The Long Way to Austin

Chapter 1: Almost Famous

The windshield crack ran diagonally from the lower left corner to just above the rearview mirror, a fault line that had been spreading for three years and eleven states. Joanna Lyle had named it Gerald. She talked to Gerald sometimes on long drives between gigs, usually around hour six, when the highway hypnosis set in and the white lines started to blur.

"Looking sharp tonight, Gerald," she said, tapping the glass above the crack with one knuckle. "Really catching that sunset."

From the back of the van, buried under a sleeping bag and two guitar cases, Spence Tully groaned. "You're talking to the windshield again."

"I'm talking to Gerald."

"Gerald is a structural liability."

"Gerald is a conversation partner who doesn't snore."

Spence sat up, his red hair flattened on one side like a crop circle. He was thirty-five, six foot four, and folded into the back of the van like a lawn chair someone had given up on. He played guitar and wrote most of their songs and had the kind of face that women in dive bars described as "interesting," which was a polite way of saying he looked like a friendly scarecrow.

"Where are we?" he asked.

"New Mexico. Maybe."

"You don't know?"

"I know we're in a state. I'm pretty sure it's New Mexico because there's a lot of nothing and it's beautiful."

Spence crawled forward and peered through Gerald at the desert landscape scrolling past. Red rock, scrub brush, a sky so wide it looked like someone had photoshopped it.

"That's Arizona," he said.

"Same general vibe."

This was their life. Joanna Lyle and Spence Tully, founding and only permanent members of the Secondhand Prophets, a band that had been filling small clubs and not filling medium ones for the better part of two decades. They'd had a rotating cast of drummers — seven at last count — and a brief flirtation with a keyboardist named Doug who turned out to be on the run from a timeshare scam. They'd been reviewed in exactly one magazine, which had called them "persistently adequate," a phrase Joanna had considered getting tattooed on her forearm before deciding it was too many letters.

She was thirty-eight years old. She played bass. She owned the van, three instruments, a storage unit full of merchandise nobody bought, and roughly four hundred dollars in checking. She did not own a house, a retirement account, or health insurance, though she had once won a year's supply of beef jerky in a radio contest, which she considered a form of wealth.

The phone buzzed in the cup holder. Joanna glanced down and saw Carla's name.

"Hey, mama," she answered, putting it on speaker.

"Auntie Jo!" Two voices, overlapping. Nate and Maisie, her favorite humans under four feet tall. Well, Nate was pushing five feet now, but the point stood.

"Hey, monsters. Why are you on your mom's phone?"

"Mom's making dinner and she said we could call you," Maisie said. Maisie was seven and spoke with the confidence of a Fortune 500 CEO. "Where are you?"

"Arizona. Maybe New Mexico."

"You don't know?" Nate's voice, skeptical. He was eleven and had recently discovered skepticism the way some kids discover skateboarding — with total commitment.

"I know I'm somewhere gorgeous and I miss your faces."

"When are you coming home?" Maisie asked.

"Two weeks. I'll bring you a cactus."

"You can't mail a cactus," Nate said.

"Who said anything about mailing? I'm going to carry it in my bare hands across the desert like a gift from the gods."

Maisie giggled. Nate made a sound that might have been a laugh he was trying to suppress. Then Carla's voice came on, warm and tired the way it always was at dinnertime.

"Jo, stop promising my children desert flora."

"I would never. How are you?"

"Good. Tired. Nate has a science project due Friday that he hasn't started, and Maisie told her teacher that her aunt is a rock star, so now I have to explain what a bass player actually is."

"Tell them I'm basically the backbone of American music."

"I'll tell them you sleep in a van."

"Those two things aren't mutually exclusive."

