The Fame Equation Read Online Free PDF Page B

Any words of advice for her? She’s moving into her new house on Friday.”
    Carole stopped raking and smiled. “Go with the flow, that’s all I have to offer.”
    Go with the flow seemed to be Carole’s entire philosophy on life, and it wasn’t necessarily a bad idea.

    Melody was renting a cute yellow cottage in Pegram, up the hill from the new Dollar General. The home was gated and partially screened by shrubbery. Perfect for a rising young star. I’d been to her house a number of times, and today, I half expected it to be piled with boxes. Melody reminded me, however, that the movers would do all of that tomorrow.
    We wandered around the small house and I took pictures of some of the furniture as Melody told me the history of a few pieces, including those she was taking with her to her new, gi-normous home in Kingston Springs.
    “I bought that futon the first week I was in Nashville, even before I had a place to live,” she said. “It folds up, and it fit in the back seat of my old Honda. A few nights, when I had nowhere to go, I pulled it out and slept in the woods.”
    Melody offered her trusty futon to me, and I was honored. I knew it would come in handy when either Jon or I had guests. Not that Jon, to my knowledge, had ever invited anyone other than Darcy or me to his loft, but hell could possibly freeze over someday.
    Melody had come a long way in a short time, and I admired much about her. She had a good work ethic and she never, ever took her eyes off her goal of making a living singing country music. What made it all the more impressive was that Melody had come from almost nothing.
    Like Dolly Parton, Melody moved to Nashville the day after she graduated from high school. But instead of a depressed town in East Tennessee, Melody hailed from Toad Suck, Arkansas. Toad Suck is an unincorporated community west of Conway, Arkansas in the central part of the state.
    Melody once told me that when pop star Harold Jenkins changed his name back in the 1960s to become a country singer, he put his finger on a map and it landed on Conway, Arkansas, and Twitty, Texas. Thus, the legendary Conway Twitty was born. Melody hadn’t used a map to change her birth name, but you have to admit that a name like Melody Cross is a bucket load of pigs better than Raylene Potts.
    I’m not sure why Melody and I hit it off so well. She was short, blond, naïve, sweet, and talented. In other words, everything I am not. We did have alcoholism in common though, her mom and my dad.
    We also shared not being raised by our parents. My maternal grandmother took me in from a rundown Chicago apartment after my mother died, and after my dad went off the deep end and started to drink. I was nine and she took me to her home in rural Bucksnort, Tennessee. My dad is still around, somewhere, but I rarely hear from him.
    The little girl who would later become Melody Cross had been the youngest, by far, of the Potts children. Her mother, Claudine, had given birth to an older sister, Brandyne, at fifteen, and a brother, Bodine, a year or so later. Melody came along when her mother was thirty. And, yes, all three kids had the same father, who was now serving a long prison sentence for doing something Melody didn’t want to talk about.
    Claudine got tired of being a mom when her youngest was about six, so the future Melody Cross became a foster child. Melody spent most of her youth in the home of an older couple who attended a small Baptist church. I guess we both had small towns in common, too.
    With Melody’s help, I took photos of a coffee table that was hand made out of old barn wood, and two matching end tables. They would be big improvements over the battered tables Jon now had. There were also two lamps and some gently used pots and pans. Melody then helped me attach the photos to a text and we sent the lot off to Jon.
    I swear, I am the most technologically challenged person on the planet. I must be missing a gene, because even though Darcy