As we drove down the Johnsons’ street, we were relieved to find a parking spot a couple of houses down. You know, this is Asheville, North Carolina, not New York City. We’d been having an unbelievable run of bad parking experiences.
Jazz’s VW was parked in the driveway. She hadn’t taken out any greenery pulling in. Maybe that meant she’d found her center on the way home. I hoped so, anyway.
Another car was behind it. A late model BMW that cost more than I wanted to imagine. “Is that Suzanne’s car?”
“No. Nothing like. So Jazz does have company.”
I opened the Jeep’s door and hopped down to the ground. ‘‘I’m going to walk on down there, anyway. I may not go in. I’ll just kind of look, see if everything seems all right.”
“Here.” Ben held out an empty drink cup.
“What’s that for?”
“I figure you need something to press against the wall to listen.”
“Ha,” I said, “ha.”
He joined me. “Okay, for no good reason that I will be able to explain, I am going to join you.”
“Why?” Every suspicious nerve in my hyper-nerved body was going off.
“Because you won’t shut up if we don’t.”
“Oh. That’s okay then.”
Hands stuffed in my coat pockets for warmth—I hadn’t been able to find my black leather gloves—I trudged behind Ben. For some reason, I didn’t feel like leading the charge on this one.
I am not going to lurk around making deductions from the sidewalk, however. We are going to ring the doorbell and check on her, and then leave.”
Nobody came, at first. We were about to take the hint and turn back to the Jeep when the door opened.
Jazz stared out at us, her hair a tangle of rainbow color melt and her cheeks wet. She held a handkerchief in her hand.
“Thank you for the name. We’re waiting for her now. She told me not to go back to the station until she calls me.”
“I think you’re wise to take her advice. You’re in good hands.”
She was obviously not inviting us in, and I sensed Ben getting ready to wish her well and leave.
“I hate to ask this—” I shifted slightly from one foot to the other. “This is embarrassing and, I, well—please, may I use the bathroom? I…” Another slight shift. “Really need to.”
“Oh. Sure.” Jazz stepped back and opened the door for me.
I scooted inside scanning both directions as I did.
“Down the hall, second door to the left.”
Fabulous. More doors to look through. I might even accidentally go right instead of left if it looked promising.
A spot burned between my shoulder blades. I knew Ben wouldn’t give me away by glaring at me. He must be sending a glare via telepathy.
I did not have to accidentally turn right.
The door on the right opened and Elgar the Elvis stepped out and almost ran into me.
“Pardon me,” he apologized, flustered in his rather charming Hugh Grant kind of way.
“It’s all right,” I said. Hurtled into the bathroom. “In a hurry!” I explained as I shut the door hard.
So okay, this was… weird. This was way weird.
I decided to go ahead and take care of business since I was in there. My grandmother always said, when you’re traveling never pass up an opportunity to sit down or use the toilet. This was a twofer.
I sat there for a while with my eyes closed, deep breathing, humming the softest ommm ever hummed. I went into my mental calm place, a small village church near Stratford-upon-Avon in England that I’d found when I was lost there the summer of ’14, and it took three hours for the tour to find me again.
Of course, the tour didn’t know I was hiding in the church and just didn’t want to leave because it was the calmest, sweetest, prettiest, most medieval place I had ever had all to myself in my entire life. I claimed it. I claimed it with my heart and soul.
Now, I knelt on the needlepoint-covered kneelers that some ladies’ auxiliary had made decades before. I went down the winding stone staircase to the undercroft and crypt beneath.
I inhaled the incense that was a little heavier behind a door that must be the sacristy.
And finally, I decided it was okay, I could step back out into the sunshine and join the tour again.
I mean, go find Ben.
I had forgotten all about the scene at Ashe U. About V.P. Bishop. About everything. I needed to fill him when we left.
But not before I peeked into that room Elgar had just left.
It was clearly Jazz’s bedroom with every boho item I could name hanging from hooks on the walls like an art installation. The bed was a mess of jumbled covers, and tissues were scattered around. That must have happened before he got there with his handkerchief.
I quietly closed the door then wandered back toward the verandah. But I didn’t have to go that far.
They were in the kitchen, with Ben sitting on one side of the breakfast table and Jazz and Elgar on the other. They were pressed close together, and he had his arm around her, his face an image of sorrow and helplessness.
I sat beside Ben but passed on the opportunity to press close and dive under his arm for comfort.
But don’t think it didn’t cross my mind.
“And you weren’t here when the police came?” Ben asked.
Wow, for somebody who was only going to touch base and leave, he sure was sticking around for the next inning.
