Day Eight

April 7

WHEN I ARRIVED ON THE ROOF THAT EVENING, TANGO’S SILLY HEN MASKS were sitting in a basket by the door. The Lady with the Rings, on the other hand, was resplendent in a silk mask covered with golden cheetahs—she had sacrificed her Hermès after all. She had left another mask on Eurovision’s throne, and he picked it up with glowing eyes.

“In better times, I’d give you a big hug, darling,” he said, fitting it on his face, plucking and adjusting it to get it just right. He turned his head. “How does it look?”

“Fabulous, of course.”

I was not going to be caught dead in a hen mask. Instead, I’d tied a cowboy bandanna around my face like a desperado. That was more in keeping with how I see myself. There were other masks, too—Hello Kitty with a Hello Kitty mask, of course, Merenguero’s Daughter with sequins, Maine with her surgical mask, looking a little worse for wear, and Darrow with a mask made out of a pink power tie. Vinegar had made herself a mask out of black velvet, with the head of a ghost painted on it.

The mural wall sported a new painting: a grotesque devil with a bat’s face and peacock’s tail writhing in flames; and hovering above it was an angel with blue and pink wings, looking down with an expression of delight on her ethereal face. It was incredibly striking and obviously done by a true artist.

“Wow,” said Eurovision. It was hard to tell if it was awe or disdain. He raised his chin toward the mural. “Who’s the painter?”

“Me,” said Amnesia proudly.

“That’s intense.”

“I used to write and illustrate comic books for a living, and sometimes weird images just pop into my head. This came to me last night—an angel digging the torture of a devil.”

“What an absolutely cruel image,” said the Lady with the Rings. “Cruel . . . but perhaps justified.”

“But don’t you wonder,” Amnesia said, sipping her drink, “what the angels up there are thinking now? Looking down on the pandemic, at all of us hidden away and dying. All the people in the hospitals. Are the angels weeping—or laughing? Is this just one more cycle for them?”

“God only knows,” said the Lady with the Rings.

“God does know,” said Florida sharply.

“The image popped into my head when I heard about what happened at that Columbia dorm uptown,” Amnesia said.

“What happened?” Hello Kitty asked. She sounded surprised that she might have missed a piece of news.

“After they evacuated Columbia, they went through one of the dorms and found dead people in half the rooms.”

“That’s not true,” said Whitney. “I have friends up there. I would have heard.”

“Have you been in touch with them?” asked Amnesia.

“Not recently.”

“Then how do you know?”

“It would have been in the Times.”

This elicited a bold laugh from the Lady with the Rings. “Precious, there’s a lot that doesn’t make the New York Times.”

“In writing computer games,” Amnesia said, “and comic books, I used to make up crazy scenarios every day, but this reality beats all. Someone up there is eating this up, I swear. The crazy shit they watch us earthlings do.”

“Speaking of angels,” said a woman on the roof who hadn’t spoken before, the tenant in 6C—La Cocinera. She’d been lingering in the background almost since the beginning, but always messing around with her phone after the cheering was over, ignoring everyone. “I saw an angel once.”

“What kind of angel?”

“Not like that one at all,” she said, pointing at the painting.

“An honest-to-God, real-life, magical angel?” Eurovision asked, his voice tinged with irony.

“First of all,” La Cocinera said, “this is not magical realism. We are sick of magical realism.” She spoke with a soft Mexican accent threading a contralto voice. “That being said, the campesinos of my country know the truth: there is magic all around us. I’m from San Miguel de Allende, but my father’s putting me through culinary school here because he thinks it will make me a citizen of the world. I am, or was, training to be a chef at Xochitl, in Brooklyn. I was supposed to go home last month—then Covid hit.” She made a wry face. “Have any of you been to San Miguel?”

Florida raised her hand. So did Whitney.

“The rest of you should go,” said La Cocinera.

