have died along with my mom. He wasn’t the one who raised me. Brett was. The minute I graduated from high school, Harry Cash hightailed it out of New York. The day of my graduation, he handed me a card with a few thousand bucks in it and told me he’d sold the apartment, and I had until the end of June to move in with Brett or find my own place.
If Crew had seen where I wanted to live that first summer, he’d have had a coronary. Even Brett put the kibosh on that one. I lived with Brett for a few months, but I couldn’t stand Amanda, his wife at the time, so I moved into the dorm. Until I quit school, that is.
My phone rings. It’s Crew.
“I’m downstairs,” he says before I can say hello. “Can you buzz me up?”
“Be right there.”
I run down and let him in. He appraises the door and the walls surrounding it. “There’s no way for you to open this from your apartment?”
I snatch the Dunkin’ Donuts bag from him. “You must be confusing this with Park Avenue.”
He follows me up the stairs. “You shouldn’t leave your door open.”
“It was only for a minute so I could let you in.”
“A lot of things can happen in a minute.” He looks disgusted as he hands me my coffee. “You should keep your door locked at all times. Promise me you will.”
I stop blowing on the coffee. “What’s with the big brother act?”
He blindly reaches into the bag I’m holding, extracts a donut, and rips through it with his teeth. “I’m not your goddamn brother,” he says around a mouthful of food.
“I see your mood has improved since yesterday,” I jest.
I’m perusing the donuts when he recites some of my lyrics. “‘People tell me all about you. Your picture hangs up on my wall. I was forced to grow without you—’”
I race over and close the notebook I left open on the coffee table. I give him a hard stare, and he knows he crossed the line. We don’t look at each other’s notebooks without an invitation.
“You’re the one who left it open,” he says. “That makes it fair game.” He stands and thoughtfully checks out my apartment, his attention landing on a picture of my mother hanging on the wall next to my bed. “Is that your mom?”
It’s the picture I gaze at each day and wonder how things might have turned out if she’d lived. “She died on 9/11.”
“Shit, I’m sorry.”
I shrug. “I was three. I don’t really remember her. Sometimes I think I do, but they are probably just memories I’ve created based on what Brett’s told me. He was eleven.”
“Was she a first responder?”
“She was a nurse. Worked at a nearby hospital. They ran over to help.”
He leans down and runs a finger across the top of my notebook. “I’ll bet you have a lot of songs in here about her. Dozens maybe.”
He says that almost like he knows what it’s like to lose someone.
He shoves another donut in his mouth. “We’d better get started.”
We sit and stare at our notebooks for long drawn-out seconds. Then we laugh.
“Any ideas?” I ask.
“Remember the one we were tossing around last month about that car on fire at the side of the road?”
“I don’t know. I kind of thought it sounded too much like ‘Man on Fire’.”
He nods. “You’re right. We have to come up with something more original. Something we can shove up their asses.”
He’s still mad at the guys for kicking us out. I am too, but I understand why they did it. We were acting like adolescents.
His phone chirps with a text. “Liam just told me to open my email. Says it’s something for both of us.” He taps on the screen. “He sent me an MP3 file.”
He plays it. It’s a guitar riff. Not much, twenty seconds or so, but it’s good. Crew plays it two more times.
“He wants us to succeed, you know,” I tell him.
“I know.”
Liam writes the majority of the melodies for our songs. Sometimes he’ll come up with one and Crew will put words to it. Other times, Crew will give him lyrics, and Liam will write a melody to fit them. It’s a symbiotic relationship my presence has thrown a wrench into.
I’ve often wondered if either of them regrets bringing me on. If maybe they’re intimidated by me. I write lyrics and melodies. I never intended to threaten their jobs. Because of that, I