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  I lift both shoulders. "I dunno, babe. She'll have to figure him out for herself. The hard way, maybe. You can't learn about love without getting hurt. As for Ben, I'm wondering the same thing. I think maybe she's not seeing the forest for the trees, you know?"

  Nell nods. "Yeah, I guess you're right." She finishes mixing the taco seasoning into the beef and tosses it into a frying pan. I wipe the counter off while she browns the meat. "I just wish I could protect her. I don't want her to go through the kind of things you and I did."

  "Nothing much we can do about that, I'm afraid."

  She sighs. "I know. I know. I just hate it, is all."

  "Me, too."

  Later that night, in bed basking in the afterglow of a slow and thorough lovemaking, Nell seems lost in thought. Deep, private thoughts. The kind I have to drag out of her.

  I turn toward her, pulling my arm from beneath her head, propping my cheek on my palm. "What's bugging you, Nelly-girl?"

  She doesn't answer right away. "Sometimes I just...I wish--god, it's stupid."

  "Wish what?"

  "That we'd had another baby."

  I wince, and fall back onto the pillow. "God, Nell. I know. We tried for ten years."

  She shrugs, and I see a glint in her eye. "Why, Colt? There were no problems with Kylie's birth. The doctors couldn't find anything. No miscarriages. Except that one, obviously. But...ten years, and just...nothing. Why?"

  I want to get up and leave the room, run from this conversation that has come up at random over the years during our entire marriage. "I wish I had an answer for you, baby. It just wasn't meant to be, I guess. That's a shitty answer. A non-answer. But I just don't know. I would've given you another one if I could've."

  "We could've adopted."

  I groan. "Goddamn it, Nell. We've been through this."

  "I know, Colt. I know. " She wipes at her face. "I just...I wish--"

  "I wish, too, Nelly. I wanted a son, or another daughter, as much as you did. You know the reasons why we didn't adopt. We didn't have the money, or the time. We were touring with Kylie in a stroller, your mom following us around from city to city. Hiring nannies. And then once we'd settled here, it just wasn't ever...right. I don't know."

  "And now it's never gonna happen."

  I blow out a long breath, and I can't stay in the bed anymore. "I--we're not--I don't know, Nell. Kylie's graduating this year. Are we really going to talk about bringing another child into our lives now?" I step into a pair of shorts. "I love you, Nell. I just don't think I can keep having this conversation."

  "Yeah." I hear the bitterness in her voice, and I don't know what to do about it.

  I go down to the garage and tinker with the Triumph for an hour or two, because it's what I know. I've spent far too much time in the garage, tinkering, just to get away from a conversation that has no solution. Nell's fine, most of the time. But every once in a while, for no reason I've ever been able to decipher, she just gets this bug up her ass, and there's nothing I can do about it. We tried. I tried. We both got tested; nothing seemed wrong with either of us. But she never conceived again. We talked about adoption, in vitro, surrogacy. None of it was feasible, or possible, or it just seemed wrong for us. Not what we wanted. And every once in a while, without warning, she gets maudlin about it, tears up, asks why. And I don't have the answers. I've never had the answers.

  I toss a wrench into the toolbox a little more forcefully than I need to, and go inside. I slam a beer standing on the back porch, watching the lights of Nashville, listening to the rush of cars in the distance, wishing I could find an answer for her, something to close the subject once and for all. And, as always, I've got nothing.

  THREE: Burn Scars and Shredding Guitars

  Oz

  I'm alone in the apartment. Mom's working. She's always working. I've got a joint in one hand, my lighter in the other. I'm in my room, the window open to suck out the smoke. I turn up the volume on my iPod dock/alarm clock until "We Stitch These Wounds" by Black Veil Brides drowns out my thoughts, buries my mind beneath guitars and drums and someone else's angst, someone else's anger, someone who gets it.

  I let my head thump back against the wall above my bed and look around. There's no bed frame, no headboard. Just the queen mattress and a box spring on the floor. I don't bother with sheets, either. Just a thin blanket over the mattress, and another to cover up if I'm cold. No dresser, either, just a big silver laundry basket with my clean clothes in it, folded, and two black contractor-size garbage bags full of dirty clothes. A bookshelf, filled with novels, mainly sci-fi and fantasy, and several dozen volumes of math texts. Some are textbooks bought for cheap on Amazon, high school and college algebra and physics and calculus. Others are more esoteric, books on quantum physics and string theory and the history of numbers, kabbalah, Sudoku, logic, statistics, books on the relationship between math and chess, and between math and music. The only other thing I own is a battered third-hand Fender Stratocaster, a twenty-year-old amp, and an off-brand pair of over-the-ear headphones.