* * *

“Before the plague hit, the streets were alive all day and all night. You could walk anywhere at any hour. San Miguel, a magical kingdom surrounded by the fifteenth century. It looks like an artwork, my pueblo. Like a painting. In most parts. But you know, outside of the bubble, outside of the bright walls and galleries and cathedrals, it’s ancient land. Chichimeca land. And people there suffer as they always have. So you must understand, for the sake of the story, I am telling that those people come into the centro to sell their wares, to show their weaving and carvings. And to go to Mass.

“In the center of the town we have a plaza. A very small Central Park, if you will. Humble. We call it The Garden—El Jardín. It is full of trees. On the western side of the plaza, the cathedral. All around the plaza, colonial buildings now housing shops and candy stores and my favorite ice-cream stand. It was my habit to go there every day and just watch the families and lovers and Indios stroll. Especially as the day of my coming here to New York approached.

“And that day, it was sunny. I was a week away from coming here. Feeling sentimental, as one does. I sat outside in the sun, reading Lorca’s poems. So cosmopolitan in my shades, watching two young men celebrating their engagement with a photographer in the lovely cobble streets. Their mothers were there. I blew kisses at them. And the small Indian girls around them were selling wooden burros their families had carved and painted in the Otomi villages downhill. The church bells began to ring, and I glanced that way. And that is when I saw the angel.

“At first, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. San Miguel is not a stranger to street performers. We have a Pancho Villa in full regalia who poses with tourists for a small fee. He even holds his machete in the air, if asked. It is not uncommon to see people wearing ten-foot-tall papier-mâché costumes—giantesses walking down the alleys. Anything is possible. And when I saw her, she might have been some mime, some contortionist.

“How do I describe her? Imagine an old woman. No, older than what you’re thinking. Smaller. Yes? Bent. Bent all the way, into a ninety-degree angle. And wrapped in tatters. White hair peeking out from under her scarf. Do you see her? Picture her in your minds?

“Good. I’m glad. Because nobody else seemed to see her. She was stumbling up the street. Did I tell you? I don’t think I did. She was balanced on two canes. Short canes, you see. Rough wood, as if she had found two small branches broken off by a storm. She seemed to be a four-legged creature struggling uphill over those ankle-breaking cobblestones. Tourists almost knocked her over. Dogs harried her. Children ran past. A car, then a bus, seemed to be pushing her over. And once, just once, her head rose and her face turned toward the church. Then she looked back at the cobbles and crept on.

“I had never seen her before. But even worse, and this is my confession to you, I might have simply never noticed her. What did she have to do with fine food or artwork or imported clothing in the shops? What did she have to do with the laughter of my friends or the foolishness of my romances?

“As she neared my corner, a terrible thing happened.

“The angel came to the corner of the Jardín, and was turning to make the last, most awful, climb to the church. I saw it all in that instant—how she must have struggled up the hill every day for the church service. It must have taken hours. And nobody saw. Nobody offered her help. What did she ask God for? I asked myself. Who does she pray for? Surely, not herself. And then, it happened. Her left stick caught between two cobbles and jerked out of her hand, and she fell.

“She fell flat on her face. There was a mesh bag, I saw, over her shoulder, and it spilled an orange into the street. People looked. One man stood and stared. But no one went to her.

“She lay as if dead. She was just feet away from two carts that sold fresh fruits, juices, and water. I threw away my ice cream and ran out to her. I realized later that I was ashamed to be doing it. Blushing because I imagined everyone was watching me. Mocking me, perhaps.

“I knelt beside her and took hold of her arm. I could hear her faint voice as I pulled her up. Her flesh was loose on the bone. She smelled like urine and onions. She turned her face up to me. Her eyes were cloudy. ‘Daughter,’ she said. ‘God bless you.’

“I told her to move slowly, be careful, and I helped her stand as far up as her bent back would allow. I myself was bent low to support her weight, and I walked her to a curb and sat her down. ‘Bless you, bless you,’ she kept repeating. I told her to rest there and rushed to collect her canes and her orange. ‘Are you hungry?’ I asked. ‘Water,’ she replied.

