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Chapter Twelve - Lesson One


“Okay so you gotta tune the guitar first,” I said, handing Ethan a pick. I grabbed the pitch pipe from the drawer. “You can tune it by ear, which I just did with mine, but if you’re gonna play with someone, you gotta use a source pitch. That’s what this is for.” I waved the pipe between my fingers at him.

“Okay,” he had his guitar across his lap, and he ran his thumb over the strings, they were all off.

“Here, listen,” I blew the pitch on the low E. “Now we’re gonna turn the nuts here on the headstock…” I brought my hand up to the head and twisted the little bolts on the top, tightening the string. Ethan watched and mimicked my motions, his hands nervous. He was biting his tongue. I strummed the string, and it rang out an E note perfectly. Ethan did, too, and his was a little off still. “Here, listen again.” Again, I blew.

Ethan worked with the string ‘til it produced the note perfectly. I grinned, “There ya go, bud. You’ll get better at it the more you do it, too.” We worked our way through the notes until we had the two guitars ready to go. Ethan’s hair had fallen over his forehead and into his eyes as he tuned the guitar and he flipped it out of his face with a nod of his head. He grinned up at me, proud of his tuning. “A’ight. Now… The scales.” I moved my hand across the neck of the guitar, “Always play the notes with your fingers at the top of the fret,” I said, laying my fingers over the strings to demonstrate where I meant, “It makes a cleaner sound that way, the notes ring better. Of course there’s times you’ll want a softer sound, so you’ll learn when to play top of the frets and when not to.”

Ethan slid his fingers onto the neck of his guitar, touching the frets just like I was.

I ran through the scales, Ethan copying me, our guitars doe-rae-me-ing all the way through together. Ethan’s smile growing as he played, alternate picking and everything already. He had a somewhat natural talent. I felt good because it was rare that I got to share music with someone like that, where they didn’t already know all if not more than I did. It was nice teaching somebody something. Especially the way the learning made Ethan’s eyes light up.

“You’re doing awesome,” I told him.

He grinned. “Thanks.”

“So you said you know a few chords?” I asked.

“Yeah…” His hands swept quickly from the scales into a couple simple chords - the G, C and D majors. He looked up at me, seeking pride.

“Great job,” I told him, smiling and nodding, giving him the approval he was asking for with his eyes. “That’s a good start. There’s plenty of songs you can play with just those three chords.”

“Yeah?” Ethan perked up.

“Yeah.” I transitioned from the scales into Leaving On a Jet Plane by John Denver. Ethan’s fingers slid across the neck of his guitar, sliding his pick across the strings, falling into pattern with mine until we were both strumming through the song. Without warning, I transitioned from that to Brown Eyed Girl by Van Morrison. “Sha-la-la-lalalala-la-de-dah,” I sang quietly as I played. Ethan smiled into the strings. “Okay...okay, now look how I’m strumming… It’s one and two and three...skip… four and… Up down up down up skip up down up…” Ethan was gnawing his lip, and his guitar let out a couple groans of complaint as he struck the strings out of their sequence, but after a good twenty minutes of alternating between Jet Plane and Brown Eyed Girl, he’d mastered the three chords and the strum pattern.

I’d been so frustrated and stressed before we started, mostly because of my mother, but I could feel the stress melting away, my heart rate slowing appropriately. The healing power of music…

When we finally finished out one of the songs and I lowered my hands from my guitar, he did, too, and the last note faded off and I said, “That was bad ass I ain’t gonna lie. Great job, man.” I high fived him.

“Thanks,” he answered. “That was cool.”

“Next time we do this we’ll go over the minor chords so you can have a wider range, but for now you did awesome. Practice that when you get chance to,” I suggested.

Ethan nodded, “I will. I swear I will. I’ll be awesome at this. You’ll see.” He grinned.

“You will be, I’m sure of it, if you just practice,” I answered.

I put down my pick.

