Sims moved the ice bag to his shoulder. He couldn’t remembering being punched or kicked in the shoulder and had no idea why it hurt so much.
“I swear to God,” he said. “I didn’t know she was married.”
“But she knew you were.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I hope you said nice things about me. Like how I cook your dinner and wash your underwear and take your kids everywhere they need to go.”
“Jackie, please. You have to understand. I was a mess yesterday. This really fucked-up thing happened at the memorial service.”
He told her about Heather Ferguson, the way she’d shoved him and cursed him in front of the coffin, in front of all those people, how he’d been kicked out of the funeral home and forbidden to go to the cemetery.
“Can you believe that? After everything I did for her. All those phone calls and hospital visits, all the time and energy I gave to that poor little girl. To get treated like I was the bad guy…”
Sims fell into a brooding silence. He wondered if he would ever see Heather again, how much time would have to go by before he could call and ask how she was doing. Maybe they could get together for coffee, he thought, maybe talk a little about what had happened, if she was feeling up to it. It would help to know what she’d been thinking, to have some kind of an explanation, if not the apology he deserved.
“I loved her,” he said, surprised not just by the words, but by the fact that he’d blurted them out, and the terrible realization that they were true. “And she broke my heart.”
Jackie didn’t say anything after that, didn’t even look at him. She kept her eyes straight ahead, leaning forward and squinting through the windshield as though she were driving through a blizzard. She seemed okay when they got home: she paid the babysitter, got Sims settled into bed with a fresh ice pack, and gave him another Percocet. Then she kissed him on the forehead with a little more tenderness than he might have expected.
“As soon as you’re feeling a little better,” she told him, “you’re gonna have to find someplace else to live.”
IT WAS harder than Sims anticipated to get a price quote on the SG. Mike’s uncle Ace — he was the famous ex-roadie, friend of Stephen Stills and Boz Scaggs, and lots of other notables — was suffering from early-stage Alzheimer’s, and he wasn’t always sharp enough to talk business. Mike said it was tough to see him like that; he’d always been bigger than life, an ageless, incorrigible hippie who rode a chopper and chased younger women well into his sixties. Now Uncle Ace was fading away at the Golden Orchard Assisted Living Community, surrounded by decrepitude, losing touch with himself and his hard-rocking past. He didn’t care about his guitar collection anymore; half the time he didn’t even recognize his favorite nephew.
“Used to be he had good and bad days,” Mike said. “But lately it’s more like bad days and worse days.”
Sims didn’t mind the delay; it gave him a standing excuse to stop by the store on his way home and ask if there was any news. Mike always seemed to happy to see him and was always up for a little jamming.
“You’re getting a lot better,” he’d tell Sims. “You must be practicing.”
It gradually turned into a regular thing, three or four nights a week. They’d grab a burrito from the truck, talk a little while they ate, then retire to the Inner Sanctum to play those amazing guitars through those vintage amps, as loud as they wanted. The store was pretty well soundproofed, and there were no neighbors to disturb in any case.
“Check this out,” Mike would say, and he’d launch into the intro of “Hey Joe” or “Texas Flood,” whatever song they’d decided to work on. “Is that sweet or what?”
Mike was a talented musician — he’d been playing in bands since he was twelve — and a patient, generous teacher. He guided Sims through a host of classic tunes — “Mannish Boy,” “You Shook Me,” “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” — stopping when necessary to expound on any theoretical or technical issues that arose. The amount of new information was overwhelming at times — the major and minor pentatonics, the chord inversions, the double stops and slurs and whole-note bends — but it was exactly what Sims needed, a musical boot camp, an intensive, ongoing tutorial in the art of blues guitar. He tried to formalize the arrangement a couple of times, offering to pay the going rate for lessons, but Mike wouldn’t hear of it, though he did let Sims buy the burritos and keep the mini-fridge stocked with beer.
When they were done, they would sit around for another hour or two, listening to Roy Buchanan and Buddy Guy and Hubert Sumlin, marveling at the precision and raw passion these artists brought to the music, and that indefinable something that made each one unique.
“Holy shit!” Mike would say when something really great happened, a blinding solo run, or a single, piercing note at the crucial moment. He sounded incredulous, even a little pissed off. “Motherfucker!”
It was usually pretty late by the time Sims left, and he always felt a little melancholy heading out to his car, partly because the thought of going home to the condo depressed him, but mainly because he felt bad for Mike, who wasn’t going anywhere. For the past six months, he’d been living in the store, sleeping on a couch in the back office, showering at a gym down the road. Talk about the blues, he said. He’d been out of work for two and a half years, ever since he got laid off from his IT job when the market imploded and everything went south.
His marriage fell apart a year later, though he insisted it had nothing to do with his employment situation. The real deal-breaker was the Chester A. Arthur facial hair he’d decided to cultivate in an attempt to cheer himself up. He thought his new sideburns-and-mustache combo looked pretty cool, but his ex-wife begged to differ. She said it creeped her out and refused to have sex with him until he got rid of it. Sims didn’t say so, but he could see her point. Mike’s muttonchops were bushy and reddish gray, with a disconcertingly pubic texture, and the pointy tips extended all the way to the corners of his mouth.
“What happened to the mustache?” Sims asked.
“I got rid of it,” Mike replied. “As a peace offering. But that wasn’t good enough for Pam.”
“You really got divorced because of your sideburns?”
Mike made an ambiguous bobbing motion with his head.
“We had some other problems,” he admitted.
“Did you ever go to counseling?”
“We didn’t have the right insurance. But I don’t think it would’ve helped much.”
Sims was curious because he and Jackie had recently tried couples counseling themselves. Jackie kept insisting that Sims had stopped loving her because she’d gained so much weight during pregnancy and hadn’t been able to lose it. In her mind, that was the key to everything — the reason why their sex life was so unrewarding, the reason why he never listened to a word she said, and the reason he’d fallen in love with Heather Ferguson, who was so much younger and thinner than she was. Sims kept trying to tell her that it wasn’t the extra weight that bothered him, it was her complete lack of interest in sex, her attitude of pained resignation every time he touched her. She said she only acted like that because of the way he looked at her, the disgust that he didn’t even bother to conceal.
“I can’t forgive you for that,” she told him. “All those years you made me feel like shit.”
They gave up after three sessions when it became clear that talking about their problems just made things worse. It was a relief to throw in the towel, or at least it would’ve been if not for the boys, and the knowledge that his relationship with them was broken, too, that he’d never get a chance to be the kind of father he’d hoped to be.