“I ran over to the carts and asked if they’d seen what happened. ‘Very sad,’ one man said. I bought two bottles of water and two tall plastic cups of fruit salad in a rage. After he took my money, he just turned away. I wanted to smite him. I wanted to slap everyone in the Jardín for not seeing the angel fall.

“When I took the water to her, she gulped much of the first bottle. She put her hands on my face and said, ‘God and the spirits will bless you, Daughter. Love to you for caring for the poor. Love to you for caring for the hungry.’

“She made signs over my head as I bent to her, and she sketched a cross on my forehead with her thumb. ‘Love for you forever for your mercy.’ Everyone now seemed to be watching us. I was overcome. I shoved all my remaining money into her hands.

“I started to weep, and I never weep in public. I had to go to one of the shops across the street and act as though I was looking at the clothes in the window until I collected myself.

“When I turned back, she was struggling up that hill again. Trying to get to the church.”

La Cocinera paused, and we all waited.

“So how did you know the old lady was an angel?” Florida asked.

“I’m getting there,” said La Cocinera. “I want to show you something.” She took her phone out, tapped at the screen a few times, and turned it to face us.

“That’s the Jardín at this very moment, and that’s the Parroquia in the background. One of my cooks at Xochitl is from a nearby city—Celaya. He reminded me of the twenty-four/seven San Miguel web cam. Here it is, live.”

She made to hand the phone to Vinegar, but Vinegar recoiled from the touch. Apologetically, as if just remembering this nightmare of a pandemic, La Cocinera held the phone up for Vinegar to view from a distance. Then stepped to the next person, and the next, and we all took turns staring at a pixelated portrait of this magical place, three thousand miles away, as it appeared right at that very moment. I could see the empty public garden in spring flower, beyond which stood a fantastical Gothic church of pink stone with wedding-cake towers.

“My friend said his mother went there every Wednesday at three in the afternoon to wave hello to him. I couldn’t believe it. I had forgotten it in all the excitement of New York. It was like a drug for a homesick girl. As soon as work was over, I hurried here and fired up the laptop. It was after midnight, of course. And San Miguel is in another time zone, but it was night there, too. I didn’t care. I just wanted to see.

“And the image opened and there it was. All lit with its colored lights, the facades of the shops along the far side all lit as well. Lovers strolled. I could see they were eating ice cream! I was like some child screaming with happiness!

“Even better when the mariachis began to play.

“Just a moment. Once you see it, you’ll want to go there. It became a thing, you know? As soon as I woke up, I turned it on. I watched the pigeons, so different somehow than our pigeons here. The dogs. And the schoolchildren in their uniforms trudging to school. It was my daily ritual. Even the empty streets were magic. And then, one day . . .

“But all of you already know.

“I was looking. And she came out from under one of the trees. Still painfully slow. Agonizingly slow. She stepped out of the shadows and into the sun. And here is the story. She looked up. She looked up to the camera high above her on its pole. She looked up and she locked eyes with me. Looked right into my eyes. And she smiled. That’s not all. I swear to you, I saw her mouth say, ‘Daughter.’”

She stopped. Nobody said a word. That moment hung in the air. Finally she continued.

“Then this plague hit. And the streets were empty except for men in white sci-fi suits with hoods and faceplates. They sprayed chemicals from wands. The streets were deserted. I’ve never seen her again. But I kept looking for her. I looked for her every day. I was sure she was dead. I have tried to be resigned to it—she was only human. Not an angel at all. I know it doesn’t make her any less.

“Some days, I have stayed at the screen for hours. Now that we’re locked in, I am here, waiting for her. Calling to the angel.”

* * *

La Cocinera had finished her circle among us on the roof. “And now.” She looked around. “What time is it?”

“Almost seven thirty,” Eurovision said.

“Maybe, just maybe . . . this time she’ll come.” She held up her phone again for all to see. People leaned in, staring at the tiny screen, glowing like a brilliant jewel in the dim light. The silence was profound.

We stared at the San Miguel web cam, every one of us hoping for a miracle. My eyes began to water from the strain, but I swear I saw it: the barest movement, the appearance of a bent shadow just entering the tiny frame of the phone from behind some trees—and then the phone blinked out and went dead.

