Page 94 of String Boys

Kelly was so excited he opened his email in the car.

It was a rental agreement for the day after Christmas through the first week of January, with a typically brief note:My dad will bring you down, and we’ll spend the week together, all three of us. Your family’s welcome—it’s his present to your mom and sisters. Then they’ll all go home, and you and I will be there for the second week.

And you’ll know my touch again by then.

And we can fly.

Kelly hugged the phone to his chest, not feeling silly or sappy or anything bad. That super sweet, super cute, super talented boy really fuckin’ loved him. And life was not all drudgery from school to home to work.

And Seth Arnold wrote him music and gave him dreams when he was too tired to find his own. And in a couple of months, they would hold hands together and fly.

Dangerous Hobbies

SETH LOOKEDaround the dive bar with narrowed eyes and tried to stay in the present.

When he’d auditioned, in the daylight, the black paint on the walls had been chipped, the red paint on the concrete floors had been stained, and the stage had been a splintered death trap. At night, the curtains, the dark lighting, the loud music—all of it managed to look seedy instead of disintegrating, but Seth knew the risks.

He did not belong here.

The clientele of this little shit show west of Vacaville was mostly poor, an awful lot of white, and favored big boots and big hair. They hadn’t ID’d Seth when he’d come in to audition as a fiddler for the house band, and they hadn’t asked any questions either.

Seth had played “Devil Went Down to Georgia” straight up, although he’d been practicing country music rhythms since he’d seen the ad.

The thing was, he needed money.

The good news about Bridgford was that he had free room and board—and education, for which he was more grateful every day.

The staff was great about steering him toward financial aid, and although he hadn’t mentioned it to Kelly, the times he’d traveled with the orchestra during the summer had been funded by a grant.

But he’d graduated from buying Kelly stuffed animals with his lunch money to rashly renting a house with his FAFSA money, and he’d been desperate when he started looking up ads on the internet.

Everything classical insisted on daytime practices.

But he was nineteen now, and he could go off-campus without permission or notification. The ads for bar bands had all talked about rehearsals at night. Country and rock music were often much simpler than classical music—he felt like this doubled as practicing without doubling his practice load, which was already extensive.

But most of all, he needed the fucking money.

It wasn’t that he was trying to buy his way into Kelly’s affections. It was that he was trying to keep Kelly afloat! Seth knew, because his dad told him, that Matty’s hospital bills and Xavier’s funeral expenses had wiped out the Cruz savings. Dad said that Linda hadn’t told Kelly, but Kelly had gotten a job anyway because he wasn’t stupid.

None of the baby’s furniture had been usable. All of it had been secondhand and out of code, because they’d sold the new stuff Isela had gotten at the baby shower to fund their opioid habit. Seth’s dad, who had offered to go get Chloe’s things, had hauled it to the trash and gotten new furniture on credit. He’d bought other items too—clothes for Chloe and clothes and school supplies for the girls. He’d privately told Lily, Lulu, and Agnes to come to him when they needed things, and not to bother their mother.

But he couldn’t keep doing it forever. EvenwithSeth’s room and board paid.

So Seth had resolved to get a job, which was a laugh riot, since he didn’t even have a driver’s license and his job skills were for shit.

He could do one thing—play the fucking violin—so when he’d seen the ad for the fiddle player in a country-western band, he’d borrowed a hat from the drama department and a flannel shirt from Vince, who hated the cold with a passion.

He’d worn tennis shoes with frayed laces because that’s all he had.

The pay wasn’t a lot. He couldn’t have survived on it, but it was enough to rent the house in Monterey. It was enough to send money home to his dad to help pay the Cruz’s expenses.

It was enough to help.

And all he had to do was haul his gay black ass to this place, where neither of those things was particularly welcome, and play as well as he had in the tenth grade.

The playing was easy. Butch, the fifty-something paunchy, graying, red-faced guy who played the lead guitar, said he was the best fiddle player he’d ever met, and Seth had smiled and politely thanked him. His son, Guthrie, played the drums, and he’d given Seth a sideways look, speculative. Guthrie was stringy, in his twenties, with shoulder-length surfer-blond hair and slightly crooked front teeth a little like Seth’s own.

For the most part, Guthrie listened to his father’s instruction, and his uncle Jock’s—who played bass—and hung out until it was time for him to play.