  They are the belongings of a nomad. They'll all fit in the bed of Mom's rusted-out Dodge Ram, and the tiny trailer that she bought in Biloxi. Her room looks about the same, although she has a frame for her bed, and a little nightstand she got at a Salvation Army in Colorado Springs.

  I flick the Bic, watch the orange-yellow flame touch the twist of white rice paper. Inhale. Suck deep, and hold it in. It doesn't hit right away. This is kinda shitty weed, but I haven't had a chance to sniff out a good hook-up yet. It'll do, though. It ain't the danks, but it's decent. After another long inhalation, I feel it. Light-headed, slow, floating. Cares are gone.

  I watch my hand lift the lighter up. I stare at it. It's my favorite lighter. Red, slim, and translucent, the fluid jiggling low at the bottom. It lights easily, has a good, high flame. It's got an adjuster, so I can turn the flame up if I want. I do that now, slide the little black piece of plastic to the side, all the way. I roll my thumb across the knob, trying to remember why I shouldn't do this. I do it anyway. I light it, the flame almost an inch tall now. Holding my palm facing down, I bring the lighter up, up. I feel the heat. It's a gentle warmth at first. Then, as I move the flame closer to my flesh, it turns to burning. Pain.

  Yes.

  I suck in another hit, feeling the high whirl through me, tossing me up and away, in the cloud-world of hazy uncaring. The pain grounds me. Brings me down, anchors me so I don't float away. It's just my palm at first, heat baking my skin. I trace the flame along the lines of my palm. Not enough. I run it along my finger, up the pad of my index finger. Now the pain becomes real. It's a true burn. Harsh and furious, deep and aching. The burn sears me, and I relish it. My fingertip reddens. When the heat reaches a threshold I cannot ignore, I let the flame snuff out. I hold my finger up and examine it. It'll blister.

  The song fades, and "Home Sweet Hole" by Bring Me the Horizon comes on. I nod in approval. I like this song. They're a little screamo for my taste overall, but this is a good tune. Another hit, and I blow the smoke out the window, watch it skirl through the screen and get snatched away by the puff of breeze. I'm in the ether now. The joint is almost gone, just a roach. I pinch the cherry between finger and thumb, not even registering the slight twinge of the heat. Opening the lid of the tin Band-Aid box, I toss the roach and the lighter in, on top of the baggie of pot. The box goes into my backpack, way at the bottom of the front pocket, beneath pens and guitar picks and crushed granola bars.

  I lie down flat on the bed, close my eyes, and listen to the music, feeling the aching burn of my palm and finger. "Life of Uncertainty" by It Dies Today comes on, and I soak it up, sink into it. Drifting, drifting.

  It's a fleeting respite.

  When unwelcome clarity starts to penetrate the fog, I slide off the bed, grab my guitar and my amp. Adjust the tuning slightly, flick the volume a little higher, and do some scales to limber up my fingers. My index finger hurts, making it tricky to move from string to string, but
it's fine. I'm used to it. The burning is my secret, my release. I smoke pot because it loosens the grip of the anger and the bitterness of my fatherless, nomadic life. The burning is...I don't know what it is. Rage is exhausting, bitterness is exhausting. Burning is a way to feel something else, to alleviate it. To feel something in this life.

  "Breaking Out, Breaking Up" by Bullet for My Valentine comes on. I taught myself this song, and I play along. When the song ends, I grab the tiny remote off the floor and click the iPod off. I play one of my own songs. It's an instrumental because I don't sing and sure as hell don't write no goddamn poetry. It's fast and hard, technical. My facility with numbers helps somehow. I can't make any kind of scientific claims about it, but I relate numbers to playing guitar. Each chord is an equation. Each string is a number. I guess I have quick fingers, so that's part of it, but the real playing happens in my head. I see the riffs like strings of equations, one plugged into another and another until there's a whole endless skein of numbers slinging from the six strings.