“They were taking him out to the squad car when I showed up,” she said bitterly. “As soon as Daddy saw me, he started telling them he needed to warn me, as if he thought I was stupid enough to talk to them. Or explain things. I don’t know. They wouldn’t let him. He—he lost his temper. He started struggling and—Daddy’s a good man. He’s not a fighter. But he’s strong, and it took two of them to control him, and—”
“You’re right, Jazz. He’s a strong man, and he can take care of himself until the barrister arrives.” Elgar had a lovely baritone voice, so soothing in an almost fairy tale Prince Charming kind of way. “And as soon as we can, we’ll get you to the station to see him.”
“I’ve never seen him like that,” she said. “So wild-eyed. Not afraid. Wild. Enraged. I’ve never seen him like that.”
Elgar did have a bit of a young Elvis look if you considered the dyed Goth-black hair waving down his forehead, the pale skin, the blue eyes. His rather bashful smile. [We’re talking Young Elvis here, you know that, but I feel compelled to be specific.] “I believe Diggit said you were as interested in his early days as I am.” Where the heck did that come from? But Jazz fell against Elgar and closed her eyes. He must want to shift the conversation away from the arrest. “What an amazing time of history, that was, especially here in the U.S. Your father returning from Vietnam and turning to music as a balm for his soul.”
“They didn’t hear that part,” Jazz said. “They’d have to spend a few more months of evenings and weekends hearing Daddy’s stories to hear all of it, and then you never know exactly what to believe.”
Elgar grinned down at her, a gentle grin, but a grin. “You’ve never warned me off his stories before.”
“I think the ‘romantic’ part is him putting a bit of a gloss on times that weren’t at all shiny or romantic. But no, I don’t mean he’s making stuff up. Just that looking back, sometimes things seem simpler or better then. Sometimes the ‘might-have-beens’ seem a lot more promising in hindsight without any reality to destroy them.”
I couldn’t bring up Professor Humphreys, under the circumstances. Even I couldn’t cross that line.
But evidently Elgar could.
“Did you know that Diggit and Professor Humphreys played together when they were kids? Diggit on sax, Humps on piano, and a kid named Joe on drums.”
Jazz leaned her head against his shoulder again, and he smoothed her hair.
Ben was probably avoiding looking at me as hard as I was avoiding looking at him. No, Diggit had not mentioned that he was one of the kids playing with the professor.
“They were quite wonderful, or so it seems.” He touched Jazz’s chin. “Surely you’re not going to burst my bubble and say that a manager didn’t try to get them a touring gig.”
Her full lips twisted. “No, that’s true. He’d already talked to my grandmother about it. In fact, that’s how Mingo’s grandmother found out about it. The manager visited all the parents to convince them. In Mingo’s place, his grandmother.
“And she didn’t tell them no. She told them to please let her be the one to tell her grandson, and they took it as a big surprise and agreed not to tell any of the boys until they were all at the Orange Peel that night, playing a set. In fact, they thought it such a grand idea, they got all the parents there but pulled to the back so the boys wouldn’t see them and figure out what was up.”
Jazz stretched her head back, exposing her long, supple neck and the ring of beautiful hibiscus blooms tattooed around it. Then she sat up, shrugging Elgar’s arm off her shoulders. She stared at me and Ben through flat green eyes.
“So there they were playing in front of a crowd that loved those boys like they were their own, that had known for a long time they were witnessing the beginning of something new, something special. It was electric. That’s what everybody said. The mood, the music—it was all electric even not knowing the surprise that was coming.”
“And then that viper walked up on the stage in her orthopedic shoes,” a new voice spoke, a deep contralto.
It was a heavyset woman with a tight gray Afro and a cane.
“Granny!” Jazzmyn cried and lunged up from the table.
They met halfway, and it was hard to tell who was holding whom up, the way they clung. But where Jazzmyn trembled, the old woman stood stiff. And when they pulled apart, she asked, “Why are you talking about that time? Today of all days. Why?”
“My apologies, Mrs. Johnson,” Elgar said, standing behind the table still. “I—I wasn’t thinking. I mean, I was thinking, thinking that talking about something else would be easier than speculating about—about—but admittedly, I have had more intelligent thoughts.”
“This is Ben…” Jazz began awkwardly, clearly not remembering his full name. “He gave us the attorney’s name.”
“Ben Griffiths,” he said, shaking her hand. “I hope I have done Diggit well with my recommendation. Suzanne is who I’d call if I were in the same situation.”
“Thank you.”
“And I’m M.—Maisie Jo,” I said. “Maisie Jo O’Malley. Ben and I were working together on another… project when we met Diggit and Jazz. I am just horrified by what happened.”
“Maisie Jo. What a sweet, old-fashioned name,” she said, beaming like the sun had decided it couldn’t hide any longer. The lines on her face clearly had been carved deep by decades of that smile.
“The tale is started so I may as well finish it,” she said, once we were all seated again.
