chasing him outside.
“Keep that hairy face to yourself, old man," Jake said as Bruce unfolded from the seat of the Nissan. You're not wired right to be kissing this mouth.”
The four of them walked into Jaxie's and sat down for breakfast as Jake suddenly realized that he was hungry.
***
Interstate 70 parallels the old Cisco trail through that part of its run, and Brandee and Janelle could almost imagine what it would be like to be alone in the world out there. After about 15 minutes, Brandee broke the silence.
“Tell me a little more about you than I already know, Janelle. What makes you who you are?”
Janelle had always been the kind who didn't volunteer information readily. More than one person had been on the wrong end of one of her “mind your own business” outbursts. Even when she was very young, her teachers had a hard time getting her to open up. So it was a surprise even to her when a torrent of words rushed out of her mouth.
She told Brandee everything there was to tell about herself. Always before she had severely edited the stories that she told about herself, but not so in her release of information to Brandee Evans. She maintained that she was anxious to see her parents. After all, on a certain level that was true. Everything else, warts and all, sped from her mouth to Brandee's ear.
For her part, Brandee felt herself to be like a kindred spirit to the younger girl. She wished that she had done some of the more outrageous things that Janelle had done. She had no desire to do time in a detention center, but Janelle's “get outta my way!” persona displayed some of what Brandee had wanted to be when she was young.
Brandee had always felt like she didn't have time to be a kid when she was young. From the time that her father had met his untimely end, she had decided that she had to grow up and start being an adult. When she had been in San Francisco taking lessons from Racheal Geyer, there hadn't been any time to explore Fisherman's Wharf or get in trouble in Chinatown. She had been a driven young lady, but was now envying a life without care. To her, Janelle's stories didn't sound like the life of a troubled child, but a free spirit.
Janelle had never felt so good in her young life. Brandee Evans was actually listening to her. She felt like she could tell Brandee anything there was to tell, without being criticized or judged for what she said. Less than 2 hours into the trip, she had told Brandee how it felt being incarcerated at a young age. She told her how she had waited day after day for someone to say that they wanted to come visit her when she was on the inside. She described how empty it felt to watch other inmates (or “guests of Lane County”, as she laughingly called them) receive postcards and letters during mail call while she sat alone in the lunchroom, fighting a feeling of abandonment. Just being able to talk about all of this with Brandee gave her a sense of freedom.
Brandee and Janelle stopped at Jaxie's in Spanish Fork for lunch just before entering the suburbs of Salt Lake City. While they were having lunch, Janelle took a break from telling Brandee her life story to let Brandee tell her story of performing in front of a dead crowd at the USANA Amphitheater. Janelle was suitably appalled at how her idol had been treated by the Utah crowd.
“I can't believe that! We weren't anything like that in Laramie! You were rocking that place so damn hard! What a night!”
“I rocked the Amphitheater just as hard,” Brandee said, “And it didn’t seem to matter. It was like I was performing to a bunch of stiffs.”
Janelle thought that was the funniest thing she had ever heard. She laughed until she doubled over. Brandee patted her on the back to help her catch her breath.
“Hey, hey! Take it easy!” she told Janelle. “It's not worth hurling your lunch.”
That sent Janelle into renewed gales of laughter. She thought Brandee's sense of humor was a scream for sure, but it went beyond that. She thought that she understood what it was like to kick back with Britney Spears or Fergie, except that Brandee was more beautiful than the former and a better singer than the latter. She was dazzled by the very presence of Brandee Evans, and would have gladly choked anyone who would have tried to take this moment away from her.
“You want to split a piece of pie?” Brandee asked her. “I like the looks of the peach pie, but I need to be able to get in my clothes for the show. Half a piece won't hurt me.”
Janelle nodded without speaking. She suddenly realized that she hoped the server only brought one fork with the pie.
***
By the time that Brandee and Janelle had finished their pie, worked their way through the traffic tie-ups in Salt Lake City, and headed into Nevada, the Nissan was already at the venue for the show that night. Jake, Bruce, and Diane made quick work of the setup with Suzi acting as overseer for the operation. Jake left to see if he could find the venue manager and the light and sound tech for the evening. Bruce was chewing the last of a maple bar when Suzi and Diane approached him.