The Final Mix

I'd been up since six that morning messing with the cover art, so by the time I parked my Corolla outside The Beehive I'd already had two cups of coffee and half a bag of pretzels from the glove box. It was a Tuesday in July, which in Rodney means you sweat through your shirt walking twenty feet, and I did, walking twenty feet.

I'm Luce Kerr, I'm sixty-three years old, and I've been doing graphic design work for about thirty of those years. Album covers used to be the dream job when I was younger, back when covers mattered. Now mostly I do menus for taco places and websites for dentists, so when Eva, who manages this band called the Hollow Owls, called me about their debut record, I said yes before she finished the sentence. Rising band, real budget, vinyl pressing. I wanted this contract bad.

The Beehive is a converted warehouse over on the east side. Exposed brick, a flat roof that leaks when it wants to, a lounge with a torn leather couch and about four hundred records leaning in milk crates. I've been there twice before for meetings with Eva, always upstairs in the office. This time she'd told me to just come into the control room during the session and pitch the mockup while everybody was between takes. She said it gave the whole band a chance to see it at once.

So I pulled the big glass door open, portfolio under one arm, the mobile drive with my files in my bag, and I stepped into the cool dim room smelling faintly of old carpet and coffee that had been on the burner too long.

That's when I saw him.

Gabriel Sullivan was sitting at the mixing board with his back half turned to me, gray hair pulled into the same sad little ponytail he wore five years ago, headphones around his neck. His hand was riding a fader, slow and careful, and the music coming out of the monitors was one of the Owls' songs, the slow one, the one Eva said was going to be the single.

Then his hand stopped. Just stopped, mid-fade, the song hanging there half-mixed.

He turned in the chair. I watched him do the same math I was doing. Sixty-four years old, same crooked nose from when he broke it playing softball in Zilker Park, same way of looking at a person like he was checking a level before committing to a take.

I had known, in the abstract, that he worked in Rodney again. Eva had mentioned once, a year back, that the Owls had found an engineer who used to tour with a big Americana act. She never gave a name, and I never asked, because I'm not stupid. Some things you don't want confirmed.

But here it was, confirmed, sitting in a chair, staring at me.

"Hey, Luce," he said. Low, like he was trying not to spook me, which was its own kind of insult.

"Didn't know you were engineering this session," I said, and I was proud of how flat it came out. Flat as a fader at zero.

"It came together last month." He took the headphones off and set them down, like maybe that was a gesture of good faith. "Eva didn't tell you?"

"Eva tells me about budgets and pressing plants." I walked past him to the far end of the couch where the band was piled up, because walking past him was necessary and I was going to do it like it was nothing. "Hey, y'all!"

The three of them looked up from a phone they were all watching together. Maxwell, the singer, twenty-nine and already losing his hair, waved. The drummer, Petey, said my name wrong, the way he always does, Lu-cee, and I let it go again. The bass player, a tall quiet woman named June with her feet up on the coffee table, gave me a nod and went back to the phone.

"Should we look at the cover thing now?" Maxwell asked.

"Yeah, give me one second." I set the portfolio down on the couch and made myself turn around and deal with the room. Gabriel was still in the chair, one hand resting on the board like it was an old dog. "I'll need about ten minutes of setup and then everybody gathers round. That work?"

"Works for me," Maxwell said. "I'm getting a Coke. Anybody?"

Petey went with him. June drifted toward the lounge couch, where she immediately put her feet up again. That left the control room to me and Gabriel and the half-mixed song still hanging out of the monitors, stuck where his hand had left it.

"You can finish the take," I said, pulling my laptop out of the bag. "I need a table and an outlet, that's all."

"There's a table by the window." He pointed with his chin. "Window's cracked, fair warning, it's July."

"I noticed the July part in the parking lot."

He almost smiled at that. I saw it start and then he killed it, which was thoughtful of him. I got set up at the little table under the window, plugged in, opened the laptop, and pulled up the file while the room air from the cracked window crawled across the back of my neck like a warm washcloth.

The five years, in case you're wondering, went like this. Gabriel and I were together two years. I was fifty-six when we met, he was fifty-seven, and I thought, at my age, this is the last big love and that's fine, better than fine. He was engineering then, not touring, doing steady work at a studio on the south side, and we had a whole quiet life. Sunday farmers market, his tomatoes, my roses, arguments about the thermostat that never got resolved.

Then a band he'd engineered years before got back together for a national tour and needed a front-of-house engineer for the second half of the run, and somebody offered him a session gig on the road, and he said yes. He asked me, sort of. He said, it's eight months, Luce, and I said, I don't do eight months of nothing, and he went anyway. He called twice from the road. I let the second call go to voicemail and that was the end of it. He came home in the spring and never called again either, and I told everybody, including myself, that this was fine and mature and what adults do.

That was five years ago. I'm sixty-three now and mostly it doesn't cross my mind except when a certain song comes on or when I'm at a show and there's a tall gray-haired man near the soundboard, and then it crosses my mind hard for about an hour.

"You still doing the design work?" he asked from the board. He'd finally pulled the fader down and killed the monitor feed, so the room was quiet except for the window and the little fan they had going.

"Every day. Dentists and taco trucks, mostly." I didn't look up. "This one's a real one, though."

"The Owls are a real one," he agreed. "Good songs."

"You like the record?"

"I like it a lot." He said it plainly, no sales pitch in it, which was one of the things I'd always liked about him and was not currently in a position to appreciate. "Maxwell writes better than he knows."