A chorus of dismay rose from the group. La Cocinera pulled back her arm and looked at her phone with a frown. “Damn.” She waved her hand. “It’s my battery.”

I felt acutely disappointed. I had really believed I might see the angel—I’m not sure why.

“You did that on purpose,” said Amnesia.

La Cocinera shook her head vehemently. “Mine was a good angel, even though she’s old and ugly. Not like your beautiful sadist.”

Amnesia laughed. “You never know in my comic books which are the angels and which are the demons. I get a lot of my ideas from Hieronymus Bosch paintings. And fairy tales. If you think about it, computer games are like the new fairy tales.”

“Computer games are worse than fairy tales,” said Vinegar. “And more violent.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Amnesia. “The old fairy tales were just as dark. Cannibalistic witches, girl-eating wolves, vicious stepmothers, poisoned apples, mutilated women. I don’t know why, but kids love that dark, violent stuff, as long as good triumphs in the end. I’m always dreaming up weird tales, a lot of which I just can’t make into a computer game or comic book because they don’t have a happy ending.”

“Why don’t you tell us one?” Eurovision asked. “One of those that ends badly.”

“Sure. Let’s see, there’s one I wrote a few years ago, but it was rejected by my publisher . . .” Amnesia took a deep breath behind her mask. “Once upon a time, there were two sisters named Frannie and Tara who did a favor for the goddess of truth.”

“What kind of favor?” asked Eurovision.

“I don’t know. They picked up her dry cleaning, or they found her lost orb, or they saved her from an obfuscation monster. It doesn’t matter. The point is, the goddess of truth owed them a boon.”

* * *

“So Frannie asked for the obvious thing that you would ask the goddess of truth for. She wanted to never be lied to again. Either people would tell her the strict truth, or they would hold their fucking peace. She didn’t want people to be forced to tell her the whole truth—just, no more lies. You get sick of it. You know?

“But Tara? She asked for something a little more complicated. She wanted a spell that made it so that any time someone lied to her, it automatically became true. So if you told Tara, ‘I’ll give you the money tomorrow,’ that would be the absolute, unshakable truth. But she was careful to add that this wouldn’t apply if someone was exaggerating on purpose, for dramatic effect, or making a joke—only if people were actively trying to deceive her.

“A few years went by, and Frannie and Tara ended up living together, because they were the only ones who they could talk to.

“See, Frannie had gotten tired of hearing the truth all the time. If she’d stopped to think it through before she asked for that particular favor, she’d have known. Right? People were constantly being just a little bit too brutally honest with Frannie. About her looks, her job performance, the sound of her voice, and so on. Not being able to blame these people for their truth telling was the worst part.

“And meanwhile, Tara found out the hard way that not every lie people tell is sugarcoated. ‘I never loved you’ is just as much a lie as ‘You’re the only one I love.’ Or, ‘You don’t have what it takes to succeed around here.’ Tara might be the most beautiful woman in the world one day, because someone had said so, and then the next she might be hideously unfuckable.

“Sometimes your family are the only people you can get through a truthful conversation with. These girls had lost their parents when Frannie was seventeen and Tara was fifteen, and they weren’t close enough to any other relatives for that kind of radical honesty. Tara didn’t mind being forced to tell nothing but the truth to Frannie, and meanwhile, Frannie was careful not to tell any excessively cruel lies to Tara.

“I could tell you about how Frannie tried to find a career where her gifts would be valuable—counselor, investment manager, police officer—only to find that all of those jobs required someone who could be lied to successfully. Or how Tara became monumentally wealthy, by meeting up with a bunch of con artists who promised to bring her fantastic sums of money in exchange for a small deposit, but then lost it all when one man told her she would never be good at holding on to money.

“I could even tell you about the time they started a religion. Okay, a cult. They started a cult, and it was great for three days. Until it wasn’t. They had to change their phone numbers and burn sage and bring in an exterminator, and it was a whole thing.