Carla laughed. It was the laugh Joanna had known since college — since the dorm room they'd shared freshman year at the University of Colorado, when Carla was pre-law and Joanna was pre-nothing, already playing gigs in basements and skipping classes. They'd been best friends for eighteen years, which was longer than most marriages and certainly longer than Carla's, which had lasted four years before her ex-husband, Rick, had decided that fatherhood was more of a concept than a practice and relocated to Portland to "find himself," which apparently meant losing his children's phone number.

"Drive safe," Carla said. "Call me when you get to Flagstaff."

"Will do. Love you."

"Love you too. Don't pick up hitchhikers."

"Only the interesting ones."

She hung up. Spence was watching her with that look he got sometimes, the one that said he was about to be insightful and she wasn't going to like it.

"Don't," she said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to say something about how I light up when I talk to those kids and maybe I should think about what that means."

"I was going to ask if we have any more Doritos."

"Under the amp."

He rummaged. She drove. Gerald caught the last of the sunset and split it into two pink ribbons across the dashboard.

Two weeks later, Joanna was home — home being a generous term for the one-bedroom apartment above a laundromat in Denver that she'd been renting for six years. It smelled permanently of dryer sheets and someone else's fabric softener, which she'd come to find comforting. She was sitting on her couch, which was also her bed, eating cereal for dinner and watching a documentary about octopuses, when her phone rang.

It was a number she didn't recognize. A 303 area code — Denver.

"Ms. Lyle? This is Dr. Petersen at St. Luke's Medical Center. You're listed as the emergency contact for Carla Tejada."

The cereal bowl hit the coffee table. Milk sloshed.

"What happened?"

"Ms. Tejada was brought in this evening with a ruptured appendix. She's in surgery now. She's going to be fine, but recovery will be extended — we're looking at complications with infection. She asked us to call you about her children."

"Where are the kids?"

"A neighbor brought them in. They're in the waiting room."

Joanna was in her car — a 2009 Honda Civic with its own collection of personality quirks — in under two minutes. She drove to St. Luke's in twelve, which was technically a land speed record for that stretch of Colfax Avenue.

She found them in the waiting room. Nate was sitting very straight in a plastic chair, his jaw tight, his hands gripping a book he wasn't reading. Maisie was curled up next to him with her head on his shoulder, clutching a stuffed elephant named Professor Trunksworth.

"Auntie Jo!" Maisie launched off the chair and into Joanna's arms with the force of a small cannonball. Joanna caught her, lifted her, held her tight.

"Hey, baby. Hey. I'm here."

Nate didn't move. He looked up at her with eyes that were trying very hard to be adult and failing.

"Mom's appendix exploded," he said.

"I know. She's in surgery and she's going to be totally fine. Appendixes are basically useless anyway. Like the human version of a decorative throw pillow."

Nate almost smiled. Almost.

"Can we see her?" he asked.

"As soon as she's out of surgery. I promise. But right now, you're coming home with me, and we're going to eat something that isn't waiting room vending machine food, and everything is going to be okay."

She said it with a confidence she did not feel. She was a thirty-eight-year-old woman who couldn't keep a succulent alive. She was now responsible for two children.

But Maisie's arms were around her neck, and Nate was finally standing up, and there was no one else.

Carla's parents were in Portugal — her father had taken a teaching position in Lisbon two years ago, and her mother had followed. They were lovely people who sent the kids care packages and video-called every Sunday, but they were five thousand miles away and Carla's mother had a fear of flying that bordered on clinical.

Rick was — well, Rick was Rick. Wherever Rick was.

So Joanna drove the kids to Carla's house, a tidy two-bedroom bungalow in a neighborhood where people had actual lawns and didn't consider ramen a food group. She found the spare key under the garden gnome Maisie had painted to look like Beyoncé, and she let them in, and she put Maisie to bed with Professor Trunksworth and sat with Nate until he fell asleep, which took a long time because he kept asking questions she couldn't answer.

"How long will Mom be in the hospital?"

"I don't know yet. But I'll find out tomorrow."

"What if something goes wrong?"

