Inside the coffee shop, Webb found a table in the corner and set his guitar case on a chair.
As Mumford played from invisible speakers, Webb wandered to the counter, where gleaming silver espresso machines contrasted with the brown-painted concrete blocks of the walls and the nicked and scarred hardwood floor. There was a place for a band to set up, with a chalkboard announcing live music on Friday nights. Speakers and wires and cables were plugged in and ready to go.
This had once been a warehouse, obviously, now converted to the kind of trendy café that drew the kind of people he saw around him. Long hair. Tattoos. Earrings and pierced eyelids. Thrift-store clothing made chic. Funky hats. He knew he was catching a few glances, as if people were wondering if he was lost.
His hair was almost preppy short, and he wore his CFL shirt, blue jeans and black Blundstone boots. It wasn’t a look that fit in a place where the baristas wrote the names of organic coffee beans in pastel chalk on a blackboard, but the glances Webb got didn’t bother him.
The coffees listed on that trendy chalkboard weren’t cheap. The era of selling tires and used furniture in this neighborhood was long gone.
All he wanted was a simple cup of coffee and a bagel, but now it looked as if he’d have to drop close to six bucks for it, more by the time he put some change in a glass tips jar at the till.
Webb didn’t have to count the money in his pocket. He knew exactly what he had in bills and loose change. Six bucks that would buy plenty of macaroni and cheese at the grocery store near the marina. It would also go a long way toward a can of ground coffee for the filtered stuff he could make in the morning.
Webb turned away from the counter and nearly stepped on the foot of a girl carrying an uncased guitar across her back.
It was Charlene. From Gerald Dean’s studio. Or, rather, Elle—he told himself to think of her as Elle.
She gave him a dark scowl he knew would sting for a while. What had he done wrong?
He couldn’t think of anything to say, so he tried a smile. Her scowl deepened, so he took the hint and moved past her to get his guitar case, passing a guy in a suit standing behind her.
Normally, that was the thing about guitar. You could be the skinniest, dweebiest, nerdiest guy in the world, but get a guitar in your hands and rip a couple of chords, and you were transformed from someone girls scowled at into a chick magnet.
At least, that’s what drew some guys into guitar.
Not Webb. His Gibson J-45 was a legacy from his father. And so was Webb’s love of music. Every time Webb held his J-45, it took him back to those years of joy and innocence when his real dad was alive and patiently showing Webb where to put pressure on the frets, how to make his fingers move with silky magic and draw sound out of the guitar as if it were a mysterious creature with a soul of its own.
“Great decoration, a guitar like that,” Webb heard as he lifted his case from the chair.
He turned and straightened, thinking someone was talking to him.
He was wrong.
The comment was directed at Elle. It had come from the guy in the suit—maybe late twenties, probably owner of the silver BMW that hadn’t been parked in front of the coffee shop when Webb first walked in.
Suit Guy sounded like he was kidding around, trying to engage Elle’s attention. If so, it worked. She turned around, and her eyes locked on his face.
But it was the wrong kind of engagement. Suit Guy wouldn’t understand. A guitar wasn’t like a BMW. You didn’t have one to impress other people. You didn’t even own guitars; they owned you.
Great decoration, a guitar like that. Webb had no doubt that Elle thought of her guitar as more than decoration. Just like he thought of his J-45 as more than polished metal and burnished wood.
Even from the far side of the small café, Webb could see there wasn’t any playfulness in Elle’s eyes. But Suit Guy, standing so close to her that he could have reached across and pushed a lock of hair off her forehead, wasn’t reading her correctly.
“Looks good on you,” he said.
“Like a Beamer looks good on you?” she countered.
“Something like that.” He’d taken it as a compliment. “You noticed, huh?”
“When you nearly ran over me outside,” she said. “Not good at paying attention, are you?”
“What do you think I was distracted by?” he said. He paused. “The guitar, of course. Like I said, great decoration.”
Webb could see both of them in profile. He could see Suit Guy’s grin, like he was thinking he was sharp and witty and she was totally into him and his BMW and his implying that he’d been looking at her butt but was charming enough to say it was her guitar. Like saying “nice pair of… sunglasses” to a girl with cleavage and thinking she’d dig you for it.
Elle reached up to her guitar strap and with a deft movement spun the guitar around from her back and into her hands. She walked to the band area, plugged in and did a test riff to make sure she had sound. Then, without taking her eyes off Suit Guy’s face, and definitely without any hint of humor, she ripped into the opening chords of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water,” riffed on a Coldplay tune, settled into something haunting, intense and totally original, and finished with an amped-up version of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”
When the last chords faded into silence, spontaneous applause broke out from the trendies scattered through the coffee shop.
Elle unplugged and spun the guitar around and onto her back again.
“Dude,” she said to Suit Guy, “if you could drive your decoration half as well as I play mine, you’d be NASCAR championship material. But I doubt you can even parallel park.”
Elle pointed at Webb.
“And you,” she said with that scowl. “I wouldn’t bother to cross the street for the audition.”