“Next time,” he says. “You two take care.”

I climb back onto the bike, the canvas bag slung over my shoulder. The whiskey thumps against my ribs.

Johnsons’ Market next. On the way I’ll check the music studio. The Smiths’ house. The Murrays’ house. In a town this size, there are only so many places to check.

I pedal through town, along the other side of Main Street. A few people are out now, heading to the diner. Running errands. Ducking into bars. I scan their faces. No one looks back at me.

And then, just as I pass the post office, I see a car slowing down on the other side of the street, across the tree-dotted meridian. Dark blue. New. Expensive.

Frankie Lynde is in the driver’s seat. I can see her profile through the sunny streaks on the glass. She’s laughing.

Someone climbs out of the passenger side.

It’s him.

I brake, pulling the bike to a stop between two parked cars. For a blink, I see myself reflected in the rear window beside me. I’m nothing. Just round shapes. Long, curling, pale hair.

Anders pulls a guitar case out of the backseat. He leans back into the car. Says something else to Frankie. I watch his lips. He smiles at her. For her.

Something painful opens inside my chest. I slam it shut again.

Keep my eyes and my mind clear.

Anders turns around. He opens the glass door that leads down to the music studio. The panes flash with reflected sun, and he disappears into the brightness.

Frankie’s car purrs away.

I focus my eyes straight ahead again.

A loaf of bread. Ground coffee. Maybe some milk. If there’s a little money left over, I’ll buy something else for the root cellar. Something that will keep. That can be opened by feel, in the dark.

Coffee. Bread. Milk.

I pedal on, toward the grocery store.

Anders

Underground Music Studio is literally underground. It’s in the basement of an old three-story stone building, down with the roaring vents and knocking pipes. It shares an entrance with an insurance office and a custom alterations place called Nancy’s Needles, which always makes me think of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. I’m guessing the Nancy upstairs didn’t have the Sex Pistols in mind.

You step off Main Street, through a stenciled glass door, into a toothpaste-green hallway. Then, if you’re under thirty and you’re not looking for insurance or an embroidered sweatshirt, you head toward the metal door on your right. Through that door and down a flight is a big, brick-walled room full of buy-or-rent instruments and parts: guitars, drums, keyboards, microphones, racks of replacement strings, sheet music, plastic buckets with a rainbow of little plastic picks, plus some saggy corduroy couches and chairs. I’ve spent so much time in this room, waiting for my lessons, that it feels like my own living room. Just with way better accessories.

Around the room are soundproofed metal doors numbered one through four. Studio number four belongs to Flynn. Inside, its red brick walls are covered with posters, mostly from Flynn’s past tours playing backup guitar in once-huge rock bands. Spongy acoustic panels, like unfrosted sheet cakes, hang from the water-stained ceiling.