ONE
I’ve got bad news in my pocket, Charlie Remick thought.
He closed his eyes and steadied himself against the load-bearing beam next to the soundboard. When he opened them, the world had righted itself, or seemed to. It was hard to tell in the darkness.
Jimmy, the guy running the soundboard, must have noticed the sudden change in Charlie’s weather and leaned over to clap a friendly hand on his shoulder. He asked Charlie if he was all right. Shouted it, really. The crowds at Brooklyn Steel never got big enough to achieve a chest-rattling roar, but tonight they were in fine form, whooping and hollering and clapping and whistling enough to beat the band … so to speak. The band wasn’t onstage yet.
Charlie nodded at Jimmy, forced a lopsided smile, and said he was all right.
He gripped his phone through his pocket. It was still buzzing with incoming text messages. He ignored it—or tried to—and decided instead to applaud with the other concertgoers, but there was something other than the bad news that made him uneasy—something that crept up his arms and forced the hair on the back of his neck to attention.
Dread, Charlie figured.
Or maybe something more sinister.
He sensed it, only for a moment—the way someone will catch a whiff of an oncoming storm in the air on a cloudless day—and then it was gone. Something big had been set into motion and he had been dragged aboard, an unwitting passenger along for the ride. He only wished he knew where he was being taken.
His pocket buzzed again.
Onstage, the lights went up—a cool mixture of blue and green—and the crowd maxed out the dial. The band took the stage, smiling and waving sheepishly as the applause reached a fever pitch, and when Joey Banes—the rail-thin singer of the Mightier Ducks—grabbed the mic and said hello, he blushed openly as three hundred (and counting) smiling faces answered him.
Charlie stood in his little spot next to the soundboard, arms crossed coolly over his purple corduroy blazer, eyes trained on the stage, looking every bit like the A&R man he was. Seth Larson, the Ducks’ drummer, gave the wing nuts on his cymbal stands a cursory—and entirely unnecessary—tightening. Charlie saw this and sighed. The wing nuts were already tight. Seth knew that. They had been tight at sound check and they were tight now. The kid simply didn’t know what to do with himself while the other guys fished picks from their pockets and plugged in their guitars.
Soon Seth would learn what all drummers eventually learn: just sit there and do nothing until you’re ready to play. Fidgeting with your cymbal stand doesn’t make you look like a pro, it makes you look nervous. And Seth looked nervous. They all did.
Charlie wished he could smile. These were the moments he loved. But the bad news in his buzzing pocket wouldn’t let him. With a decisive whip of his wrist, he pulled out his phone and powered it down. He hoped doing so would ease the invisible vise around his chest, but just before the screen went black, his eyes caught the text message that started this whole nightmare and the grip around his lungs tightened even more.
The text message.
The bad news.
Hey guys. Dad passed away last night.
His heart skipped a beat, then after a brief lull in his chest, hammered heavily on the return swing. He shook his head, trying to clear the words from his mind, but they remained—floating aimlessly behind his eyes, the way the sun will burn a ring into your closed eyelids on a bright day.
Hey guys. Dad passed away last night.
A loud squelch from the house speakers forced the crowd to cover their ears, and Charlie shot Jimmy the sound guy an icy glare. Jimmy merely responded with a whaddya gonna do shrug and dipped one of the faders on the mixer. Onstage, Joey Banes was having trouble plugging his cable into the output jack of his Strat. His hands were shaking badly.
“Jesus Christ, Joey,” Charlie mumbled impatiently. “Act like you’ve been here before.”
Jimmy the sound guy shot him a quizzical look. “You sure you’re all right, man?”
Charlie didn’t respond. He was embarrassed that he’d been heard. Joey Banes was a good kid. Seth, too. They were all good kids. And this was a big night for them.
So give them a minute for chrissakes, Charlie told himself. You’re just stressed. Stressed and worried and feeling guilty because it’s been five years since—
A wave of supportive cheers erupted. Joey had finally managed to plug his guitar in. He blushed again, giving them a bashful wave, and Jimmy the sound guy pushed the fader back up.
Charlie relaxed, but only for a moment.
Because the words were still there …
Hey guys. Dad passed away last night.
… hiding in his pocket …
Hey guys. Dad passed away last night.
… and with each subsequent buzz of his phone, more words were coming.
Which of his sisters had written the initial text? he wondered. He’d forgotten to look. Was it Susan or Ellie? And what’s more—he felt a pinch of anger now—who broke that kind of news over a text message?
It could have been either of them, really. Susan had always been a bit robotic in the emotional department and would no doubt prefer to break such news impersonally. Eleanor, on the other hand, never would have been capable of relaying such terrible words out loud without breaking into incoherent sobs, so a text message would be the more sensible—and efficient—approach.
Where was Ellie now? he wondered. San Francisco? New Orleans? El Paso? Was she back home already?
