Vicente Rivera was the one who answered. “I dragged him up to the rooftop storage space where we stored his old drum kit and I said, ‘Okay, let’s go take this to the dump.’” The older man shook his head. “I got that drum kit real cheap after I did a small construction job for a deli owner whose son didn’t want it anymore, and David, he loved it.”
David rubbed his face, then smiled. “I did,” he admitted. “We kept it in the rooftop shed so I could haul it out onto the roof and practice without the neighbors getting mad. I almost cried when he told me he was taking it to the dump.”
“And still he agreed!” Vicente threw up his hands. “First time in my life I’ve been so angry with one of my children. I told him—your music is in your blood. You think we want this? For you to live a life you don’t want? We didn’t fight to bring you up right so you could throw your dreams away.”
Thea’s eyes burned at the love in Vicente’s words, in Mrs. Rivera’s expression. “You clearly got through,” she said, unable to imagine David without his music. The passion on his face when he picked up the sticks, when he created the rhythm that held an entire song together, it was electric to witness.
“Of course we did,” Mrs. Rivera said. “He’s always been too responsible, David. You’ll have to watch that.”
“Mom.” David glared. “You’ll be pulling out baby photos next.”
Mrs. Rivera’s eyes lit up. “Oh, you must see, Thea! He was the sweetest baby.”
Chapter 9
By the time David and Thea left an hour and a half later, David was even more in love with Thea than he had been before. She’d treated his folks with warmth and affection, fitting seamlessly into his family like a missing puzzle piece. He could only hope he’d do the same when she trusted him with her own family.
“You realize,” she said, “I now have enough blackmail material for eternity?”
“I’m burning those photos next time I go home.”
Thea’s laughter wrapped him in a thousand silken chains he didn’t want to escape. “I’ve heard the four of you talk about what it was like to be flat broke when Schoolboy Choir first started out,” she said, “but I never considered how tough that decision must’ve been for you.”
That was because David didn’t discuss it. It was too private. But this was Thea, who could ask him anything she damn well wished. “Fox, Abe, Noah, they were all getting ready to hit the road and start gigging after we graduated.” Noah had been ready to say fuck it to school by the time he was sixteen, had stayed on only because the rest of them refused to quit for reasons of their own.
“I wanted to go with them to the point where I was dreaming of it,” David told Thea. “And the guys? They wouldn’t even discuss recruiting another drummer, despite the fact I made it clear I was carrying on to college.” Chest tight with the memories, he focused on carefully following a detour for the next couple of minutes. “Then my folks stepped in.”
Thea touched his arm. “You’re deeply loved.”
“I know.” It was a gift he never took for granted, not after having seen the loneliness and isolation of Fox’s and Noah’s lives when it came to family. “But I love them, too. I could never follow my dream if it meant watching my parents work their fingers to the bone till the day they died. It would’ve killed me.”
Thea’s hair slid silkily across her shoulders as she nodded. “There’s something your parents don’t know, isn’t there?”
“Yeah.” Coming to a stop at the light, he glanced at her. “I gave myself a one-year time limit to make it. Not fame, nothing like that. I just wanted Schoolboy Choir in a position where we were gigging steadily, earning an income. If that didn’t happen, I was going to go to college, get myself a career.”
“Did you tell the other guys?”
“Yeah.” He’d never lied to his friends. “And the fuckers shrugged and said they’d just move to whichever college town I chose and drag me out to gigs on the weekends.” Laughing, he continued on down the road. “You know that wedding story?”
“The one about how the four of you once played six weekend weddings in a row?”
“Yeah.” To the public, the fact Schoolboy Choir had once had to earn rent money by doing covers of romantic ballads was an amusing anecdote in their history.
To David, it was one of the defining times of his life.
“We didn’t need those gigs for rent money,” he said, driving into the parking garage under his building and into his spot. “We were scraping by on our other jobs, making enough so we could take whatever gigs might get us some exposure.”