"Your mom is the toughest person I know. She once ate gas station sushi on a dare and didn't even flinch."

"That's not the same as surgery."

"It's arguably more dangerous."

Another almost-smile. Then his eyes closed, and his breathing evened out, and Joanna sat in the hallway outside his room with her back against the wall and called the hospital.

Carla was out of surgery. She was stable. But there was infection, and they were talking about a week minimum, possibly two, possibly more if things didn't clear up.

"She's asking for you," the nurse said.

Joanna went to the hospital the next morning after dropping the kids at school — Nate at Ridgemont Middle and Maisie at Columbine Elementary. She'd packed lunches that were, she felt, reasonable approximations of what a responsible adult would provide: sandwiches, apple slices, and juice boxes. She'd also included a note in each one that said "Your mom is fine and your Auntie Jo loves you," which Maisie would treasure and Nate would be embarrassed by, which was exactly the point.

Carla looked terrible. She was pale and hooked up to things and her hair was flat and she still somehow managed to look like she was about to chair a meeting.

"You look great," Joanna lied.

"I look like death warmed over and you're a bad liar. How are my kids?"

"Perfect. Fed. At school. I packed lunches."

"You packed lunches?" Carla's eyebrows rose, which was clearly painful because she winced. "What was in them?"

"Food. The appropriate kind. I even cut the crusts off Maisie's sandwich."

"Maisie likes the crusts."

"She — what? Who likes crusts?"

"My daughter. She's weird. I love her."

Joanna pulled a chair up to the bed and took Carla's hand. It was cool and dry and familiar.

"How long?" Joanna asked.

"They're saying two weeks minimum. Maybe three. The infection is being stubborn."

"Okay. I've got this."

"Jo, you have gigs."

"I'll cancel them."

"You can't cancel them. You have that showcase coming up. The Austin thing. You've been talking about it for months."

"That's not for three weeks. I'll figure it out."

"You always say that."

"And I always do. Mostly. Sometimes. Look, your kids are my kids, okay? Not legally, obviously, because I would fail any background check, but in every way that matters."

Carla squeezed her hand. Her eyes were wet, and Carla Tejada did not cry, ever, not even during the divorce, not even during the Pixar movies that destroyed Joanna every single time.

"Thank you," Carla whispered.

"Don't thank me. Just get better. And tell me where you keep the laundry detergent because I've been looking for twenty minutes and I'm starting to think you hide it on purpose."

"Hall closet. Top shelf. Behind the towels."

"Why is it behind the towels?"

"Because Maisie tried to make a bubble bath with it last month and I had to steam-clean the bathroom."

"Fair enough."

Joanna called Spence from the hospital parking lot.

"I need to cancel the next week of gigs," she said.

"Jo. No."

"Carla's in the hospital. I've got the kids."

"I heard. I'm sorry. But we've got Albuquerque on Thursday, Tucson on Saturday, and Phoenix on Monday. That's three paydays we can't afford to lose."

"I know."

"And the Austin showcase is in three weeks. If we cancel these warm-up gigs, we're going into the biggest show of our careers cold. You know what happens when we play cold."

"We played a very solid set in Boise."

"You played the wrong song. Twice."

"It was a creative interpretation."

"Jo." His voice was serious now, stripped of the usual banter. "This is the one. Rialto Records is sending someone. If we blow this, we're done. Not 'we'll try again next year' done. Done done."

She knew. She knew it in the way she knew the frets on her bass, in the way she knew every mile of every highway between Denver and the Pacific. This was the shot. The real one. The one she'd been playing toward for twenty years in vans with cracked windshields and clubs that smelled like stale beer and broken dreams.

"I'll figure it out," she said.

"You keep saying that."

"Because I keep meaning it."

She hung up and sat in her car and stared at the hospital and thought about two kids who needed her and a stage that was calling and a life that had never once been simple.

Then she started the engine and went to pick up Maisie from school, because it was 2:45 and second graders wait for no one.