"Everybody says that about Maxwell."

"Well, everybody's right."

June called something from the lounge about the Coke, and Maxwell yelled back, and the normal noise of a session filled the room up again, and I was grateful for it. I got the mockup up on the screen and transferred the files to the mobile drive and generally fussed, and I could feel Gabriel not looking at me, which takes a certain effort and I knew exactly how much, because I was doing it too.

Eva came in at some point with her iced coffee and said, "Oh good, you found the room," to me, and, "Gabe, take five more for the art pitch," to him, casual as anything, and I understood that either she didn't know or she knew exactly and enjoyed chaos. With Eva it could go either way.

Gabe. She called him Gabe. I used to call him Gabe. I was not going to call him Gabe again if we lived to be a hundred.

Maxwell came back with his Coke and Petey came back with two Cokes and a bag of chips, and June finally took her feet off the table, and I turned the laptop toward them and got as far as "Okay, everybody, here's the," before Eva's phone buzzed.

Gabriel stayed at the board. He didn't come look. I told myself that was professional distance and not whatever else it was. I caught myself checking anyway. He was turned toward the console with a pencil, doing something in a notebook, and I decided his neck looked exactly the same as it had at fifty-eight and hated myself a little for noticing.

Eva read the text and made the face of a woman reading a message from a landlord. "Okay. Parking thing. The guy with the loading permit is double parked and somebody's blocked the alley, so I have to go be a grownup about it. Everybody, tacos? There's the place on the corner. Gabe, can they run playback on their own for ten minutes?"

"They can run it all day without me," he said. "Take your time."

So the band trooped out, Maxwell grabbing the chips, June saying something quiet to Petey that made him laugh, and Eva pointing at me on the way out the door. "Don't leave without showing me the back cover."

And then it was just the two of us and the fan and the window and four hundred records in milk crates.

He hit play on the rough mix without asking me if I wanted to hear it, which was exactly the right move, because I did want to hear it and I would have said something stiff if he'd asked. It was the slow one, the single Eva had talked about. Maxwell's voice came in low, and the bass rolled under it, and there was a guitar line way back in the mix that sounded like somebody remembering something.

"That's the take from Monday," Gabriel said, half to me and half to the board. "Third one. He thought he flubbed the second verse."

"He didn't."

"No, he didn't!"

I came around the table to look at the console, because standing across the room from him was worse than standing near it. And that's when I saw the tape. There was a strip of masking tape stuck to the top of the board, right above the faders, in his handwriting, and it said KEEP TK 3, and under that, smaller, it said for L.

My chest did something I wasn't ready for.

"You labeled a take for me," I said.

He looked over. He saw where I was looking, and to his credit he didn't pretend he didn't know what I meant. "That's an old habit. I used to mark takes I thought you'd like. You'd come by the south side studio and I'd play them for you in the parking lot before we went to dinner."

I remembered that. I had made myself not remember that for five years and there it was, whole, the smell of his car, the way he'd hold the DAT player between the seats. I softened and there was no hiding it, my whole face went, and he saw it happen.

"That was two years of takes," I said. "You never ran out?"

"Never ran out."

The song kept playing. Maxwell sang the line about the highway and the porch light, and nobody in the room had written it for us and it still landed like it had.

The band came back smelling like tacos and queso, and the afternoon got loud again, and I showed Eva the back cover and she said the layout was fine but the spine type had to be bigger, and Gabriel ran the Owls through two more takes of the fast song while I sketched at my little table. Petey broke a stick and blamed the stick. June ate a sandwich standing up, leaning against the brick, watching everything. Normal day. Except for the part where every fifteen minutes I checked the tape on the console and it was still there.

Around five, Eva called a real break. "Tacos, for real this time, I owe everybody. Luce, you coming?"

"Can't. I've got the final files to lay out tonight. Big deadline Friday."

"Lame," said Petey, kindly, and they left, all four of them, arguing about brisket versus barbacoa, and the door banged and the warehouse went quiet again.

Gabriel came out of the control room with two bottles of water from the little fridge and held one out to me.

"Thanks." I took it. It was cold and the lounge was not. The couch has a tear in the left cushion and a spring that bites, and I sat on the good end, and he sat on the other end like someone who had measured the distance first.

For a while we just drank our water. A truck went by outside. The fan did its work.

"Tell me about the tour," I said. I hadn't planned to say it. It just came out, the way things come out when a room gets quiet.

He turned the bottle around in his hands a couple of times. "Eight months turned into fourteen. You know how it goes. One leg extends, then they add dates, then somebody drops off the bill and you pick up their markets. It was good work. It was the best-paid work I've ever done, honestly."

"That's not what I asked."

"I know it's not." He looked at the records, not at me. "It was fine, Luce. It was loud and long and I was good at it, and every night I walked out to four thousand people and none of them were you. I thought about you in every city. Every single one. Denver, Boise, somewhere in Ohio I can't even name. I'd be standing at the side of the stage and I'd think, she'd hate this volume, or, she'd like that hotel, they have real hangers. And then I'd fly to the next one and do it again."

I didn't say anything. The fan hummed. I have never in my life been good at receiving an apology, and that wasn't even an apology, it was something worse, it was just true.

"Why didn't you call," I said. "When you got back. You were back in the spring. I know because I checked, I have a cousin who knows everybody."

"Because calling in the spring was a year too late. The call that mattered was from the road, and you let the second one go to voicemail, and I understood it. It was a clear message. I respected it." He shrugged. "Respecting it was the worst thing I've ever done, but I