Page 44 of Faking It With the Grumpy Single Dad

Joe is quiet as I take a few minutes to locate a large box. I ignore his offer of help as I rip off the tape and fling off the cover to reveal a beat-up leather guitar case within. Kneeling down on the floor in front of it, I smile up at Joe.

“It’s my dad’s favorite guitar.”

Joe is wide-eyed. “Isabeau?”

I smile. He really is a fan of Schism. After all this time, he still remembers that my dad named his most beloved instrument after his grandmother, who passed away shortly before I was born.

“The one and only.”

I pat the floor beside me. Joe crouches down slowly, as if he isn’t sure he should be allowed so close to such an artifact.

With practiced fingers, I unlatch the case and carefully lift up the lid.

In a bed of worn, dusty felt the color of the night sky lies a 1961 Gibson Les Paul, restored and customized by my father to be the color of pure onyx. The shade of black is so deep and matte that many journalists used to joke that Jack Minton was making music with nothing but shadows.

“Wow,” Joe breathes.

I reach out and ghost my fingertips along the strings, which are terribly out of tune at this point. I could replace the strings and tune it myself, but Isabeau has laid in this case since the day my father died. For whatever reason, it wasn’t with him when he boarded that plane. He left it in Paris with me and Deb, promising to come back to histhree favorite girlsby the end of the weekend.

I swallow hard, remembering how it felt to learn why he never came home when he was supposed to. Why none of them did.

“So… you want to paint the living room black?”

Not for the first time, I’m grateful for Joe’s bluntness. A laugh breezes out of me.

“Just one wall, as an accent. The other walls, I want to paint white like the tuning pegs.”

Joe takes a moment to think about it, then begins to nod slowly. “It’s not something I would ever think of, but that could be very cool. Verychic, Poppy.”

I giggle. “Thanks. I don’t know how I thought of it. I almost forgot I had this guitar. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame hounded me for years, begging me to let them put Isabeau on display in their museum. Maybe I should have said yes, since I’m sure the fans would have loved to see it up close, but I couldn’t bring myself to let go of it.”

“Just because your dad was loved by so many millions of people doesn’t mean that you have any obligation to share him with everyone.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“It must have been strange to have a father like that.”

His comment is soft and inquisitive, an invitation for me to share more, but only if I want to. He’s not prying for information. Not the way that so many people did for so many years.

“It was definitely different,” I say, still gazing at the ebony guitar. “He was larger than life, even when it was just the two of us hanging out in the hotel suite in some random foreign city. He was just this fearless, passionate man who somehow managed to be everything to everyone, and still be my dad at the same time.”

“He sounds like he was a great guy.”

I smile. “I used to sit backstage and watch him perform with earplugs in because I loved watching him transform from the guy who reads me bedtime stories to the creature that shreds guitar strings on stage and screams into microphones in front of thousands. It always fascinated me, that duality. I thought he was the coolest person alive.”

Joe chuckles softly. “He was.”

I lightly punch his knee lightly. “Were you serious before? When you said you were a fan of him?”

He nods, his voice becoming reverent. “I remember first hearing them when I was a young teenager. Maybe middle school? It was like he was singing the things I couldn’t say, even though I was just a kid experiencing childish troubles.”

“Your troubles weren’t childish,” I argue lightly. “You lost someone important to you, too.”

Joe shrugs. “His songs really did help me with that grief, I guess. The loneliness, too. He had such an unapologetic way of describing emotions. I think he was probably one of the onlyrockstars in existence who was secure enough in his masculinity to admit that he cries.”

I smile wistfully. “I know. He was so easily vulnerable. He’d cry onstage and never cared about wiping away the tears.”

“And another thing is that—even though Schism rose to fame after my dad had already passed, I knew that he would’ve loved their music,” Joe says.

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