Ethan looked at mine, then at his. “What’s the difference between your pick and mine?” he asked and he reached for the one I’d just put on the counter, but I snatched it off the desk quickly.

“Sorry,” I said, realizing how rude I’d been to snap it out of his hand practically. “I got this one a long time ago. Supposedly it belonged to Kurt Cobain. You know. Like Nirvana?”

“You were alive when Kurt Cobain was?” Ethan looked wide-eyed, like he’d just found out I was alive when Beethoven was alive or something.

“Dude, I was in the Backstreet Boys before Cobain died.”

“Shit. So wait wait. This is his pick?” He stared down at it with reverence in his eyes.

I nodded.

“Shit that’s cool. How’d you get that?” he asked eagerly.

“I went to go see them, one of the last shows before he died, and I wanted to go meet them but I wasn’t much of anybody yet, so I didn’t get to go in and meet him, other than a quick brush-by in the hallway, but one of the people in his entourage gave me the pick.” I smiled and Ethan dropped the pick into my palm.

“That’s gotta be worth some money,” he commented.

“It’s worth way more than money,” I answered, sliding the pick into my pocket.

It was almost lunch time by the time Ethan and I emerged from the studio. Ethan ran upstairs to put his guitar away and I stepped into the living room, where Lauren was sitting on the couch under a blanket on her iPad. “Well good morning stranger,” she said, “You’ve finally emerged from the Music Cave, I see.”

“Yeah,” I said, “Did us some guitar lessons this morning.”

Lauren lowered her glasses, looking up at me over the frame, “Did you pause long enough to do your phone-in before Lori has a heart failure?” Her lips threatened at a smirk.

I nodded. “Yeah.”

Something about the yeah must’ve been too heavy because she raised an eyebrow quizzically. “And how did it go?”

I shrugged.

Concern officially crossed her eyes. “Are you okay?”

Ethan came back in the room at that exact second. “I’ll tell ya later,” I replied.

Lauren nodded, then turned her attention to Ethan, “How was the guitar lessons? Was he hard on you? Do I have to beat him up?”

Ethan laughed, “Nawh, it was good. We had fun. I learned some great stuff.”

“Good to hear,” she said. “I’m musically challenged, so I respect anyone who has the patience to attempt to learn it… and even more respect for anyone who attempts to learn it with this guy as the teacher.” She looked up at me with a twinkle in her eye.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

Lauren laughed, “Just that you aren’t the most patient teacher in the world.” I knew what she was thinking of… the time I tried to teach her how to play Magic the Gathering and gotten frustrated because she couldn’t understand the meaning of the mana cost. ”They’re just fucking trading cards!” she’d yelled at me, throwing several cards at my chest after I’d yelled at her that she couldn’t use a blue spell because she didn’t have enough mana for it in play.

Ethan smiled at me, “It wasn’t all that bad.”

I stuck my tongue out at Lauren.

She laughed. She was just playin’ with me and we all knew it. “So - speaking of Nick and patience… I started mapping out that trip to the ocean we were talking about and ---”

But before she could finish the sentence, there was a strange chiming sound and both of us looked around for the source. Ethan, however, reached in his pocket and produced a cell phone. “It’s my dad!” he said with excitement, then he charged out of the room, flipping open the cell and saying, “Hello?!”

I looked at Lauren. “Did you know he had a cell phone?”

“Nope,” she answered, surprised. We both stared after him for a couple moments. Then Lauren turned back to me. “So what happened with the interview?”

I sighed. Honestly I was still processing it. Or maybe, rather than processing, I was repressing it. Something like that. I shifted uncomfortably. “My mother called in.”

Lauren groaned and rolled her eyes, taking her glasses off and sitting up, putting the iPad and her glasses on the table. She patted the sofa beside her. I went over and sat down and she wrapped me up in a hug. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I hate that woman,” she added.