“But that stuff is just shoes falling, and we all know how that goes. Shoes fall down: thud thud thud. But also, they protect your feet?

“Frannie and Tara bought a slow cooker secondhand from someone, like in a yard sale or something. The old owner swore it worked perfectly, and luckily they were talking to Tara, so it was a dream. And the two of them became low-key obsessed with slow-cooking things. Everything from fancy sous vide beef to taco soup and weird kale concoctions. Their little house was always full of a starchy, yeasty smell: tomorrow’s meal in the works. I swear to god, they would have conversations that lasted an hour about that slow cooker, and all the things they could put in it. It was their whole satisfaction.

“That house, too, was a lot on their minds. They had inherited it from their parents, and they owned it free and clear, so they just had to worry about upkeep and taxes. Tara had to be the one to talk to plumbers and contractors; Frannie was the one who talked to the city. The house was always somewhere between falling down and perfect, depending on whether you looked at the beams or the foundation. To be honest, neither of the sisters really knew much about being homeowners, and that house worried them all the time. They felt like their parents were judging them for their poor upkeep (and the dead can say whatever they want to you, no matter what).

“One day the sisters were sitting in a café, and it was the first time either of them had left the house in ages. (This was before it was normal to never leave the house.)

“‘I’m so fucking old. I’m as old as fucking dirt,’ said Tara.

“‘I’m even older, I’m as old as dirt’s grandmother,’ said her older sister, Frannie.

“‘Excuse me,’ said the man at the next table over, addressing them in that manner of cis men in coffee shops speaking freely to unfamiliar women. ‘But you’re both very young.’

“They stared at him until he shut up and went back to talking to his computer.

“But . . . he had been speaking to both of them at once, so there was no way he’d been lying. And also, Tara and Frannie were fully aware that they were in their twenties (twenty-five and twenty-seven, respectively).

“‘Let’s just go home and slow-cook something,’ Frannie said to Tara.

“‘I want to stay and finish my coffee.’ Tara gestured at her mug, which was still mostly full and lukewarm. ‘I paid for this coffee, I want to drink it here.’

“Frannie said nothing, just brooded. She knew better than to tell her sister something was okay when it wasn’t. A few minutes later, she stood up. ‘I can’t stay here any longer. People are going to want to talk to us, and every time someone tries to tell us about ourselves, I get more tired.’

“‘I’m tired of being alone,’ Tara said. ‘In that house in the middle of nowhere with you, slow-cooking things. It’s good, but it’s not enough for me.’

“‘We could get a dog.’ Frannie didn’t mean it until she said it, and then she did.

“Another man approached, wearing too much denim and smiling without teeth. ‘Beg your pardon,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t help noticing—’

“‘No,’ Tara said to the man.

“‘Just no,’ Frannie agreed.

“‘I wasn’t going to—’ he protested. But they waved him away, and he went.

“‘We could get a skillet,’ Frannie told Tara. ‘Or a wok, even. We could fry stuff.’

“‘Can I just sit here and finish my coffee?’ Tara pleaded.

“The sisters only had one car between the two of them. I should have mentioned that earlier. And it was a long, annoying walk back to their cabin, most of it on the soft shoulder. The car was a ten-year-old fizz-colored Hyundai, without a ton of mileage on it, and the back seat was strewn with CDs even though the CD player refused to disgorge this one Johnny Cash album that Tara had shoved in there a few years ago. It didn’t even have any of the songs about murdering someone, it was all ballads and courtship, stentorian declarations of love.

“Frannie could tell Tara was getting ready to leave her. And maybe Frannie could tell her younger sister the right kind of lie, so that Tara would stick around.

“Like: ‘You’ll never have the guts to go out on your own.’

“Or: ‘You’ll never be happy living with anyone but me.’

“But either of those projections would be a garbage thing to say to your only blood relative. And you wouldn’t want to be stuck living with someone you said such things to. Plus, Frannie also knew that Tara was scared to leave, because anybody could say anything to her, out there in the world. And it really wouldn’t take much to scare Tara into staying.

