A Rocker and a Hard Place Read Online Free

was pure Cole. Dark hair and skin, wide smile, lanky body. Dad had been a manual laborer and therefore more solidly built than myself. It’s also what had driven him to an early grave. Though at the rate I was going with my reckless lifestyle, I might not be far behind him.
    The pizza arrived and I answered the door, momentarily forgetting that I was only wearing a towel. It was lucky that the pizza boy was a forty-year-old man. He appraised my near nudity and sighed.
    “Ten bucks.”
    I took the pizza and handed him a fifty. “Keep the change.”
    Three bites of pizza later, I was done eating. I had completely lost my appetite.
    Emma was a mom.
    Emma’s life had moved on without me in it.
    I had sworn that I was done drinking until I passed out. So many times I’d promised myself I would get my life together. This last time, after starting a fight with my bass player for no reason, I had been resolved to stop drinking for good.
    But in my father’s house, alone, I felt a familiar itch beginning to build. I tried to distract myself by exploring the empty rooms. I saved my old bedroom for last, the place that still held every memory from my youth.
    An old guitar in one corner, a basketball in another. My old t-shirts in the dresser drawers and CDs stacked next to an old stereo. In the corner of the mirror, a faded photo stopped me cold. A youthful Emma grinning uninhibited at the camera, blond hair blowing and green eyes sparkling.
    Even then, I had hated having my picture taken. In all those years together, I’m not sure we ever took a picture together. But I remember the day I took that picture of Emma.
    We had taken a long drive out into the country. At the end of a dirt road, we sat in the back of my pickup and watched the sun begin to set over the pond.
    In a time before camera phones, I dug a cheap disposable camera from my pocket. She had laughed and asked what I was doing.
    “You are so beautiful right now, I just want to have this moment forever.”
    She had laughed again while I took the picture and teased me for being such a dork. Then she’d whispered that she loved me and my heart had never been so full. I broke her heart two weeks later .
    I grabbed the picture, tearing the corner slightly, and went downstairs. A questionably old bottle of scotch st ill sat in the back of Dad’s liquor cabinet. I didn’t stop to think about if I should drink it- I poured two fingers in a glass and tossed it down my throat.
    It burned- in an all-too-familiar way. I poured more into a glass and took it and the bottle with me into the living room. For the next hour, I took a hard trip down memory lane, staring at Emma’s beautiful face and throwing back half of the bottle of scotch before my world started spinning.
    Opening my eyes the next morning was painful. Harsh sunlight streamed through the open windows. A hammering noise outside compounded the assault on my hangover. I opened my front door to find Glenn hauling away pieces of my damaged porch.
    “Sorry, pal. Didn’t mean to wake you.” If he noticed my sorry state, he didn’t say anything. “You mentioned that you were planning to start working on this today and I thought you might need some help.”
    “You’re a good man, Glenn.” I wasn’t being facetious.
    Salvation was full of men like Glenn that woke up early on a Sunday to help a stranger fix his front porch. I didn’t even know the name of my neighbor in Malibu, and my house in Nashvill e was behind an iron gate to keep strangers away. “Just let me grab some coffee and I’ll be out to help.”
    Some pain meds, a liter of water, and two cups of coffee did the trick. Before long, Glenn and I had managed to drag all of the damaged wood out to the curb.
    As we appraised the empty hole where the porch used to be, Glenn said, “I saw you talking to Emma Wellington yesterday. You two have a history?”
    Glenn was a perceptive guy.
    “You could say that.” I wasn’t sure I trusted Glenn enough to