Wendy stopped reading in the old garage. The story carried perfectly well, and Jimmy was alert in it. “There’s one more half page,” she said.
“Go on,” Jimmy said.
“Is it sick?” Wendy said.
“Not at all,” Jimmy said. “If I understand what you mean.”
“When I wrote it, this part, I wondered.”
“Go ahead. Read.”
“Did you always know what you were going to feel when you wrote your books?” She was leaning back in the old overstuffed chair, slumped there now, out of the pool of yellow light in the gray afternoon.
“No, Wendy, I didn’t.”
She started now to read again, and he had to ask her to read louder. She sat up again into the light, holding the pages there, and she read the end of the story aloud.
Steve stands over Eve and bunches her jeans and underpants, stuffing them into the pickup bed with his left hand. When she says okay now, she adds, “But you’ll have to hit me again, and then you can do what you want.” Her head aches from the first time. He pretends not to hear, and she pushes him with her foot and tells him, “No. Steve, you have to hit me or give me my pants.”
The last two sentences of Wendy’s story were “Steve leaned in the open cab and placed his left hand heavy on her hipbone. His other hand was out of sight.” Immediately upon saying these sentences, Wendy stood and put her papers away. “Thanks for listening,” she said, already turned for the door.
“Wendy,” Jimmy Brand said, “congratulations. Please sit. This story is solid and fine and finished, and now you get to do what real writers do.”
“What is it?” she asked. “I’ll do it.”
“You get to write another and bring it next week. Or sooner. If you can. Wendy, I think you should make it sooner.”
She was standing and looking at Jimmy Brand and said, “Thank you,” and she went out and closed the door carefully behind her. And in the quiet now in his temporary quarters, Jimmy Brand felt lucky. I’m lucky to meet her this fall, he thought.
He heard voices outside, and then a moment later it was the next afternoon somehow, or much later the same day, and there literally was a drumroll, a snare, and the door opened again, full of his old friends talking and greeting him, Craig Ralston grabbing the milk crate at the door and Mason handing Jimmy a bright sheet of lyrics and stepping back so Larry could reach his guitar. Someone said, “Is Frank coming?” and then Frank said, “I’ve got forty minutes for my art,” and then Mason saying or someone saying, “We should rename the band, to be honest, and call it the Half Hours, Three Days a Week.” And someone said, “Forty minutes for my art.”
Then the notes were firing from Larry picking at the Fender. Jimmy saw that the boy could link passages now, his fingers awkward half the time in the transitions. It was strange. The music halted and flowed. It sounded like it flowed. Jimmy had shown him how to work his left hand on the frets, using his thumb sometimes, and it had been unnatural at first, but now it worked.
Frank stood behind Larry with his bass. “You’re hired,” Frank said.
“Of course, the pay is abysmal.”
“Abysmal, dismal, nadir, etc. Vocab deluxe.”
Jimmy leaned back. He didn’t dare close his eyes because the day would flee. They geared up and stumbled through a far-ranging version of “Johnny B. Goode.” None of them could hear it, whether it was good or bad or even clear, but Frank’s grin was magnified as the chords subsided. “This is such a crazy idea,” he said. “Let’s do one more.”