Clearly, she was going to have to toughen up some over the next two days.
Saturday lunch was always a bitch. Konigsburg was full of tourists on the weekend and Saturday was the day they all decided to have lunch out in “the country,” or as close to the country as they could get without having to eat chicken fried steak.
Joe had described the Wine and Food Festival competition to the kitchen staff that morning before they started service. He still wasn’t satisfied with the menu he and Fairley had come up with, although it tested well when he’d tried it out one evening. It was okay, but conservative. He had a feeling this competition was going to be won by flash.
He was hoping Jorge or Leo or Darcy might have some suggestions. Fairley had given him a sour look, indicating his own displeasure with that idea, but Joe didn’t particularly care. Fairley was definitely beginning to grate.
If he hadn’t been a great sous chef, Joe might have moved him on. But the number of returned plates had dropped to a fraction of what they’d had before. Fairley might be a prick, but he was an efficient prick. As an expediter, he was first rate. And he could step in and cook on the line during a crunch.
Darcy suggested trying the produce from a new herb farm for an appetizer salad. Fairley sneered, Leo grimaced and Jorge went back to his station in silence. Par for the course these days. He stood watching MG for a couple of minutes just to take his mind off the crap around him. She’d told him she might be a little late getting back tonight because she had a couple of errands in town. But at least she hadn’t cancelled, which would have made it a perfect shitstorm of a day.
If lunch was busy, dinner was slower than usual. A lot of the tourists had headed back home and others were probably having dinner in town. The inn’s guests usually had dinner at the Rose either Friday or Saturday, but it looked like most of them had headed for town too. Joe worked sauté and grill, Fairley expedited, Jorge did pasta and cold plates, but none of them were all that busy.
Darcy wandered in a little after eight.
“What are you doing here?” Joe asked. Since she worked breakfast, Darcy was usually gone by four.
She shrugged. “Wanted to check on some stuff for brunch tomorrow.”
“Should be okay. Use the salmon from Thursday for kedgeree. And there’s country ham.” Normally he ran brunch himself since it was Fairley’s day off, but he figured Darcy might as well get her hand in. Eventually she’d be running a kitchen of her own somewhere.
“Right.” She nodded. “So you going to keep open tonight until nine?”
Joe sighed. “Probably not if it stays this slow. Might as well start cleaning up—maybe close at eight thirty if Kit’s okay with it. We got some cheese plates in the walk-in if the guests want anything later.”
“You ought to go over to Oltdorf if you get off early. Interesting club over there.” Darcy’s voice was bland—maybe too bland. Something was up.
He raised an eyebrow. “Yeah? Maybe we’ll go there later.”
“You need to go there before you pick up MG.” She gave him a level look.
What the hell?
“Why?”
“Go now. Trust me. You’ll be glad you did.” She turned and headed for the walk-in.
He stood staring after her. Oltdorf was maybe fifteen minutes from the inn, a little wide spot in the road with a bar and a post office. He assumed she was talking about the bar, but why he was supposed to go before he picked up MG was a mystery.
Still, it was an intriguing mystery. And so little was going on, Fairley could probably cook and expedite at the same time. Joe stepped back from the stove, untying his apron. “I’m going to check with Kit, but chances are we’re going to close early. Better have Dietz start putting stuff away so Placido and the boys can clean up.”
Fairley barely nodded, busy at his computer.
Twenty minutes later, Joe was out the door and driving toward Oltdorf. When he got there, the club still didn’t impress him—a large open building that looked like it had been a lot of things over the years, none of them exciting.
The front part of the building held a couple of drinkers and several empty tables. He could hear music from the back. Either a jukebox or live, but given that it was the Hill Country on a Saturday night, he’d bet on live. He moved through the door and into the crowd.
Most of the benches beside the long tables were full, with a line of standees along the wall, drinking longnecks. Some kids were playing in the yard at the side, their shrieks occasionally floating through the open windows. A singer was propped on a stool at the front of the room, her guitar balanced on one knee. The crowd wasn’t entirely quiet, but they seemed to be paying attention to her, and from what he could hear, Joe decided they were right to do that. She was good.
He grabbed a longneck out of a tub of ice and passed his money on to the bartender, then found a spot to lean where he could watch. So far he couldn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t have brought MG along—she’d probably have enjoyed it, given that the singer knew what she was doing.
He leaned back to take a swallow, turning his full attention on the stage, and almost choked on his beer.
For a couple of seconds he wasn’t entirely sure it was MG, although in reality there wasn’t too much doubt. She didn’t look like the version of MG he knew. Her green eyes seemed huge, her lips a bright coral. She looked like she was wearing more make-up than usual. Her red-gold hair glowed in the lights. Even her clothes looked like a costume—black jeans, shiny black shirt with red embroidery, white tank underneath. Her hand moved across the guitar in a wild open-handed strum. And then there was her voice.
He’d only heard her sing once, when they’d been dancing. And that hadn’t been singing so much as sort of glorified humming. Now her voice filled the hall. She was singing a song he vaguely recognized, about going back to “my same old used to be.” A couple of people up front were dancing, a kind of slow two-step. MG grinned at them as she sang. Some people in the crowd seemed to be singing along, at least on the choruses.
He stood transfixed, his beer hanging limply from his fingers, trying to figure out what the hell was going on and how he felt about it. If she could do this, why was she raising chickens? Why was she working in his kitchen? Was it all some kind of stupid joke?
He blew out a breath. Maybe she was just starting out. Maybe she’d never performed before. But as he watched her move her fingers over the guitar, he knew that wasn’t true. She knew what she was doing—exactly what she was doing, in fact. She played to the crowd. She handled her guitar like a pro. She was clearly doing something she’d done before, and done lots of times at that.
She was a singer. A very good one.
