Page 37 of Reverb

This neighborhood had been rundown when Denver bought his house years ago. At the time, the house had been a fixer-upper that went for dirt cheap. Like everything else in Portland, though, the area was getting more expensive. The neighbors who had late-night screaming fights, grew weed in their backyard, and smashed beer bottles on the sidewalks were moving out, and nicer people were moving in. Those nicer people were definitely going to hate him.

I knocked, and Callie’s voice called to come in. It was a domestic Saturday-morning scene in here. Callie was in the kitchen, looking for something in a cupboard. She waved at me. Denver was sprawled on the sofa in his open-plan living room, a cup of coffee by his elbow and a notebook in his lap. Aside from the sofa and the TV, the rest of the room held Denver’s music collection, his stereo, and the equipment he hadn’t moved to our rehearsal space. An acoustic guitar sat on a stand. Binders were stacked on the floor. One of Denver’s flannel shirts was tossed in a corner. He was wearing plaid sleep pants and a T-shirt, his bare feet up on the coffee table.

“Morning,” Denver said.

“Hey.” I took my jacket off, unlaced my boots. I didn’t stand on ceremony with my bandmates—none of us did. We’d lived together on a bus for too long, including for the last ten weeks. Still, it changed things with a woman in the picture. I had to be a little polite.

“Want some coffee, Stone?” Callie asked.

“If you got some, yeah.”

“I’m pouring mine now.”

I walked into the kitchen. Callie wasn’t a bombshell, but she had looks that grew on you. She had dark blond hair—currently tied in a messy ponytail—and nice eyes. When she smiled, she lit up. She was quiet, like me, but she had a confident tilt to her chin and a sharp sense of humor. She was a talented pianist who taught piano lessons and played jazz at a club a few nights a week. She dressed modestly, but she probably looked pretty good under there. If she asked Denver to swim to Antarctica and bring her back a penguin, he’d put a jacket on and be out the door in minutes.

She poured my coffee while I dug in the fridge for the milk. Callie reached past me and grabbed a single-serve container of yogurt. “Want some?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Tastes like feet.”

“You’re not wrong.” She stared at the label. “Do you think it’s actually good for gut health, like it says?”

I poured milk into my coffee. “Who cares, if it tastes like feet?”

Callie blinked. “Good point.” She threw the yogurt in the trash. “Freedom.”

I felt myself smiling at her. “You play last night?”

She smiled back at me. “Yes, I did, and I was excellent. You should come sometime.”

“You told us never, ever to come to your gigs, or you’d never speak to any of us again.”

She picked up her coffee. “I may have been a little extreme. Denver and Axel came to one of my gigs, and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”

“You yelled at me about that,” Denver reminded her from the sofa.

“Because you disregarded my wishes,” Callie replied past my shoulder. “And I don’t yell.”

I took my coffee cup, put it down on a table, and picked up Denver’s guitar. I can’t work properly without a guitar in my hands. “Jesus, Denny, these strings,” I said, running my fingers over them.

He looked up from his notebook. “I know. I haven’t had time to restring it.”

“You got strings?”

“In the cabinet under the stereo.” He tossed aside his notebook and picked up a different one. “You don’t have to restring it.”

“The hell I don’t.” I found the strings and dropped to the other end of the sofa, the guitar in my lap. I had done this so many times, I could restring a guitar in my sleep.

“I’ll leave you guys to it,” Callie said. “I have a student at noon. And I have to go home and hang out with Elmer. He’s lonely.” Elmer was her cat.

I fussed with the guitar while Denver opened a third notebook, looking for something he’d written. Callie got ready to go and ran her fingers through his hair, gently brushing through the long, dark strands as he bent over his notebook. Something about the gesture made my chest hurt. “You’re already in your head,” she said to him. “I’ll talk to you later.”

He looked distracted, but he caught her wrist and kissed the inside of it before letting her go. “I’ll call you. Text me when you get home.”

“It’s daylight,” she said.

“Do it, please.”

Then she was gone. We worked in silence for a while, me restringing the guitar and Denver paging through his notebook. He’d always been a poet, ever since he was a kid. His parents had abandoned him, and he’d bounced from relative to relative, none of them wanting him for very long. He’d been beat up in school, because he was always the new kid, always lost in his poetry. He’d been pretty much homeless when we met. But he always had notebooks. And, fuck, could he ever sing.

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