Page 4 of Anywhere with You

I worked all weekend, which mostly meant sitting in my office watching Mesmio reels of buff women splitting logs.

Florence and our other employee, Doug, were more than capable of running Strings & Things without my constant presence, but the alternative was to be at my house, and Badger’s fuzzy face aside, I hated it there.

I fantasized a lot about setting it on fire.

Not for the insurance. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure there was insurance.

No, I just wanted to watch it burn…and all the memories with it.

It was nice of Lorenzo and Bridget to both move out, I supposed, leaving Cara and me each with our homes. Or maybe they just didn’t want us to know where to find them. As angry as I’d been these last six weeks, that was probably smart.

Not that I’d burn down their love nest. But I’d probably spend a lot of time sitting across the street and thinking about it.

Or about buying a bag of crickets from the pet store and leaving it outside their bedroom window.

Smearing their cars with canned tuna. Getting a Realtor to put their house on the market.

Reporting them to the police for smuggling illegal cheeses.

Definitely better not to know.

On Sunday, Bridget and Lorenzo posted another Mesmio reel, kissing on a pier in Galveston, seagulls shrieking alarmingly close by, as though mistaking her phone for food.

Bridget looked like she’d been out in the sun a lot. Her face was tanned, her hair gold streaked. She had a new tattoo on her wrist, some kind of butterfly.

Lorenzo looked like Johnny Depp, if Johnny Depp had been beaten up too many times, but that was how Lorenzo always looked.

I was pretty sure that Bridget was walking along that pier now, gleefully telling Lorenzo that their latest video had been watched seventy-six times. She had no way of knowing that seventy of those views were mine.

I still expected her to call every day. After Cara said that Lorenzo had called, I was sure that I had one coming, too.

I spent all weekend with the phone on my desk in front of me, ringer on.

I even called from the store phone to check the volume.

The horrible default ringtone annoyed Florence, Doug, our one customer, and me. My phone was working fine.

But Bridget hadn’t spoken to me since the day she moved out. She hadn’t even called to ask about our dog. Not once. I couldn’t imagine that degree of heartlessness.

Sunday evening, I set up an amp in the store. We hadn’t had any customers in a while, and Doug was deep in the latest Elizabeth Acevedo novel. I sent him to the break room to keep reading so I didn’t interrupt. It was a really good book.

I played through my favorites—Eric Clapton’s “Layla,” some Nirvana and The Kinks.

My mother always insisted that I must want to perform onstage, write my own songs, be a rock star. It was funny because she loved the trombone and never wanted to play onstage either, but she thought it had to be different if the guitar was your instrument.

I was never the most self-aware kid, but I had known this about myself: I wanted to play, not perform.

And I wanted to talk to other people who loved to play.

That was how the idea for the shop began.

I tried giving lessons as a side gig. I tried writing for music sites.

But one day, I went into Guitar Center, one of those big, chain music stores, and I thought yes .

I can do this, and do it much, much better.

I was halfway through my own version of “Jolene” when the door opened.

I had the amp turned up too high to hear the bell, but I saw the door out of the corner of my eye and stopped playing.

My last chord reverberated, and Cara stopped just in front of me in a tight beige dress, her head held high.

“I have an idea,” she said.