“For the first time ever, Frannie found herself wishing their gifts were reversed. Like if Tara had Frannie’s gift, then Frannie could tell her sister, ‘I’ll be brokenhearted. I understand why you want to make your own way, but I’ll be broken in any number of places without you.’ And Tara would know it was the simple truth.

“The two sisters visited their parents’ graves, in a grassy yard surrounded by walls that were made of nettles as much as stone. They put fresh daisies and crocuses on the plain granite markers, and just sat on the grass without talking.

“As they walked back to the car, Tara said, ‘What if I moved to the city for a while?’

“‘There’d be less Lyme disease,’ Frannie replied. ‘And more nonsense.’

“‘I’d hear so many falsehoods, I’d be able to surf them, keep on an even keel. Maybe a thousand people’s lies would cancel each other out, or I’d learn how to find the right kind of liars. I don’t know.’

“Frannie couldn’t risk saying half the things on her mind. So all she said was, ‘Maybe.’

“‘I’d come back here regularly,’ Tara said. ‘I’d visit all the time. You could come visit me there, too, if you wanted. I just want to try living surrounded by voices and see what it does to me.’

“‘And what if you don’t like how it changes you?’ Frannie asked.

“‘Then I’ll come back here, and you can remind me of who I actually am.’ Tara smiled and let her sister get behind the wheel. She started playing with the radio.

“‘What if I don’t want that to be my job?’ Frannie was being very careful to phrase everything in the form of questions and hypotheticals, rather than half-truths and untruths.

“‘It’s not a job, though.’ Tara decided to try and eject the Johnny Cash CD, maybe so she could leave her sister with a wider choice of music options once she was gone. ‘It’s part of being sisters. It’s a thing you are, rather than a thing you do.’

“‘Yeah, but what if you go to the city and listen to so many falsehoods that come true, and then one day you come home and expect me to help pick up the pieces, and I just can’t?’ Frannie was feeling waves of grief and nausea and lonesomeness, and she couldn’t help thinking about the way Tara had talked about surfing. Frannie could barely doggy-paddle, much less stand upright.

“‘It’ll be fine.’ Tara jabbed at the CD player with a pair of pliers. ‘Really. I can handle myself and I always know the difference, deep down, between the truth and a lie that became true. You know I can handle this.’

“‘Stop messing with the CD player,’ Frannie snapped. ‘I’m trying to—’

“Both sisters focused on the car stereo and Tara’s fumbling attempt to rescue Johnny Cash, like the trapped CD was the whole problem between them, and then Frannie looked up at the road too late to see a large, muscular deer plunging out of the woods into their path. The car hit with a raucous crunch, sound of confused applause for a sudden own goal, and suddenly the sisters’ seat belts were taut and there were fluffy white shapes inflating in front of them.

“A short time later, the sisters watched the deer saunter away, limping slightly, from the crumpled remains of their car’s front bumper and engine housing.

“The two sisters stood there by the side of the road, waiting for the tow truck. Frannie found a packet of rich tea biscuits in the back seat detritus and offered some to Tara. They both munched and watched the smoke dissipate.

“‘It’s going to be okay,’ Tara said, weeping gently.

“‘I know it will.’ Frannie was all cried out—but she still cried, a little. ‘That’s what frightens me.’

* * *

“And that,” said Amnesia, “is the tale of two sisters who got into trouble by trying to banish lies from their world.” She laughed.

“That’s not where I thought that story was going,” mused Eurovision, as much to himself as to anyone else.

Amnesia shrugged amicably. “No matter what, there’s no way to give that one a happy ending.”

“Lies are the lubricant of life,” said the Lady with the Rings. “I, for one, would not wish to live in a world of truth.” She looked around. “I lie every day. As I’m sure we all do. In fact, I lived a lie for thirty years—with spectacular happiness. And when it all unraveled . . . I was still happy.”

“Tell us about it,” said Eurovision, leaning forward eagerly.

“Not yet.”

“I love a good lie,” said Hello Kitty.

