“You have your cart before your horse. Your priorities are all wrong. You can’t infuse your music with love until you’ve loved, deeply and unselfishly. You can’t bring joy to the music until you’ve poured it into life. Same with grief, agony, ecstasy, fierce desire, loss...It’s like method acting—drawing on your own life experience to relate as closely as possible to the music, to the lyrics. You have to have those feelings in your life before you can have them in your music. Instead of sacrificing for the sake of a good life, life you can bring to your art, you’ve been sacrificing for the sake of fame. As you get older you get more desperate, more arrogant. You’re looking for your break, not your insight. There’s no question in my mind you would do anything to be number one. You’d sell your soul for it. I think you have! And from all I hear, fame isn’t that much fun.”

“Yeah,” he said with a hollow laugh. “Right.”

“Well, I promise you money and fame won’t hug you on cold, lonely winter nights... Buster saw it. Your passion is for notoriety, not for art. It’s empty, Mick. It’s not real. But great music and feeling joy from creating it, conveying authentic feelings, that’s real. You should learn to pull up the emotions of an experience, like meeting or losing the love of your life, and it should be so real you cry! The best sound, the most unique voice, the beauty of your instrument. Emotions you’ve experienced. That’s real.” She shook her head. “If you start with your life and your art you won’t have to talk about all the great singers you met in the men’s room or how many stars have your CDs because it won’t matter. Hard, hard work, focus on real living and real emotion, not on the stature you want. It’s not just marketing, it’s talent. You’re not authentic, Mick, that’s the problem. You have a good voice and a lot of arrogance. And you’re selfish. That doesn’t translate well.”

He was silent, mouth open slightly. He mulled this over. “You have a great strategy there, Ginger. If he thinks I don’t care about success but just want to share my great music...”

She rolled her eyes.

“I think you’re really onto something there, Ginger. I think Buster will go for it.”

“Good luck,” she said, making to rise again.

“Ginger,” he said. “You’ve always been there for me.”

“I know. I did my best. But that’s in the past, Mick. I have a man in my life and I don’t want you to ask for my help again.”

“Who is this man?” he asked.

“His name is Matt,” she said with a smile. “He’s a farmer.”

“Seriously? A farmer? Wow, I would’ve never seen that coming!”

“The smartest, sexiest man I’ve ever known.”

“Ever?” he asked.

She leaned toward him. “Ever.”

“But hey. We were happy once, weren’t we? I mean, I was happy and I thought you were happy. You loved me. You loved my music.”

“Uh-huh. And you loved you. It was very compact. I was almost superfluous. You always had very big dreams. They didn’t leave much room for anything or anybody else.”

He frowned. “What are you saying? That you loved who you thought I’d become?”

“Not really. But I think I might’ve loved who you thought you would become. And I was pretty young—it might’ve been the way you moved your hips when you sauntered on stage with all that confidence. In the end, it was very lonely. I wish you the best but I’m glad not to be in that relationship anymore. It really wasn’t good for either one of us. I’m going now. Don’t call my mother again—it gets everyone all riled up. My brothers want to beat you up and gee, if one of them broke your jaw, think how inconvenient...”

“Very funny,” he said. “You came, Ginger. Thanks for that. I think your ideas really helped.”

“Right,” she said. Strategy. Not hard work or sincerity or honesty, but strategy to get ahead faster, to make money more quickly, to be the top dog. Not to live a fulfilling life and also make good music.

“And Ginger,” he said, causing her to turn back to him. “I’m really sorry about the way things turned out. You were great. I’m sorry about your baby.”

Your baby.

It was tempting to correct him, remind him it was his baby. Except really, it wasn’t.

“I gotta remember that,” he said. “I’m creating relationships with the people I play for. I’m feeling the emotion. Like method acting, that’ll work.”

She just nodded once and left. When she got to the door of the café she turned to look at him and he was already on his cell phone. He was no doubt calling one of his many contacts to explain how he was now putting all his passion and energy into his music without worrying about fame...

* * *

It surprised Ginger how tired she was after a meeting with Mick that didn’t even last an hour. She was back in Thunder Point before five, just in time to help Grace bring in the sidewalk displays. It took quite a bit longer than usual because Grace was bristling with curiosity about Ginger’s meeting with Mick. Throughout the tale Grace let her indignation fly with comments like, “You’ve got to be kidding me!” and “Unbelievable!” and finally, “Man, you’re lucky you escaped!”

“True,” Ginger said. “Mick and I have nothing in common. But Grace, who knows—he might really take to fame and fortune. He’s pretty shallow. A lot of attention works for Mick.”

“He’ll never know,” Grace said. “Trust me. I’ve been in the trials where being first is everything. You know what? People think it’s luck. And they’re right. It’s down to luck after you’ve done everything humanly possible to sharpen your skill, after you’ve put in more work and time than anyone else, after you’ve established you have the greatest talent and sacrificed everything else for that one goal. Then it’s luck and timing. And then you’ll know if it makes you happy.”

“I already know it wouldn’t make me happy,” Ginger said.

“Didn’t for me, either. I’m happier in this little shop with my hottie schoolteacher than I ever was in competition. And that’s why there’s chocolate and vanilla. Because we all need different things.”