The song ended and the crowd burst into applause. Someone whistled from the back of the room and he heard stamping feet. A short guy in a cowboy hat walked out on stage, grinning as he clapped along. “MG Carmody, everybody,” he yelled. “Ain’t she great?”
MG smiled at the crowd and at the short cowboy standing beside her. Something tightened in Joe’s chest.
“She’s gonna be back next week,” the short guy crowed. “Y’all come back and hear her next Saturday night. Now I’m gonna pass that bucket around one more time, and y’all just show her how much you appreciate her music.”
One of the kids who’d been picking up empty beer bottles from the tables reappeared with a galvanized tin bucket. Joe watched the crowd drop in dollar bills and fought the urge to peek at how much the take was. At least she wasn’t performing for free. He pushed himself to his feet and headed for the parking lot, dropping his almost-full beer bottle on a table as he passed.
He found MG’s battered Kia sitting under a light pole in the parking lot. Sooner or later he’d have to try to figure out why the hell Darcy had decided to blow the whistle on her, but at the moment, he needed to talk to her himself. He tried to figure out exactly how he felt right now. Pissed? Hurt?
No, more like confused. Once he got it all sorted out, then he could figure out how else to feel, but right now confused was it.
He leaned back against the car, folding his arms across his chest. He figured it wouldn’t be long before MG finished up her business inside and headed to her car. After all, she had a date tonight.
MG stuffed the roll of bills into her guitar case. She didn’t bother to bring a purse when she played at Dewey’s place, and there was no way she could cram the money into her pocket, not the way these jeans fit.
By a rough count, she’d made around one-fifty tonight. Not bad, although not as much as she’d made in Nashville. Of course, the Nashville kind of money depended on her being able to pretend to be someone else, and it hadn’t lasted very long. Now she needed to figure out how she could go on balancing a career as a singer with a career as a kitchen slave without either falling asleep in the kitchen or being too tired to perform well late at night.
At least tonight she’d get some sleep. Eventually. She smiled to herself. She’d need to give Joe a call before she went back to the inn.
She rounded the corner of the building, heading toward her car in the parking lot, and stopped cold. Somebody was leaning against the car. A very large somebody. She took a deep breath, trying to calm her racing heart, and took a closer look.
And recognized him. Of course. She should have seen this coming.
I will kill Darcy Cunningham.
She swallowed hard, then managed to paste on a wildly insincere smile as she walked closer. “Hi.”
He nodded, giving her a half smile. “Evening, Ms. Carmody.”
She unlocked the car and put her guitar in back. “I guess you want to talk about this, but could we do it somewhere else? I swear I’ll tell you anything you want to know, but I’d like to get out of the parking lot.”
“Sure.” He pushed himself away from the car. “Why don’t you come back to my place? I have a feeling this could require a beer, and no offense, but I’ve got better beer than you do.”
“Right.” She blew out a breath. “I don’t suppose you’d let me change first?”
He shook his head. “I want a closer look at your current version before you do that. I can drive you back to your place later if you want.”
“Okay. I’ll follow you.”
“Right.” He turned toward his truck, then looked back. “One question—should I be mad about this? Because right now I’m not.”
She closed her eyes for a moment. “You’ve got a right to be mad at me for taking so long to tell you about this, but I wasn’t trying to keep anything from you. I just didn’t know how to go about it exactly.”
He shrugged. “Okay. I’ll buy that. For now.” He turned toward his truck again, while she got into her car.
The drive back seemed a lot longer than the drive over, but that was partly because she was trying to work out some kind of coherent story to tell him.
I used to be a small deal in Nashville? Once upon a time I thought I was going to be hot stuff? Then I found out how lukewarm I really was?
She followed Joe up the drive to his cabin, parking in the spot next to his. For a moment, she wondered if she should leave the Martin in the car, but again, that really wasn’t much of a question. Without the Martin, she was out of business. And the case held her take for the evening.
Joe watched her stride up the walk, her guitar case in her hand. “I don’t want to leave it in the car,” she explained.
He shrugged, then opened the door for her. She couldn’t tell if he thought bringing the case inside was a
faux pas
. If so, he could add it to her tab. She put it next to the couch in his minuscule living room.
He stared at the case for a long moment, then glanced back at her. He shook his head. “Enough. I want to know what’s going on. I
need
to know what’s going on.” He stepped back into his minuscule kitchen and opened the refrigerator door, emerging with a couple of bottles of beer. “Here,” he said, handing her one. “Sit down while I open these and then start wherever you want to. Maybe beginning with the basic question—What the hell are you doing here?”
She sighed, dropping down on his couch. “I’m trying to build a life for myself. I’m a chicken farmer moonlighting as a singer. Or I’m a singer moonlighting as a chicken farmer. Take your pick.”
“Why?” He took a healthy swig of his beer.
“Because I’m not sure I’m good enough as either one to do that and nothing else.”
Joe stared at her, holding his bottle loosely. “Okay, that’s a crock,” he said finally. “You’re a smokin’ singer. I may not know much about the music business, but I know a great singer when I hear one. So what makes you think you’re not?”
MG took a sip of her beer. Joe was right: it was a lot better than the stuff she usually drank. Maybe that would make this story easier to tell. “I used to be a singer-songwriter. I worked in Nashville for a couple of years.”
Joe nodded. “Okay. So?”
“So. I was doing all right. I got my stuff on a couple of albums by other people, but nothing big. I thought it was pretty good, though. So I signed with this manager, a guy who’d worked with a lot of singers who’d made it to the big time.”
Joe narrowed his eyes. “And that wasn’t a good thing?”
She shrugged. “Well, it was and it wasn’t. I mean he got me booked into bigger clubs than I’d been able to do on my own, places where they actually paid me a percentage of the take instead of passing the hat.”