Charlie had always gotten along with his older sister, Susan, but he and Ellie were thick as thieves, and had been since the day they were born eleven minutes apart. They not only looked alike and talked alike, they had nearly identical track records when it came to their dismal dating life. They had their fair share of differences, of course. Ellie was a nomad, having lived in ten different cities in the past seven years. Charlie had lived in only one, and hadn’t planned on a second. Ellie was also a crier, and Charlie wasn’t. He wasn’t emotionally blocked or out of touch with himself. He felt his feelings like everyone else. He just didn’t cry. In fact, he could only recall two moments in his life that had moved him to tears. The first occurred while watching The NeverEnding Story for the first time (the memory of Artax the horse sinking into the Swamps of Sadness still severely bummed him out), and the second occurred while his mother’s casket was being lowered into the ground.
Two perfectly good reasons to cry as far as he was concerned.
And now here he was, presented with yet another perfectly good reason, and he couldn’t manage a single tear.
In fact, he began to laugh.
He couldn’t help it. It was too perfect.
Raymond Remick had died and people around him were cheering.
The timing was too on-the-money to ignore. If Charlie hadn’t been certain that such a thing was impossible, he might have suspected that his father had planned the whole thing.
One last wink of the eye from the old man as he passed from this world into the next.
Up onstage, Joey turned to his buddies, shared a quick nod, and then kicked into their first song, a real scorcher called “Olivia Quinn.” Charlie’s eyes drifted to the banner hanging above the stage. Emblazoned upon the vinyl in neat type were the words SONY BMG WELCOMES THE MIGHTIER DUCKS.
Charlie sighed. They would need to change their name before the record came out. It was a conversation he’d repeatedly kicked down the road for the last few months (he didn’t like to ruffle feathers during the signing process, especially since he’d already lost too many would-be signees to Sub Pop and Hardly Art and 4AD—labels that offered less money but more credibility than his current employer).
If it was done tactfully, Charlie should have no trouble convincing the band that names like the Mightier Ducks never stood the test of time. They were meta and stupid and only funny the first time you encountered them (if they were ever really funny at all), to say nothing of the fact that Charlie was in no mood to spend the next two years sparring with the Walt Disney Company over parody law, only to suffer a public loss and have to change the name anyway.
None of that mattered now, of course. The name change was a problem for tomorrow.
Tonight, Charlie had his own problem to deal with.
He let his hand drift once more to his pocket. His phone had stopped buzzing.
That meant that Ellie and Susan had graduated from text messages to a phone call, and Charlie was now out of the loop.
And there was nothing worse than that.
He spun around and eyed the path to the bathroom, but knew there wouldn’t be enough privacy in there. Brooklyn Steel had a bad habit of employing a bathroom attendant, and Charlie had no desire to read the details of his father’s death while an aging hipster looked on, hoping to sell him a two-dollar pack of Juicy Fruit.
Instead, he made his way toward the stage. There would be plenty of privacy in the green room, and even if there wasn’t, he could always kick people out. He hated power moves like that, but such were the perks of the A&R man.
The crowd was dense, but Charlie had perfected the art of the weaving walk, and as he approached the side of the stage, he flashed the laminate around his neck. This was more of a courtesy than it was a necessity, as the security team at Brooklyn Steel all knew him well by this point. Antoine, a beefy Belgian whose pectoral muscles tested the tensile strength of his black SECURITY shirt, shot him a brief smile and let him pass.
Once through the gate, Charlie turned and peeked out over the stage.
The view never ceased to exhilarate him. It was one thing to watch a band from the darkness of the crowd, packed and sweating in a throng of bodies. It was something else entirely to watch the crowd from the stage. A sea of faces, bathed in light, gazed up at the Mightier Ducks as they plowed their way through their soon-to-be first single, and although none of them were looking directly at Charlie—not that they could see him back there anyway—he still felt the rush of their eyes on him. And it felt good.
He allowed himself a few more seconds to sponge up a bit of vicarious glory, noted that the high E string on Joey’s guitar was a little flat (nothing he could do about that now), then made his way through the VIP section, which was mostly populated by roadies and girlfriends at this point. The groupies wouldn’t start showing up in earnest until the record had been out for a few months. After exchanging a few brief handshakes with the Sony brass, Charlie made his way into the green room and shut the door behind him.
The space was empty, and he was grateful. That meant he wouldn’t have to kick anybody out.
Luke the Shithead loved kicking people out.
He probably kicked his own mother out of the delivery room ’cause she wasn’t wearing a laminate, Charlie thought darkly, then switched on his phone.
He had thirty-eight missed messages.
With a flick of his finger, he scrolled back to the beginning of the thread.
Once again, he was met with the cataclysmic text.
Hey guys. Dad passed away last night.
It had been Susan who sent it.
Her next message—which Charlie was now seeing for the first time—did little to soften the blow.
Copyright © 2023 by Scott Leeds