Page 48 of Dirty Like Brody
Then he turned andwalkedout.
ChapterEleven
Jessa
For the nextfew days Ilaidlow.
I didn’t go back to the church, even though my brother kept asking me to come; even though I knew the whole band was there and they wanted me to be. Because no matter how offended I wanted to try to be over what Brody had said to me, I couldn’t deny that he wasright.
If I was going to leave… the best thing to do would be toleavenow.
But I’d promised my brother ten days. And he’d postponed his honeymoon for me. Which meant that I should suck it up and get my ass back down to the church to spend time with him. Jam with the band.Hangout.
Just be there, ifnothingelse.
But I couldn’t bring myself to go back down there. For now, I’d told Jesse I needed a little time for other things. It wasn’t a lie, but it was a bit of an excuse. And instead of visiting old friends like I told him I’d be doing with a good chunk of my time, I barely left Roni’splace.
I did call my agent, to tell her I’d be staying in Vancouver until the day before the shoot, when I’d fly downtoL.A..
But I barely spoke to anyone else, and I barely got out of mysweats.
I wasn’t going to sit around and feel sorry for myself, though. I’d done enough of that for a lifetime as a teenager. So I got Paulie’s address down in L.A. from Maggie and sent flowers. I called and spoke with his wife, and his nine-year-old daughter on the phone. Then I arranged to have two weeks’ worth of healthy meals delivered to them by a concierge service, including some fun stuff for the kids, to try to help. I didn’t know what else I couldreallydo.
I’d never really believed God would answer my prayers. But I prayed for Paulie and his wife and theirfamily.
Then I re-organized Roni’scondo.
By the end of day two of my self-imposed sabbatical, I’d labeled and color-coded everything in her cupboards. When Roni came home that night, she took one look at what I’d done, raised her eyebrows, and walked straight into her bedroom withoutaword.
* * *
The next day,people started dropping byunannounced.
It started with Maggie, then Zane, then Elle. Dylan and Ash showed up with takeout. Everyone and their dog suddenly happened to find themselves in Roni’s neighborhood with nothing better to do than check uponme.
Because rock stars weren’t busy oranything.
And not that I didn’t appreciate it, but it was also kind of annoying, since it was interruptingmyfunk.
It was also necessary, because by the morning of day four, I’d started to slip. I’d run out of shit to organize, I still hadn’t figured out how to deal with Brody, and the inevitable brooding hadsetin.
I’d taken to sitting around in my sweats and Yankees cap, idly playing the guitar Jesse had given me but really playing nothing at all, listening to stuff like Lera Lynn’s slow, sultry cover of “Ring of Fire,” which was either a brilliant or totally horrendous song to listen to when you were deep in the throes of a screwed-up, lovelorn, scared-shitless sortoffunk.
Then I binge-watched a bunch of heart-rending movies, making it throughThe Notebook,The English Patient, and half ofThe Age of Innocencebefore my new sister-in-law managed to drag me out of thehouse.
I was still wearing my sweats and ball cap, but I went with her when she asked me to come to her art studio—Dirty’s old rehearsalspace.
I had been here before. It was a clean, spacious studio with an open loft above and big skylight windows. Perfect for an art studio. As Katie and I stepped inside with her black lab, Max, I could see, though, why the band wanted something bigger, something a little more raw, with a few more stories to tell, for their rehearsalspace.
“I’ve set up a little studio in the sunroom at Jesse’s place, too,” Katie said as she deactivated the alarm. “You know, facing the water?” I smiled at how she still called itJesse’s place. “I like to paint at weird times, sometimes. And I don’t always want to have to haul my ass over here in the middle of the night.” She looked around the room at her stuff as she turned up the lights, frowning. “Jesse’s been really gracious. Making room for me, and, you know… everything that comeswithme.”
I just smiled, rubbing Max’s head. “Well, that’s what you do when you love someone,right?”
“Right.” She sighed, squinting at her stuff, like the room was a mess. It totally wasn’t. Her art supplies were all neatly arranged in shelving units along a side wall. There were canvases, both clean and painted, filed into a custom storage unit with tall, narrow compartments. But what caught my eye were the paintings that had been left out—leaned against the walls, there was a giant portrait on canvas of each member of Dirty. The one of Dylan stood on an easel; it was the only one that wasn’t yetcomplete.
As I approached, I could make out the seemingly millions of brush strokes, the texture of the thick, layered paint, the hundreds of colors that seemed to have been used to capture the myriad shades of hisauburnhair.
“Katie… these are freakingamazing.”
