“Mum,” I tried again. “Please.”
“Close the door behind you and keep the TV on low, yeah?” she grumbled, already half asleep.
I stared at the back of her head. Her hair was twisted up and spun thin like an old rat’s nest. I stared at it, happy for the spot of ugly on her. I stared at it and hated her so much that my little body shook with it.
“I hate you,” I whispered, but Mum was already back asleep.
“Hatin’ never did no one any good, H.R.,” King muttered as he took my arm and pulled me out of the stinky room, closing the door softly behind us. When he faced me, his face was serious like an adult’s. “You gotta be smarter than hate, yeah? You don’t like Mum? Can’t blame ya, but you don’t let that rule ya.”
“Why not?” I pouted.
King grinned and tugged on the end of my messy ponytail. “’Cause I don’t wanna take a grumpy girl to Mega Music with me.”
“We’re gonna go anyways?” I nearly shrieked.
“If you keep it down, we will,” King ordered on a harsh whisper. “Now get your shoes on and let’s go.”
I started to turn on my heel and sprint to my mini biker chick combat boots, but I stopped mid-step, lost my balance, righted myself and then turned around to face my brother again.
“You love me, don’tcha?” I asked him soberly.
He grinned his grin that girls already loved. King was only eight, but, man, did he have game. “Yeah, H.R., I fuckin’ love ya.”
“How much?” I demanded, because I knew I could.
I might have had a shit mum, but my men loved me, my brother, maybe, most of all.
He shoved at my shoulder and rolled his eyes, but his voice was so warm as it poured over me it felt like soft, tropical rain. “Enough to take ya to Mega Music instead of meeting Shelley Newborn at Stella’s diner for a milkshake and a kiss.”
“She has braces anyways,” I told him something he already knew as I tugged him down the hall toward the front door. “I’m saving you from bloody gums. You can do better.”
“Such a chick thing to say,” King argued as he swung out of the house behind me and slammed the door shut as a tiny ‘fuck you’ to our mum. “Sure, she has braces, but have you seen her tits? First girl in the grade to get ’em, and H.R., you’re not a dude so you don’t get just how much a bloody mouth is worth some one-on-two time with those beauties.”
“Horndog.”
“Brat.”
We grinned at each other so wide, we looked dumb and then before I could sass him right back King hiked up his loose-fitting jeans and took off in a dead sprint.
“Last one to Mega Music has to buy the winner a pop,” he called out.
I wasn’t angry with his head start or even when he won, mostly because I didn’t have the money to buy him a pop and he’d find that out soon enough, but also because Old Sam would give me some Hubba Bubba so King was the one that was going to lose out in the end.
He was already inside when I pushed open the poster plastered front door to Mega Music, but I didn’t go looking for him among the stacks and bookcases filled with records. Instead, I went straight to Old Sam.
“There she is, oh ye, there’s the love of my life,” Old Sam sang out to me, doing a little shimmy as he did it.
I laughed at him and fell just a little more in love with him. I didn’t have a grandpa, because my dad’s parents were dead and my mum’s wished she was dead, so it kind of felt like Old Sam was my grandpa. He suited the part too. Even though he wasn’t a biker, he’d lived a hard life of rock concerts and partying as a roadie before settling in Entrance at Mega Music and I liked the tales age and experience had written in his creased face. He wore his hair funny, a retro-style I was too young to realize was reminiscent of Elvis and James Dean.
When I reached him, I threw my little arms around his legs and squeezed. He laughed in a way that was somehow jazzy and patted the top of my head.
“There she is,” he repeated softer, then pushed me away gently so he could bend down and look me in the eye. “You been a good this week girl?”
He asked me this every week and every week I shot him a little grin and batted my eyelashes at him. “Not this week, Old Sam.”
I was only six, but I knew men, I’d been reared by the manliest of them, and I already knew how to wrap them just so around my little finger.
Old Sam laughed then winced as his knees creaked when he straightened. “You make an old man feel young, shinin’ such beauty in my store each week.”
“It’s my favourite day, Sundays,” I told him.
“Right on, girl, mine too. Now, where’s your dad at, huh?”
I shrugged even though it was weird that Dad would miss a Sunday with us, at least without calling to tell us why first.
He pursed his lips and darted his eyes over at his cell phone lying on top of a stack of records, but when he looked back at me, he was smiling. “Right, pick a paw then, princess.”
I watched him stick his hands in his pockets then offer them to me with fists tight before slapping my little hand over one of his big ones. “Left!”
He tipped his hand over and opened his palm, revealing a package of strawberry watermelon Hubba Bubba gum.
“Yes!” I shrieked with a fist pump. “My fav!”
Old Sam winked at me. “Don’t I know it? Now, I pulled some Johnny Cash fer ya, today. Why don’tcha go take a look while I deal with somethin’?”
I wrinkled my nose even as I popped a thick piece of bubble gum in my mouth and started to chew. “That’s country music! I hate that shit.”
“Girl, you don’t know shit about that shit. Don’t spew what yer daddy told ya without listen’ fer yourself. You got a mind of your own in that pretty head?”
I fisted my hands and plunked them on my hips. “And don’t forget it!”
“That’s what I thought. So, go the hell over to your spot and play what I pulled fer ya, think you might like this brand’a country.”
I chewed my lip. Country music sucked, my dad had told me that all music outside of rock was for the musically uneducated. But I trusted Old Sam. He pulled records for me every Sunday and he never disappointed. So, even though I could’ve thrown a mini tantrum and it would’ve been fun to argue with Old Sam about it, I took his advice and made my way through the disorganized stacks to my little corner with the record player.
There was a man in black on the worn sleeve and “At Folsom Prison.”
Reverently, I slipped the record from the cover and placed it on the turntable. I held my breath as the first few strains of his rendition of Blue Suede Shoes rumbled into the room with me.
I wasn’t a musician. In the last year, I’d tried the guitar, the piano, and singing (don’t even get me started on that failure,) so I couldn’t produce beauty with sound, but since I was a baby, so they said, I loved it. I was a woman with a deep well of emotions raised by a bitch mother and a brotherhood of men who mostly didn’t know their emotional ass from their elbow. So, I had a lot to feel and not a lot of ways to say it.
Music was that voice for me, and even at six years old sitting cross-legged on the floor of Mega Music, I knew that it would play a vital soundtrack to my life.