Spiral

program.”
    Based on what she’d said, I tried to fill in the blank. ”Alcohol rehab?”
    ”For me. Both drugs and booze for Spi. He loved to mix and match in his ‘youth.’ I’m more a one-addiction woman, and unfortunately I kind of transferred that from bourbon to Spi. Then, when he started getting back into snorting and drinking, I transferred from him to Very.” pretty frank, so I decided to go with it. ”Did you and your husband think of getting a divorce?”
    ”Spi? Hunh.”
    I thought that last part might have been Held’s way of laughing, but there was no smile on her face now.
    ”No, John. Spi’s father—the great field marshal himself—kept either one of us from even raising the possibility.”
    ”How?”
    Jeanette Held let her right hand drift to her lap, then closed her fists, watching them with something approaching interest. ”The Colonel had Spi by the balls, John. The money Spiral needed for its comeback had to ‘come’ from somewhere.”
    ”And his father wouldn’t have financed a divorced son—”
    ”—who’d deprived a little girl the principal male figure in her life.”
    I let it hang there for a moment before saying, ‘Tour husband was a good parent to Veronica?”
    ”Hunh.” A genuine laugh this time, if the resigned smile was any indication. ”Spi’s idea of being a ‘good parent’ is... was to buy Very expensive stuff on her birthday and then ignore his daughter the rest of the time as kind of a drag on his life.”
    ”What kind of ‘drag’?”
    ”What kind of ‘life’ would be a better question. Spi and some sidemen Mitch Eisen came up with would—you met Mitch yet?”
    ”Briefly.”
    ”That’s the best way, if you can’t avoid meeting him at all.”
    The smile seeped back through her shield. ”Spi and these sidemen would tour as ‘Spiral, the great raunch band of the seventies.’” Held looked down at the carpet. ”Christmases were the worst. He’d always want to be away for the holidays, avoid having to see his father. Then money got so tight that we’d barely get by, and even Spi knew he couldn’t take off for Aspen or the Alps.”
    ”I thought Colonel Helides was financing this big comeback.”
    ”Only recently, when Spi ‘discovered’ how Very could put across a song. He’d ever attended shows in her elementary school here, my husband would have known a lot sooner.”
    ”Someone else told me that Veronica was being tutored privately.”
    ”Privately, yeah. By my father-in-law’s wonderboy, Duy Tranh.” Held softened just a little. ”And I have to say, Duy was doing a good job by her, even if it was one more way the Colonel ran our lives.”
    ”So, no problems between student and teacher?”
    ”Not that Very told me about. It was more, ‘Duy showed me this way-cool nature video.’ Or, ‘David taught me this awesome computer game.’”
    ”David being the Colonel’s other son.”
    ”Yeah. Very liked him, too, even through the ‘extreme weirdness.’ But no matter how much she learned from those two, it still wasn’t normal.”
    ”What wasn’t?”
    ”Her not being in school just so she could rehearse with the band.”
    ‘You didn’t approve of the comeback?”
    ”The truth?” Held said sharply.
    ”That would be nice.”
    ”The truth.” Less sharply, the shield seeming to lift. ”Well, here’s what I heard of the old days. When the band started getting eaten alive by disco, this drummer I never met named O’D committed suicide. Spi went into a free fall. The other players—Buford, Gordo—they hooked up with other bands or got day jobs.”
    ”Like what?”
    The straight hair shook. ”Don’t know, because I didn’t even know Spi himself then. Oh, I knew of him, of course, at least from the glory days in the early seventies, cause I’d hear Spiral’s sounds on the radio back then. But by the time I met Spi, I’d been through one bad marriage with no kids, and a bout with the bottle that kept coming up knockout every round. So, I got off the booze, and did what I could to get Spi’s monkeys off him, too. And I did, so long as everything was going good.”
    ”Everything with your family life?”
    ”Hunh. No. No, I’m afraid that after a fantastic honeymoon and maybe three more months of ’wedded bliss,’ Spi started missing things.”
    ”Missing things?”
    ”About being in a rock-’n’-roll band, on tour in one of those stupid buses thinks it’s a Winnebago.” A stalling sound from her