And yes, Ben had given me a quick arch of an eyebrow which I read very clearly for, time for us to go. And then pretended I hadn’t understood.
If he asked, I would say that it was too good an opportunity to pass up.
I would not say it’s because the warmth I felt between this woman and Jazz brought back waves of memories, and the overflow from their love swept over me and brought my own grandmother’s presence so close I could almost smell her.
If Mrs. Johnson had been wearing Shalimar I would have been a blithering puddle on the floor.
So I sat beside her and sipped at my tea until everyone was settled.
“Since I am the one who actually witnessed it, I think I am most qualified to tell it. Even Johnny can’t really tell it, except from inside, from being up there fourteen years old, inside that dream and then nightmare, watching his dreams shatter in front of a hundred people.”
She turned her face away for a moment. “That woman was as skinny as the boy, and he got his cold disdain from her, too.”
Oh, yes, I could see that woman, that boy. I could see them all too clearly in my mind.
“His momma, now that girl had curves. Had boys sniffing after her from the time she was way too young. And when that woman tried to tie her down, she took off in the middle of the night, and we never saw her again. Heard tell she was in New Orleans. Dancing.”
“On Bourbon Street?” I asked.
“Oh, no, girl. Weren’t none of us in the French Quarter unless we could pass for white, nor in Tremé because the Creoles didn’t want none of us, either. She’d have been in Gentilly or maybe the Sixth Ward. And she wouldn’t be just dancing.”
Professor Humphreys’ mother was a hoochie dancer?
Was she like her son? Did she have that same music in her, thrumming to make itself known? I stopped myself before I actually asked.
“A few years later that old woman disappeared for eleven days. Oh, we knew exactly how many days, because that was a woman who had never left before in any of our memories. We wondered if she was gone for good. But no, she came back, and she had that poor little baby with her. Word went ’round. Letitia was dead. That poor, poor girl. Knifed in an alley and gone, just like that. Rough living leads to rough dying more often than not, that’s what I was always taught, and Lord knows I saw enough of it to believe it.
“And she had left that poor baby behind, and him only a few months old.”
I felt a movement and saw Elgar hanging on her every word.
Maybe it was my imagination. Maybe it was my tender heart. But I felt a kinship with him in that moment. I was pretty certain we both were absorbing the warmth of ‘family’ like parched travelers finding pure water.
“That old woman raised him, and that was the ruining of him. The one time we all thought maybe he had a bit of his momma in him, Melba Howard pinched it out of him like a nit from his head.
“She marched across that stage and grabbed that boy by the ear—he had to bend over, he was enough taller than she was, even at fourteen—and without a word, she dragged him off that stage, and I watched my own boy’s face as he saw his dreams turned to ashes. There wasn’t a curtain or anything, just a stage built on three levels, covered in shag carpet—it was a fine place, for the time. Fine. My Johnny grabbed his sax and his case and got off that stage, but that poor Joe and his drum set. Some musicians jumped to help, and it all got cleared off.” Her eyes grew misty. “Joe. I hadn’t thought about him in a long time. He didn’t come back from Vietnam. His poor mother.”
She placed her hands on the table and took a deep breath. “That manager thought he was going to go take care of everything, that he could make things right. He took off like a rocket after Miz Humphreys. We all knew, though. We knew it wouldn’t change anything. The only thing that could change anything was if the boy himself broke away. But he didn’t even try. He was at school the next day as if he hadn’t spent two years playing with those boys and them all dreaming big dreams. It was as if none of it had ever happened. He walked past them like they were nothing, like they were gum on the bottom of his shoe.”
“Mrs. Johnson,” Elgar said. “I envy Jazzmyn for having you and her father and all your family around her, teaching her what is important—about music and about life. You needn’t think of your son with broken dreams. Because of you, he had a life. And if—I hesitate to even mention it, because it is a sensitive subject, but if I can help in any way. Any financial way…”
“We couldn’t—” Jazz broke out.
“No, we couldn’t,” her grandmother agreed. “But you have warmed my heart by offering.”
The doorbell rang again.
It wasn’t Suzanne, the attorney. It was two older women with a small child in tow, loaded down with food. More family. Family that gave me the side eye as I ushered them in. Ben and Elgar rose as they entered the room, and I hung back other than to give a small smile and acknowledgement as we were all introduced.
After that, Ben and I left without even looking at one another., We just both knew it was time to get out of there and leave the family to its own.
But as I was leaving, I looked back one last time and met Jazz’s eyes.
Perfect cat eyes.
Still.
But the most goshawful sad, pained eyes I could ever recall seeing, swimming in tears.
I pressed my palms together and hoped she understood.
Whether she understood it to be some yoga thing or prayers didn’t make any difference. Either way, I felt she had my message. Be calm. Pray. This is not over.