his hair, and his attitude all worked. Hey, they had worked on her, and she had snagged him, and she was thrilled every time she looked at him. But, other women were constantly being snagged as well and she had to be ever vigilant regarding her potential rivals and Phil’s attitude toward them. Luckily, he was so used to female attention that he usually ignored it. Tracie sighed. She would have to introduce them. “Laura, Frank, Jeff, Phil, this is Allison.” And even though she knew she shouldn’t, Tracie looked at Phil and said, “And this would be …”
“This is Melody,” Phil said. “She needed a ride over here.”
“From where? Your apartment?” Tracie asked, and then wanted to bite her tongue.
Laura shifted slightly in her seat, so there was no room for anyone else at the banquette. Tracie had to hand it to her friend. Phil still ignored Laura as he tightened his embrace around Tracie’s shoulder. “You look like a warm stove on a cold night,” he whispered into her ear. “See you later, babe,” he said to Melody, who was then forced, albeit reluctantly, to melt into the crowd.
Tracie eyed the girl’s back as she left.
“Unchained Melody,” Laura muttered with satisfaction.
“Righteous Brothers. 1965. Phillies label,” Jeff said.
Best to just ignore her and what might have gone on, put it away, like a sweater at the back of the closet in summer. Not that she wouldn’t hear all about it from Laura later. “So, are you playing tonight?” she asked Phil.
“Yeah. Bob is letting me do the second show.”
Bob led the Glands, but not for long, if Phil had his way. “Great!” Tracie said, distracted. She looked back into the crowd to see if Melody was hanging around. She didn’t seem to be, which was a relief. Tracie trusted Phil, but only within certain parameters. She’d better stay the whole night, then. When you mixed music, alcohol, and Melody, you were outside the parameters. “When is Bob arriving?”
“Well, there’s the question,” Phil said with a frown.
“Which Gland is he?” Laura asked. “The adrenal? The pituitary?”
“The asshole,” Phil said.
“Oh. Then that would more properly be called ‘the anal gland,’” Laura said smoothly.
Though Phil was the newest member, he was already jockeying to be leader. But why he would want it, Tracie could not fathom. It seemed like a lot of work: begging for unpaid jobs with club owners, making endless phone calls about rehearsals, begging vans from friends to schlep equipment—all just to pick the lineup of songs. Big deal. She supposed picking the lineup would be fun, but she couldn’t imagine Phil organizing everything else. She thought, There must be a responsible side to him after all.
“You know,” Jeff said for what had to be the three hundredth time, “I’m not so sure about our name.” Tracie looked up to the ceiling and sighed. When the guys weren’t fighting with one another or rehearsing or drinking, they spent their time arguing over the band’s name. Tracie had managed to do a feature about them—overcoming a lot of resistance from Marcus—and she’d used the latest name that they had agreed upon: Swollen Glands. But now, once again, Jeff voiced an objection. “I saw this sign, and it was really cool,” he continued. “Up in the mountains. They had them everywhere. It just said FROST HEAVES. Great name, huh? And, like, free advertising. Cool, huh?”
“How about Watch for Curves?” Laura joked.
“Nah,” Jeff said, serious. “Too limp.”
“Well, there’s always Yield to Pedestrians,” she suggested.
“There’s nothing wrong with Swollen Glands,” Phil said. “I thought of it, and anyway, the name’s in the paper. We don’t want to stop the swell of publicity that’s building. Right, Tracie?”
Tracie didn’t have the heart to mention that one article was more a pimple than a swell and that tomorrow there’d be another band in the paper. “Right,” she said, and caught Laura rolling her eyes. She hoped Phil hadn’t seen it.
Luckily, Phil was trying to get the bartender to fix him a drink. He then nuzzled closer and whispered into Tracie’s ear, “I’m happy to see you.”
Sometimes, Phil was a jerk. And Tracie knew he probably wasn’t ready to make a commitment, but there was something about his wild good looks, the way his hair brushed across his cheek, the way his fingers hardly tapered, but instead came to an end in flat, smooth nails. Phil was heat to her coolness and passion to her planning, and sometimes he made her forget all of the bad. Tracie responded to his whisper with a blush.
Laura picked up on Tracie’s blush and shook her head. “I think I’ll try to buck the trend and do something socially responsible, like picking up a merchant seaman. Later,” she said as she boogied off into the crowd.
“What’s up her ass?” Phil asked Tracie.
She just shrugged and sighed. It was too much to expect her friend to like her boyfriend and vice versa. She turned to her laptop. She’d completed her profile at work and begun the Mother’s Day feature, but she still had some polishing to do on it.
One of the things Tracie really liked about Phil was that he was also a writer. But, unlike her, he didn’t write commercially. He was an artist. Phil wrote very, very short stories. Some less than a page. Often Tracie didn’t get them, but she didn’t admit that to him. There was something about his work that was so personal, so completely contemptuous of an audience, that she respected him.
Although Phil had roommates, and had always had a girlfriend, Tracie knew he was essentially a loner. He could probably spend five years on a desert island and when a ship landed to rescue him he’d look up from his writing or his guitar and say, “This is not a good time for me to be interrupted.” He’d certainly said that enough to her, and she respected his integrity.
Sometimes she thought that journalism school and her job had spoiled her talent. After years of being told, “Always consider who might be reading your work,” she found Phil’s commitment refreshing, even if he looked down on writers like herself who took on commercial subjects.
Now she knew exactly who would be reading her feature: suburbanites over morning coffee; Seattle hipsters munching bagels at brunch; old ladies at the library. Tracie sighed and bent her head to get closer to the screen.
After just a minute or two Phil nudged her. “Can’t you put that down and enjoy the scene?”
“Phil, I told you I have to finish this feature. If I don’t get it in on time, Marcus will pull me off features altogether. He’d love the excuse. Or I could lose my job,” she snapped.
“That’s what you say about every story,” Phil snapped back. “Stop living in fear.”
“I mean it. Look, this feature is really important to me. I’m trying to do something unusual about Mother’s Day.”
“Hey, you don’t even have a mother,” Jeff announced.
Tracie turned to Jeff as if he was a child. “Yes, Jeff, it’s true that my mother died when I was very young. But, you see, journalists don’t always write about themselves. Remember, I wrote an article about you guys? Yet I’m not a Swollen Gland. Not even a mammary. Sometimes, journalists write about current events. Or they report on other people’s lives. That’s why they call us ‘reporters.’”
“Wow. The irony is so heavy in here, it’s breaking my drumsticks,” Frank said.
“Man, what time do we go on?” Jeff asked.
“Not till two, man,” Frank told them.
Tracie kept herself from groaning. Two! They wouldn’t be out of here until dawn.
“God. Was that the best Bob could do?”
“I hope these jerks clear out by then and we get a decent crowd,”