Tickets

When she figured it safe, she went around the coffee table and took his seat, gaze falling on the wallet he’d left behind. She told herself she wanted to know his full name in case she ever had to give it to the police – because he had that look about him – but she was gripped with good old fashioned nosiness too, as she picked up the wallet and flipped it open.

There were a half a dozen ten dollar bills and a few ones in the cash sleeve. Two credit cards. A CVS customer card. A ticket stub from an AC/DC concert in ’08. He looked shell-shocked in his license photo, but she couldn’t read his info because the plastic sleeve was scratched and cloudy. She worked a nail beneath and managed to slide the ID out. Tameron Wales, she read before something that had been tucked behind the license went fluttering down to the floor.

She leaned forward and took a corner of it between two fingers. It was a photo, the kind you’d get at a carnival photo booth, of Tam sporting even longer hair and a girl on his lap. She was young, a dirty blonde, with a sweet little pixie face and huge eyes. Both her arms were around Tam’s neck and she smiled up at the booth’s camera as he pressed a kiss to her temple.

Delta flipped it over and read the bold, all-caps label handwritten on the back. JOEY 2003. Back to the wallet, she found two more from the same photo booth session inside the license sleeve. Tam was smiling in both pictures, the kind of smile that reached off the paper and told anyone looking at this snapshot of time that he’d been deliriously happy in that booth with that girl, whoever she was.

~ From Better Than You

 

 

 

I got to go to that show. Ticketmaster booted me off twice and I lost my floor seats; ended up sitting in nosebleed and it was still amazing. There's no way Tam missed it. Mike had tickets and he took his bestie.