One

ONE

I t was raining, and while I loved the sound of it and the way it made everything smell, and mostly how everything looked immediately after, all glistening and bright, it did have the effect of keeping many tourists inside until it stopped. That was no good for me. I needed people walking up and down the 500 block of Frenchmen Street where my place was, and popping in for a drink. We served prize-winning cocktails at La Belle Vie, thanks to my mixologists, Xola Bass and Darcy Lee, who had individually and together won several awards both locally and nationally.

The issue was, as good as the drinks were, along with our food—a Caribbean-Creole mix thanks to my award-winning chef, Georgine Joseph—without the live music we were famous for, bridal parties walking the Quarter wouldn’t pop in and stay until closing. People looking to dance, not simply stand and listen to jazz, wouldn’t stop and show off their moves for their dates and buy drink after drink. Early in the evening, there was a space between the stage and the tables where people mingled. That was when we had the soloists, the artists, those selling CDs and looking for their big break. Later in the evening, between ten and closing—which was at two in the morning Friday and Saturday night, midnight on weekdays—was when the house band went on, and the place filled up with a raucous crowd, and people sitting at tables could have someone in their lap at any moment. We were always packed, and the bulk of our money was made on beer and shots while people sang along to the music.

But on Monday a week ago, after closing at midnight, Jimmy Jake and the Polecats quit.

“Stupid name,” I muttered under my breath.

“Boss?” asked Conner Lee, Darcy’s little brother and one of my barbacks, as he walked by me with a tray of dirty glassware. “Did you say something?”

“No,” Xola replied, lifting the pass-through so he could walk behind the bar. “Your boss is simply lamenting our abandonment by Jimmy Jake and the lame-ass pieces of shit he calls a band.”

“Ah,” he said, nodding. “Well, considering no one else wanted them and Chris was the only one to give them a chance—and they were, no question, mediocre at best—I can understand the sentiment.”

“It was the best thing that could have happened,” said Simone Howard, my manager, as she took a seat beside me at the bar. “We need to talk to that booking agent.”

I shook my head. “We’ve always had a house band.”

“It’s not a sustainable solution anymore,” she told me for the five hundredth time.

“But if you have someone new every night, how can you ever develop a following?”

Simone turned to look at Merle Jennings, my head server, who was stacking our latest alcohol shipment on the shelves above the bar. “Say something.”

“The house band is dead,” he reiterated his point from two days ago. “Xola’s right, Simone’s right, Pete’s right, everyone’s right when we all told you we don’t need something constant , we need something constantly evolving .”

“Oooh, that was good,” Darcy chimed in as she peeled oranges for garnish.

Merle winked at her.

“Any performers we get, much like Jimmy and his couldn’t-keep-the-beat cats—God, they sucked,” Darcy said with an eye roll, “will eventually get another gig because they all aspire to greatness. Jimmy certainly couldn’t stay here forever, and being the house band at whatever club they went to in Nashville will get them seen by a lot more people. It’s all about exposure. You know that.” She eyed me hard. “We live in the age of social media, and if you have someone spectacular, or in Jimmy’s case, mediocre but constant in his cover of other people’s songs, someone will come sniffing around.”

It was the same with my two bartenders and the two others they’d trained. People were always in the bar wanting to poach them, but I had the edge with my employees. The space I’d created was safe. And not just because I did things by the book. They all knew I would take care of them. From a 401(K) to health insurance that included vision and dental, to being available day or night, I’d found that once someone signed on with me, they didn’t leave for anything at the same level or lower. They left to go to school, to open their own place, to spread their wings, to fly. Even then, sometimes they flew away to look, to see, and then came right back home.

Darcy was offered an amazing opportunity at a nightclub in Dubai and another in New York. She’d weighed the pros and cons, even taken trips to see where she would be working, and came back disillusioned—and in the case of the trip to Manhattan, with pneumonia.

“It didn’t feel right,” she’d explained, hugging me. “It wasn’t here.”

I enjoyed everyone being invested in our success, which was why I never hired anyone, except the bands, without everyone weighing in. The last time I’d been in the market for a new server, before Elsa Wayne, the guy sitting at the bar waiting for me to interview him had told Xola he could score her Molly if she wanted. Pete Rosen, one of my two assistant managers, had reported that her eyes had narrowed instantly and she’d pointed at the door. Anyone who thought selling drugs at our place was a good idea was in for a surprise. No one was about to put our Yelp , Tripadvisor , Zagat , or World of Mouth ratings in jeopardy. We liked being on the best of lists for our city. Of course, our music scene was a big part of that.

“Boss?”

I looked up to find Merle squinting at me.

“Sorry,” I said quickly. “I was just thinking about Jimmy and the guys.”

“They’ll get paid more at the new place,” Merle reminded me.

“I know. I don’t begrudge them leaving. It’s just the timing.”

“Yeah,” Darcy agreed. “If they could have waited just two weeks, that would have allowed you time to at least put feelers out. As it is now, right before Christmas, it’s gonna be hard to find someone to fill the spot.”

“So true,” I grumbled.