  I lose myself in playing, pressing hard with my burned index finger to keep the pain fresh in my head.

  I don't even notice Mom until she reaches down and turns off the amp. I claw the headphones off and glare up at her. "What the fuck, Mom?"

  "You were smoking."

  I shrug and don't look at her, reach for the "on" switch. "Yeah. So?"

  She knows I smoke. She smokes with me sometimes. Only when she's really bad, when whatever it is that's driving her becomes too much. She gets melancholy as hell when she smokes, like she's remembering something.

  She grabs my wrists, jerks them up. Shit. I resist, and when she tries to overpower me, I tear my hand from her grip. "Let me see your hands, Oz." She lets go, but kneels in front of me. Concern fills her gray eyes.

  I can't look at her for long. I keep my hands flat on my knees. "It's fine. It's nothing. No big deal."

  "Show...me." She bites the words out.

  I roll my eyes and turn my palms up. She immediately sees the fresh burn on my left hand, the redness on my palm and blister on my finger. "I'm fine, Ma. It's no big deal."

  "You burned again. You said you weren't doing that anymore." She sinks back to sit cross-legged on the floor in front of me. She still has her apron on, the server book stuffed inside, fat with cash. She's never been real modest around me, and now is no exception. She works at a nightclub as a cocktail waitress. Which means short skirts, low-cut shirts. I look away at the wall, out the window.

  I shrug. "It just happened. I'm fine."

  "Burning yourself is not fine, Oz." She pulls the book out of her apron and counts out the cash, stacking it into ones, fives, tens, and twenties.

  I watch her count slowly. "Mom, god. I'm fine. For real. It's just a little burn. I'm not...I'm not actively burning again. I swear."

  She looks up at me, examines me, the cash now stacked in her hand. "Oz, why do you do it? I don't get it."

  I shrug again. "Fuck, Mom. I don't know. You ask me this, and I can't tell you. I would if I knew. I just don't. It just...helps."

  Mom tilts her head back and sighs. She pulls a pack of Pall Malls from her apron and hunts for a lighter. Comes up empty. I dig my tin out of my backpack, find the lighter, light her cigarette for her. I take one for myself from her pack, light it, return the lighter to the tin. We smoke in silence, Mom thinking, me trying not to.

  Eventually, she breaks it. "Oz, do you hate me?"

  I'm shocked. Stunned. "Hate you? What the actual fuck, Mom? Why would you ask me that? Of course not. I love you. You're my mom."

  She glances around the bedroom for somewhere to ash. I grab the black plastic ashtray from the foot of my bed and hand it to her. She taps the end of her cigarette against it, staring at the orange cherry. "But I'm not a good mom."

  "You've done the best you could." It's a meaningless response, and we both know it.

  She frowns up at me. "Which means no."

  I shake my head. "Jesus, Mom. How am I supposed to answer that fucking question? Huh? 'No, Mom, you've been a shitty parent.' Is that what I'm supposed to say? Or how about 'Well, gee, Mom, it's been great. You're a goddamn miracle worker, raising an ungrateful little shit like me.'"

  Her head jerks up, and her eyes are hurt, angry. "Fucking hell, Oz. Really?"

  I let out a breath. "Sorry. I just--what am I supposed to say? I don't know. You're the only mom I've ever had, the only parent I've ever had. We don't have a typical life. We're not a typical family. But it's what we are, and...that's it, I guess."

  She nods, blowing out a thin stream of smoke. "I guess. I'm just sorry I haven't done better for you."

  "What's this all about?"

  She lifts a shoulder, stabbing the cigarette out. "You, burning again. You shouldn't...that shouldn't happen. But it does. And it's my fault."

  I'm not sure what to say her. I wish I could say I didn't blame her, but I do. Shitty, but true. I resist, at great effort, the urge to stab my cigarette out on the back of my hand. Mom watches me, as if knowing what I'm thinking.

  Tell me about my father. My lips tingle with the question, but I hold it back. I've asked it a million times, and she refuses to answer. Once she was a little drunk and I asked her about him, thinking the booze would loosen her tongue. Instead, it loosened her hand. She slapped me, hard. She immediately felt horrible and started crying and begging me to forgive her, but she never told me a damn thing. She never hit me before that, or after, but she never told me about my father. The burning is a daddy issue, I think. A shrink would have a field day with me, if I gave enough of a shit to go.

