Out of the Blues by Mercy Celeste Page B

the house now and every year I thought about putting it on the market. I just never seemed to find time to get around to actually selling it.
    I finally found the safe under a tarp wedged in the corner, it was a big fucking thing that I’d bought to hold all of Cody’s papers and jewelry. He had a collection of autographed pictures of people I’d never even heard of stashed inside as well. There was one of him and Kurt Cobain. Cobain was another one who’d died way before his time.
    I dialed the combination on the safe and sat down on the concrete floor to sort through the files.
    I found the one I hoped contained what I was looking for.
    Cody never stopped writing those four years we were all pretending to be people we weren’t. He had notebooks filled with lyrics and notations on key changes and what singer the song would work for. I found the sheet music he’d written by hand and leafed through the stuff from when we were kids. These were the songs that he hadn’t published or recorded for whatever reason. Songs from when he was in love and family was more important than touring.
    I found the song he used to sing when Harper and I were kids, and I wiped the tears I didn’t know I was shedding with the back of my hand.
    I had everything I needed to arrange something: piano, guitar, bass, and drums. If Cody could play it, he wrote music for it.
    He’d left me everything, including the ability to play everything.
    And here it all was, locked away in a fucking storage unit in bumfuck Georgia.
    I was such an asshole.
    I didn’t deserve to be his son.
    I closed the safe and took the music from the last four years and that one piece from the 90s along with the guitar. I locked everything up and turned on the radio in the car in time to catch the end of Cody’s last hit song, playing on the oldies station.
    How in the hell was Cody Gillette on the fucking oldies station?
    And I drove across town. I had someplace else to be and I really just wanted to keep on driving until I was back across the country and my soul wasn’t lying in tatters on the living room floor of the house I’d come of age in…all because I fucked a man on the fucking sofa Cody had broken one night not long after we moved in. He’d sawed the legs off the next day. I think that was the night he found out he was dying. I think that was the night he gave up.
    I never even tried.
    And I fucked a man.
    I wanted to fuck him again.
    I had no idea what Cody would think. I’d like to think he was pretty open-minded. He was always the cool dad. Unlike my real dad who just didn’t give a shit.
    Like me.
    I just didn’t give a shit about anything.
    Not even my own fucking happiness.

Chapter Thirteen
     
    In which Kilby is fit to be tied.
    The tuxedo fit me like a sausage casing. I stared at myself in the mirrors and shook my head. No fucking way I was wearing this.
    “How’s it going in there, Kilbourne?” My brother called from the outer fitting room. I wanted to tell him where to fucking stick himself. I walked out of the cubicle of mirrors and turned for his inspection.
    “Oh god,” he whispered, sounding horrified. I looked down at my feet and the high water pants legs. The sleeves of the jacket didn’t quite reach my wrists. The shoulders were okay, just a little too tight but the pants cut me up the crotch and that was not okay.
    “Oh my fucking god, what have you done to that poor man?” The strident tones of distress and disbelief rang out from another room and for a moment I thought Mason was seeing some other poor man in a horrible suit. His head appeared around the corner followed by his body and the look on his face was probably worse than anything I was feeling. Except for the crotch issue. That was becoming unbearable. Especially with the man haunting my sexual fantasies staring at that particular area.
    “I don’t know. The measurements were done in one of the franchise stores in Nashville and sent down. This should fit him.”