I didn’t particularly like her, but something inside me flared up protectively when Lauren said those words. Even after everything my parents have put me through over the years, that natural instinct to protect blood doesn’t fade away.

I doubt it fades away in anyone, no matter what they’ve been through. Not on the very most basic level.

We just get better at keeping that instinct quiet is all.

“I wish she’d just leave me alone,” I said. Lauren ran her hand through my hair and I suddenly felt the rims of my eyes heating up again, burning like they were thinking about crying. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, I instructed myself. Don’t let her have this kind of power over you. Just don’t do it.

“I know, baby, I’m sorry,” Lauren said. “What did she say?”

“I dunno, just the usual bullshit you know? But I hate when she does it in public forums like that. It’s not true, and even if it was it shouldn’t be discussed with the whole wide world listening, y’know?”

“I know.”

I shook my head, “Our family looks so trashy ‘cos of the shit they pull,” I said, “I’m just so sick of not being taken seriously by media because of them.”

Lauren sighed.

“And it scares me, too,” I added.

“Why?”

“Because… what if it’s, like, some kind of fucked up genetic thing? What if I’m just as bad a parent as my parents are?” I couldn’t even look at her as I said the words. I was suddenly very, extremely certain that there was not enough juju-karma in the entire galaxy to undo the mar that was my inevitable destiny to become my parents.

Lauren shook her head, “Stop that,” she said firmly. “You didn’t have a great example of parenting growing up, nobody’s gonna deny that. But Nick, you can’t inherit parenting skills. You can emulate them, but you can’t inherit them. There is no DNA code for that. There’s only learned practices, which you can break. You can look at what your parents did and either do or not do those things. When we get kids - whether we adopt or whatever once we start trying again - you will be the best dad, Nick, because you want to be a good father and, sure, you don’t really know what that looks like maybe but there isn’t a cookie-cutter model for it anyway. All you can do is your very, very best, and that’s all you need to do in the end.”

I closed my eyes and let her words sink in.

“Okay?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Okay.”

I stayed like that, just breathing her in and letting everything fade off of my emotions.

Ethan came back in the room and I sat up, breaking the spell Lauren had put me under. It was strange, I felt so much better just by telling her. I mean, that’s how it always works, I tell Lauren something that’s bothering me and instantly I’m better because she always says just the right thing to make my problems go away. I squeezed her hand with mine, like a silent thank you, and she squeezed mine back like she knew I appreciated it.

“So - your dad called,” Lauren said in an inquisitive tone as Ethan sat down in the chair next to the couch.

He nodded.

Lauren must’ve felt like a broken record: “How’d that go, are you okay?”

Ethan nodded, “Yeah. Yeah, I told him I’m stayin’ with you guys and he was really glad y’all took me in and he said to say thanks. He wanted to know if I could go visit him.”

Lauren and I exchanged looks.

“Sure,” Lauren answered with a shrug at me, “Why not?”

Ethan grinned. “He sounds like his old self. Like before he started drinking. He said when he gets out he’s gonna get us a place and we’re gonna have Christmas together. He said he’ll be out on the twentieth.”

“That’s awesome, just in time for Christmas,” Lauren smiled. She looked at me. I was staring at my feet, figuring out how many days it was ‘til the twentieth. “Isn’t that great, Nick?” she asked.

“Yeah. That’s only like a week and a half,” I said, looking up. My eyes met Laurens’s and she raised her eyebrow at me. She was silently telling me to smile for Ethan. I looked at him, “That’s great, bud.”

“When can we go see him?” Ethan asked enthusiastically.

I looked at Lauren. Truth be told, I didn’t wanna go anywhere near Cumberland Heights. The thought of the place scared the shit out of me, just because of my prior experiences there. I’d left behind a lot of shitty memories and emotions within those walls.

“This week,” Lauren answered. I could tell by her voice that she knew what I was feeling about it.