  Mom leaves me then, and I let her go. I doubt it's not lost on her that I gave her no reassurances about being a good mom. She's not. It's the truth. She's my mom, though, and she's all I've got.

  *

  There's a rhythm to the next couple of months. I find a decent job at a Jiffy Lube, changing oil. It's nothing special, but it's a job. Puts cash in my pocket and helps Mom with the bills.

  Kylie and I take to hanging out at the little coffee shop on campus. It's just an easy friendship. I mean, yeah, I'm attracted to her, but I'm not gonna push it. I kind of feel guilty for hanging around Kylie. She's good, innocent. Clean. Pure. I'm pretty sure she's a virgin. I know she's younger than me by a few years, but I haven't asked how old exactly. She doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, rarely even curses. She's...just good. And if she keeps hanging out with me, she'll get tainted. She'll see the scars on my forearms, she'll see the smooth patches of burned skin on my hands. Evidence of my fucked-up mess of a life. I get around my hang-ups by telling myself she can make her own choices as to what she wants, who she wants around her. I make no bones about the fact that I'm a "wrong side of the tracks" kind of guy. It makes me feel a little guilty sometimes, if I think about it too hard, knowing that I like her and I think about kissing her and getting her in bed, and taking her cherry. She's good, and I'm not, and seriously, Ben is the right guy for her. Rich, athletic, from a good family. Nice. He's an actual fucking nice guy.

  Then, near the middle of November, there's a flyer on the corkboard near the beverage pick-up counter, advertising an open mic night on February tenth. Kylie sees the flyer, stops dead, grabs my arm, shakes it. "An open mic night!" She spins me around to face her, shakes me again. "I've got to do it! It's my chance!"

  I'm perplexed. "Chance at what?"

  "Perform! I've been writing music, and practicing in my room, but I've been too chicken to do any open mic nights downtown by myself. This is my chance to try performing on a small scale."

  I'm even more perplexed. "Kylie. You're the daughter of one of the most popular duos in the world."

  She nods. "Well, yeah, duh. I know that. But that's them, Oz. I want to do this on my own, without them."

  I shrug. "Okay, so do it."

  She hesitates. "I'm decent at the piano, but if I'm going to really perform the songs I want to, I'd need a guitarist."

  "This is Nashville, Kylie. If I threw a
stick, right now, I'd hit at least a dozen guys who can play."

  She rolls her eyes. "Well, yeah, duh to that, too. There're guys who can play the guitar, and then there's musicians. I want someone serious. If this goes well, I want to try to eventually get a spot in a bar on Broadway. But for that, I need someone good." We've started walking again, and she stops me, a hopeful expression on her face. "You don't play, do you? Tell me you play."

  I snort. "Yeah, I play the guitar, but I couldn't play anything you want." I gesture at my Spineshank T-shirt. "I play this, Kylie. Metal. You want a country boy. That ain't me, sweetness."

  She doesn't seem fazed. "Are you any good?"

  I shrug. "I guess. I don't know. I don't play for people. I play because it's fun. It's a release. I taught myself. I can't read music or any of that bullshit. I just shred. It's like math. I just do it."

  "I want to hear you play."

  I shake my head. "Hell, no. I don't play for people. And besides, do you even like metal?"

  She makes an I don't know face. "I've never listened to it."

  "It'll make your nose bleed, babe."

  "I want to hear you play. I'll sing for you, you'll play for me. We'll trade music."

  I want to tell her no, but I don't. She seems so hopeful. I'll play something hard and wicked, and she'll be disgusted, and that'll be that. The idea of me on a stool in a honky-tonk on Little Broadway, playing a Ron Pope cover is just...comical. Kylie would probably choke if she realized I knew that kind of music.

  "Fine. But you won't like it."

  "Let me be the judge of that." She smiles up at me, shakes my arm again. It's a habit of hers. I hate it, but I like it. "Okay, so we'll go to my house. My parents have a studio in the basement."

  We're in the parking lot, heading toward my bike, having intended to go grab some coffee, but she stops, looking over at the far side of the lot, cursing under her breath. "It's Ben. I told him I didn't need a ride today. Wait here -- I'll be right back." She jogs to his truck, leans in the open passenger window, then glances back at me, holds up a finger to indicate one minute, and gets in.