Florida snorted and shook her head. “There’s no such thing as a good lie.”

“I’ve got some good lies,” said a voice from behind me.

Pardi was back. She was leaning against the wall near the doorway, her eyes alight. “I promised you the second half of my story, didn’t I? It’s got plenty of lies in it.”

Eurovision grinned. “Yes, ma’am, you did. Sit down and tell us.”

Pardi smiled her mysterious smile and settled herself again in an unused chair at the edge of the circle. We all shifted to hear her better. Her last story was so wild, I couldn’t imagine what might be coming next.

* * *

“Where was I? I told you about my daddy and his story about Lafayette the year I turned fifteen. The story Daddy told me about Lafayette was not my only birthday present. He gave me a gold-chain necklace with a solid-gold moon charm. And he bought me a subscription to something called Paris Match, which was like a French gossip magazine with pictures, because he thought it was the most likely way I was going to really learn some French—until he got a better idea and hired an old Haitian lady to come cook and clean for us. He thought learning French was important in case we ever had to leave the country.

“It became clearer and clearer that part of what was motivating Daddy’s crazy plan involving French language lessons was that I was getting older, and he didn’t want to shoot me. He thought we should move someplace warm, where the people spoke French and Black folks were in a majority and a lot of good-looking Black men were well educated and sane. That way it would be easy for me to find a Black husband, and Daddy wouldn’t have to kill me first or second, before or after the white boy.

“I thought it easier not to pick a white boy.

“Eventually, I landed at the University of Texas, Austin, in the fall of 1977. Eventually, I fell in love with a white boy. And eventually, I told my daddy. He turned on a dime. He said, ‘I can’t help but love who you love.’

“It was not without a price. Daddy was diminished. That look he had the night Neil Armstrong walked on the moon came back and took up semi-permanent residence on his face. That was enough to take the shine off that first love. It helped that the boy was a boy, and the kind of boy who didn’t want his girlfriend playing music in bars. That I shouldn’t play music in bars had actually been the one thing Daddy and the boy had agreed on before the boy and I parted ways. But I kept playing music in bars.

“He wasn’t my last white boy. For a while, hanging out at the Driskill Hotel, I was surrounded by a particular kind of white boy and white-boy music, while I dated bronze doctors-in-training until their mothers got strange about my daddy making money cooking up barbecue sauce, stranger about my having half brothers in Houston, and strangest about me having no mother at all, meaning, to them, not having a mother who was a Link, or a Girlfriend, or a Circlette, a properly respectable bougie Black woman. Those boys wanted me to be ashamed of my guitar-playing, horse-riding, boat-sailing, Black Black Galveston ways. That was not possible.

“I was following in T Bone’s footsteps. And proud to be. And maybe in my own way, Jack Johnson’s. Back then in Austin, we listened to Jerry Jeff Walker and Townes Van Zandt. It was Guy Clark and Steve Earle, Robert Earle Keen and Lyle Lovett, Rodney Crowell and Larry Willoughby. And what we listened to was Uncle Walt’s Band. My playlist was all of that plus Charley Pride, and Ray Charles, and Lil Hardin, and Big Mama Thornton; it was my original T-Bone Walker and this tall and brilliant new man—T Bone Burnett. And I was listening to me. I knew the world needed some Black cowgirl-pirate music, and I was going to write it.

“One night in Austin, it may have been my third or fourth gig ever, I was playing a not-so-tiny club, and only three people turned up.

“Jericho was one of the people. His cheekbones were so high women feared his kiss would cut their face. His legs were long. His frame was lanky. You could see the muscles on his stomach bright as the tattoos on his pale arms. He was proud of having his mama’s eyes, not dazzling blue-gray-green eyes but eyes that could see right from wrong. People would talk about his drug addiction, but he only did cocaine so he would have more energy to drink, and he only stayed up all night to drink so he could stay up all night and write. He was fully in love with brown liquor. Besotted. He was thirty-seven years old, and his best work was behind him. Seven albums and hundreds and hundreds, thousands of shows, in clubs across the world, on cruise boats, in radio stations, in record stores, and sung to me in my early morning kitchen. He gushed language just like my daddy, splashing it all over me.