Ethan looked ecstatic, though. “I can’t wait to tell him about the guitar lessons,” he said. His eyes widened, “Do you think they’d let me bring my guitar and show him what I’ve learned?” he asked.

“Probably,” I answered.

It wasn’t like he’d learned much, we’d only just started, but Ethan’s excitement was apparent. “I’m gonna go practice,” he said, jumping up, and with a wave of happiness, he rushed out of the room and we heard his feet thundering on the steps. A few moments later, the very faint sound of the chords I’d taught him echoed through the house.

Lauren raised her eyebrows.

I bit my lips.

“So we’re going to meet his father, I guess,” she said slowly.

“I guess,” I answered.

“That ought to be interesting.”

“Uh huh.” I was staring at my feet, trying to figure out a way to get myself out of having to go to Cumberland Heights without saying I was afraid of facing my past demons.

Lauren picked up her iPad and glasses, laying the tablet on her lap, she chewed the end of the earpiece on her glasses thoughtfully. “You know, I was talking to Ethan the other day while you were in the shower and he said that his dad’s been to jail.”

I looked over at her.

“Otis Paulson,” she said. “That’s his dad’s name. Apparently after his mother left, Ethan was living with his uncle, the one who died in Iraq, and Otis went to prison, but Ethan doesn’t know why. Now he’s in rehab.”

“Sounds like a real winner,” I commented under my breath.

Lauren nodded slowly, still chewing at her eyeglasses. “I was trying to look him up on Google, but all I found was a private Facebook page and the news report from the accident.” She sighed. “Do you think he’s… safe… for Ethan?”

I shrugged.

“I mean, do guys like that change?” she asked.

“I did.”

“You aren’t a guy like that. You were a child star. That fucks with your psychology and influences and all that… that’s different. This guy… he wasn’t a Backstreet Boy at age 10.”

“I wasn’t either,” I commented.

“Eleven. Twelve. Whatever you were. You know what I mean.”

“I know, I just like exploiting your pure lack of knowledge about the group,” I answered, “It amuses me.”

Lauren nudged me with her toes, “Don’t be a bastard.”

“I’m not,” I laughed.

“I’m just worried,” Lauren explained, “I mean, Ethan’s a good kid, but he’s obviously been through a lot, and… I don’t think he deserves to be put through anymore bullshit.” She paused. “And besides,” she added, “This whole Mom disappearance act is really unnerving, too. How can a mother just leave her child without a really good reason? And what did his father go to jail for? What if he was abusive and Ethan just doesn’t remember it or isn’t telling us or something?” She’d clearly been obsessively worrying over this.

I shrugged. I didn’t have an answer. But since she was putting it out there, I knew I was gonna be wondering all these same things now, too.

She sighed. “Well, I guess we’ll see when we meet him. There’s not a whole lot to be done anyway, it’s not like we are his parents.”

Our eyes met a moment.

Then we both looked away.

She looked down at the iPad, then held it up for me to see. She had Google Maps up, and a long snaking line connected Nashville to the coast of North Carolina. “Anyway, I was looking up maps and destinations and all that for that idea you had for going to the ocean, and we could do it, going the North Carolina direction, if we left Friday to be back Tuesday. You have an in-studio at the radio station downtown the next weekend, so you wanna be back here in time to rest up by then, but --” she shrugged, “If you really want to go to the ocean with Ethan we could do it. It’ll be cold, but we could do it.”

“It sounds like fun.”

“We’ll have to go get some more winter clothes,” Lauren said. “Thermal underwear, that sort of thing.”

I grinned, “You’ll be sexy in thermal underwear,” I said, inching closer to her.

“We’ll get you a pair of those wool red ones, like in the movies, with the button close ass,” she giggled.

“You just wanna see my ass,” I murmured, kissing her cheek.

She smiled, I could tell by the way her cheek moved under my lips, “I just figured you’d enjoy the excuse to have your crack showing, like usual.”

“It’s not my fault I got a long crack,” I mumbled against her face.