“What was the name of the band that was here last night?” Darcy asked, and when I looked at her, I was, as always, struck by her beauty. She was second-generation Chinese American, and instead of being anything like anyone else in her family—I’d seen pictures—she looked like a goth pixie. Both arms and her entire back were covered in gorgeous floral—poisonous flora—tattoos. Her ears, her nose, and her tongue were all pierced, and I had never seen her wear anything that wasn’t black. At the moment, she had a bustier over a peasant blouse, a black leather skirt, black tights, and knee-high motorcycle boots. When she wasn’t working, her boots were stilettos, but behind the bar, support for her feet was more important than fashion. And the boots laced up, so they were still cool-looking.

When her brother came out as gay and their parents couldn’t deal with that and stopped supporting him financially, Darcy moved the nineteen-year-old out to New Orleans, got him enrolled at LSU, and took over his support. Her one stipulation was he needed a job. She’d worked full-time and gone to school—her parents had the identical issue with her being bisexual—so he could do the same. I enjoyed having Conner at my bar because he was easygoing and smiled often, and it gave Darcy something else to do than worry about my love life.

“Boss?”

“Sorry, I was just thinking how pretty you are.”

Darcy gave me an indulgent smile. “You were zoning out is what you were doing,” she teased me. “But c’mon, what was the name of the band?”

I had to think. “Um, Cult of Meat?” I offered.

“No,” Xola said, reaching for the limes to start chopping them up for drinks. “I think it was Cult of Means.”

“Where are you guys getting cult ?” Pete Rasmussen said, like we were all dumb, as he filled the ice bin, his arms like tree trunks, making the process quick and easy. “It was Cut of Meat.”

“It was Sweet Meat,” Elsa said, putting her tray on the counter. “I think they were going for the whole the-sweetest-meat-is-closest-to-the-bone saying, but that’s just weird.”

“Ewww.” Xola, who was vegan, gagged.

Getting out my phone, I looked at the name on my Excel spreadsheet. “It was Cut to the Meet,” I announced. “Like meeting someone.”

They were all looking at me like they’d smelled something bad.

“The fact that none of you knew their name tells me they sucked. Not memorable at all.”

“Oh, they were memorable,” Darcy assured me with a roll of her eyes.

“Just not in a good way,” Xola chimed in.

“Well…” Thad, my third bartender, grimaced. He was working the day shift for the rest of the week to learn more tips from Darcy and Xola. “I mean, it was wrong from the beginning, am I right?”

Lots of nodding from everyone.

Pete grunted. “A metal band on Frenchmen Street, boss? What were you thinking?”

All eyes on me.

“Something new?” I announced cheerfully.

Xola snorted, which was incongruous coming from a woman who looked like she’d stepped out of a fairy tale. With her long black box braids with magenta highlights, and flawless deep-umber complexion with gold undertones, she was stop-you-in-your-tracks beautiful. When there were men at the bar who hadn’t seen her—they would be talking, not paying attention, and then she’d ask what they wanted in her husky voice—it was fun to watch them get caught in her amber stare. I enjoyed seeing men of all ages go mute. Small perks of the job.

Not that owning a venue like La Belle Vie wasn’t fun. I loved it. My dream had been to have a place in the Quarter, and I realized it at thirty-one. Now, at thirty-six, I thought there would be more to my life than work. I had always pictured someone with me. I had, in fact, pictured someone very specific before he blew town, seeking fame and fortune. And unlike our last band, he had quickly found both. But thinking about Dawson West was a mistake, and after all the time it took me to purge him from my system, I was not going back for anything. And more importantly, thinking about my lost love did nothing to fix my current problem. We really needed a band.

Later that night, as Shenandoah was onstage, I kept my head down and made sure not to make eye contact with anyone, catching up on my paperwork and cleaning projects.

“Really?”

I groaned and lifted my head, meeting the beautiful gray eyes of my manager, my second-in-charge, the woman I’d been smart enough to hire the moment she walked into my place five years ago, after I’d owned the club for two whole weeks. She’d glanced around, then caught my gaze.

“You need help,” she’d stated. “You’re trying to do too much.”

She was not wrong. Trying to be all things when I was a back-of-house guy, not the type to be front and center, had been a mistake. In Simone Howard, I found someone who was amazing with the public, which I was not. We had the perfect division of labor. She told me to think of work like a ship. I took care of the crew, made sure we had all the supplies we needed for the voyage, and she navigated and talked to the people in all the ports. I liked the metaphor. At the moment, though, I did not enjoy how I was being looked at.

“What?” I asked defensively.

She tipped her head slightly toward the playing band.

Groaning, I put my head down.

“Dazzle me,” she goaded.

“I thought, yanno, from the name, that they were probably a country band.”

“Mmmmm-hmmm.”

“I mean, how could a country band be bad?”

“Tomorrow,” she said, one eye closed because the yodeling was just a bit off-key and had, I suspected, run straight up her spinal column to her brain, “you will invite the very nice booking agent who dropped off her card last week, to lunch.”

“I’m cooking my lobster gumbo,” Georgine informed me, taking a seat on the barstool beside me. “That way we’ll impress her.”

“We have to do something,” Xola agreed, sliding in next to Simone, gesturing at the emptiness that was our club at the moment. “Because people cannot dance and drink and sin while being reminded of God.”

She wasn’t wrong.

“Now listen,” Simone began. “I love church, and as you know, I sing in the choir every Sunday morning, but this? This ain’t it.”

No argument there.