Tricky Business Read Free

“Probably not. I have to call. But not now. I’m gonna sleep some more now, OK? I got in kind of late.” He turned his body away from the light, from his mother’s silhouette.
    â€œFifty-five miles an hour,” she said. “They won’t go out in that.”
    Wally said nothing.
    â€œI saw him at Publix that time,” she said. “Bob Soper.”
    Wally said nothing.
    â€œHe was at the deli, waiting just like everybody else,” she said. “He couldn’t have been nicer.”
    Wally said nothing.
    â€œHe got the honey-baked ham, a half pound,” she said. “Boar’s Head.”
    Wally said nothing. Ten seconds passed; he could feel her standing there.
    â€œI just thought you might want some waffles,” she said.
    Another ten seconds.
    â€œI’m definitely gonna vacuum in here,” she said, and closed the door.
    Wally, now totally awake, rolled onto his back, stared at the ceiling, and thought, as he did pretty much every waking minute that he spent in his mother’s house, I have got to get out of here. He willed his brain to think about how he was going to get out of there, and his brain, having been through this many times, responded with: despair.
    Wally was broke. His only assets, other than his clothes, were his guitar, an Ernie Ball Music Man Axis worth maybe $800 if he sold it, which he never would; and his car, a 1986 Nissan Sentra that ran but was probably not salable, as its body was riddled with some kind of car leprosy. As a professional musician, Wally was currently making $50 a day, playing with the band on the ship, but that was only on days that the ship went out, and that money was usually gone within hours for the necessities of Wally’s life: food, gas, a cell phone, and pot.
    Wally was more than $5,000 in debt to three credit-card companies; he did not know the exact amount, because he threw the statements away without opening them. Wally had gotten the credit cards a few months earlier when he’d gotten his first-ever real day job, a short-lived attempt to leave the gig-to-gig life of the bar musician. He’d gotten the job through his fiancée, Amanda, who had grown tired of paying most of the rent on the apartment they shared. Amanda had also grown tired of the band lifestyle.
    â€œNo offense,” she’d said one night, “but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life sitting at the bar getting hit on by creeps and listening to you play ‘Brown Eyed Girl.’ ”
    â€œI thought you liked ‘Brown Eyed Girl,’ ” Wally said.
    â€œI did,” she said, “the first three million times.”
    â€œYou think we need some new songs?” he said.
    â€œI think you need a new job,” she said. Lately this had become the theme of many of their conversations.
    â€œYou’re almost thirty years old,” Amanda said. “How’re we supposed to get married on what you make? How’re we supposed to raise a family if you’re out all night all the time? Do you even want to get married?”
    â€œOf course I want to get married,” said Wally, who was not one million percent sure, but also was not stupid enough to express any reservations now. “But the band, I mean, those guys are my best friends. We’ve been through a lot.”
    â€œYou’ve been through a lot of pot, is what you’ve been through,” she said. This had also become a theme. She used to happily partake in the doobie-passing back when they started dating, when she liked the idea that her guy was a musician, an artist. But she didn’t smoke weed anymore, didn’t even drink beer. When she came to gigs, which she did less and less often, she drank Perrier and looked bored.
    â€œWhat do you want me to do?” Wally asked her. He really meant it. She was changing, and he wasn’t, and he didn’t want to lose her, and it scared him that he didn’t know