“At that show with no audience except a handsome Black couple and the beautiful white man, Jericho, I was playing what I called my Mother Dixie songs about the South as an abusive mother of Black culture but her mother nonetheless. When I came to the last one, he applauded so long I started shaking my head. He invited me to go out to find a bar that wasn’t closing soon. But I noticed the way he slurred his words and grazed his hand on my hips. I said, ‘We probably need to find some coffee. Drunk as you are and little as you know me, you are likely to do something inappropriate and I’d have to shoot you.’

“When he laughed, I showed him my pistol. Then he laughed harder and said he knew an all-night diner with very good coffee and he would bring his best manners. We wound up in a booth in a diner that served blue cornmeal pancakes, Hawaiian coffee, and off-the-menu bourbon to regular patrons. Jericho was a regular patron.

“He had made a name for himself as some kind of cross between Kristofferson and Glen Campbell with a lot more grit. When I told him that was nothing but a modern Merle Haggard, he kissed me full on the lips. Then he gave me the best proposition I have ever received, and I would receive, in years to come, propositions from poets laureate of multiple nations and winners of Grammys in multiple genres. I think because a great soul can smell previous great souls tangled in the scent of your curls, Jericho said, ‘Let’s make a poet tonight.’

(“If my father hadn’t been my father, I would have taken Jericho up on the proposition that very first night, but my father was my father, so it took a few weeks.)

“He told me I was a Texas cowgirl poet, then he proceeded to tell me all about Black cowgirls and cowboys like I hadn’t grown up in Texas. We talked about how the West was Black and brown and Native American, not just white, and how those folks at the Alamo owned slaves and nobody wanted to talk about it, and how the Yellow Rose of Texas was probably a woman of color who helped the Texans win the war, and we wondered why she did that, and I told Jericho what my father had said, and Jericho wondered if Texas might still belong to Mexico today if the Yellow Rose of Texas’s Daddy had said the same thing.

“Soon I was living in Nashville, too, though enrolled in the University of Texas. I was his little secret. Back then in country, just like you couldn’t be gay, you couldn’t have a Black girlfriend. Couldn’t didn’t mean didn’t—it meant couldn’t let it be known. So I was just the backup singer, traveling with the band.

“Jericho declared ‘keeping up a front’ to be Nashville’s third greatest performance art, with songwriting being first, and guitar picking being second. Singing, according to Jericho, was a distant fourth. By the time I graduated from Austin and landed in Nashville and got myself a publishing deal and a recording contract, I was prepping to record the Mother Dixie songs and beginning to cultivate Music City’s third great art: seeming to be something I wasn’t. The record contract required that. I was willing. I had a project I was in love with, and when you are in love, you will do anything.

“Around then, my father died, of natural causes. Bell Britton said that was a triumph—to die Black and in his own bed, with a loving daughter beside him, from a combination of semi-old age and his favorite vices—and I had to laugh, if I didn’t have to agree. After Daddy died happy, I felt like I could marry Jericho.

“We were in some little town, and Jericho walked into a pawnshop and he came out with a big diamond ring and he slipped it on my finger and he said, ‘You don’t ride in the bus with the band and the girls anymore—you call your record label, let them know the truth, then ride in the Cadillac with me—or you throw my ring into the river.’

“I didn’t throw his ring into the river. I hopped in his green Cadillac convertible in Birmingham, and he pointed the wheel toward Jackson, Mississippi. From there we were headed to Shreveport then up to Dallas. It was an easy run. Birmingham to Jackson isn’t four hours—unless your car breaks down at a gas station in Meridian, Mississippi.

“I liked gas stations. I had been raised in one. If you grow up in Texas, gasoline smells like new shoes. But not if you’re traveling with a white boy and you’re brown as a berry. Some drunk old boys in a red pickup truck—there were just three of them, looking back in my mind, I call them Eenie, