His Secret Past

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Before he moved into Mulligans, Mason had never lived anywhere permanent. With his mom there’d been a string of trashy apartments and sketchy trailers. With Five Star he’d been a hotel nomad. He hadn’t had much furniture here at first, but after Christian moved in, he’d needed to fill the empty spaces. He’d hired a decorator because he hadn’t had the first clue about how to change a room into a home. He’d wanted Christian to feel normal and fit in, but Mason hadn’t known what “normal” looked like.

The couches and chairs were deep and comfortable, large enough to handle his tall frame and durable enough to resist the energetic boy Christian had been. The natural-cherry bookcases lining two walls were crammed with his books and CDs, Christian’s outgrown picture books and paperbacks, board games and puzzles.

Photos of him and Christian, their friends, Mulligans, everything he held close were framed in black metal and hung up on the third wall. He looked back to the screen when he heard the boy he’d been launch into the second verse.

“Stage Fright” was a cover but it suited his voice and had always set up the audience perfectly for Five Star’s own soaring ballad, “Live.” The screen flashed as the spotlight swung off him and out over the audience. In the brighter light, he caught a shadow and realized his son was standing behind him. He hadn’t heard Christian come in. He turned the volume down and the room fell abruptly quiet.

“You don’t think I’ve seen that before?” Chris stayed behind him.

Of course, Mason should have known Chris had seen the movie. But until that very second, yeah, he did think the kid wouldn’t have seen it. Sometimes parents were the dumbest people on earth, brains dulled by loving their stupid children too much.

“I never showed it to you.”

“It’s on Netflix.”

Was it too late to tighten the parental controls on Chris’s Internet connection?

He tried to think of something to say, but everything he came up with seemed awkward. He was half-afraid he’d blurt out something about ice cream again. Most of what passed for conversation between him and Chris these days was uncomfortable small talk strung together with uncomfortable silence, spiced up with occasional bouts of yelling.

He rolled his head on the couch cushion and saw that Chris hadn’t moved. “You want to sit?”

He was careful not to react when Christian came around the back of the couch and settled deep into the cushions next to him.

“Why are you watching it?” Christian asked. The movie ran on, Five Star’s music sounding small.

“I had a bad night. Zoning board. The neighbors put up a roadblock. Your friend Angel’s mom is the ringleader.”

“Roxanne Curtis?”

Mason held up a warning finger. “Do. Not. Say. That. Name.”

Christian grunted. “She’s just a woman, Dad.”

“Satan spawn,” he said, referring to Roxanne. Mostly.

Chris gestured toward the TV where the song was winding down. “So does this relax you?”

What was the word for the opposite of relax? “No.”

Christian kicked his sneakers off and moved the DVD case over so he could put his feet up on the table.

“I like this picture,” he said, holding up the Five StarRising movie box. “Sort of doesn’t leave you a leg when you complain about my hair, though.”

Mason surprised himself when he said, “I hate that picture. The whole band hated it.”

On the screen Five Star kicked into “Live.” His younger self was holding the microphone close, singing with his eyes closed. He used to hang on to the stand like that when the spins got bad.

“Yeah?”

“See how the stylist put me so far out in front it almost looks like the rest of them are in a different room? Pissed them off. None of them believed me when I said I didn’t care.”

“You guys fought a lot.”

“I was a lot younger than them. They were together five years before I started playing with them.”

“Your mom met them, right?”

Slept with David Giles. He hadn’t known that until later. His mom had been fifteen when he’d been born—barely thirty when she met David. “She was waitressing at a bar they played when their singer quit. She talked them into giving me a tryout.”

He shrugged, pushing aside his uncomfortable memories. “Guess you and I got the bottom of the mom barrel. Too young. Too poor. It must have sucked for her.” Not as bad as being her kid had sucked, but close.

“Too bad there wasn’t a Mulligans for you guys.”

“Yeah.” Not that she’d have applied anyway. She’d enjoyed her addictions—booze, men, risk—too much.

“Want to turn it back up?” Chris asked.

“No,” Mason said with no inflection. He didn’t think he could stand to have Chris in the room with that. Watching the parts onstage would be bad enough, but the rest…

“How come you won’t talk about it with me?”

“I tell you about it all the time.”

“Just the crap, the drugs and the scary stuff and the fighting.” Christian gestured to the TV. “We never talk about what that felt like. You and your guitar and the audience. When I watch that movie it’s like I’m seeing someone who’s not even you.”

“You’ve seen it more than once?”

“Dad. Every guy in America who’s in a band has watched it more than once.”

That was depressing—he’d been so careful to keep Five Star out of Chris’s life.

What could he say that wouldn’t make the kid even more determined to take his shot with his own band?

He must have hesitated too long because Christian leaned forward again and picked up the plastic sleeve holding Anna’s DVDs. “What’s this?” he asked. “City at War?”

“Someone recommended it.”

“Huh.” Christian finished reading the back and then tossed the disk back on the table. “So you’re not going to tell me why you’re sitting here in the dark watching a movie about yourself that you had to rent and a documentary about Toledo public schools.”

“Detroit, not Toledo.”

Chris looked at him directly for the first time since he sat down, and the familiar anger was back. “Whatever.” Before Mason knew what happened, his son was off the couch and halfway out the door. “You can’t ever let anything go, can you?” Chris spat before he left the room.

“At least I’m not always pissed off!” Mason shouted just as Chris’s bedroom door slammed. He clicked the volume back up and watched as Five Star scooped up seventy thousand fans crammed into the aisles at Giants Stadium and carried all of them along through “Live” and straight into “Beating Down the Door” and “Dirty Sweet.”

He had no idea what he should have said to Chris. That he’d never felt better than he had when he was onstage with those guys and those songs and his guitar? That he’d been so drunk most nights that he wasn’t sure what was real and what he’d made up? That he didn’t watch this video because it made him ache, literally hurt, with wishing he hadn’t missed so much of it? That he wasn’t sure he’d done a good enough job, made Christian strong enough to resist what he’d find out there? That he’d never forgive himself if he let his boy go before he was sure he’d done everything right to protect him?

He hit the remote, cutting the credits off. He punched the open button on the DVD player and slid City at War in.

A haunting violin piece played over the opening credits, black-and-white footage of an inner-city neighborhood and then what could easily have been Lakeland but was most likely a Detroit suburb. Kids’ faces flashed by, on the streets, reflected in the windows of a school bus, and in classrooms and school hallways.

Mason settled back into the couch, arms crossed, prepared to find flaws. Nitpicking would suit his mood right now. Unfortunately for him, Anna’s confidence had been on target. By the time the forty-five-minute film was over, Mason would have been prepared to write a check to support the school bond if it hadn’t already passed by a seventy-three-percent margin.

Why did it have to be this person making the movie? He wanted to say no. But what if she could help save Mulligans? What if everything he knew to do and Stephanie and the rest of his team knew wasn’t enough and he had turned down the offer that could have saved them?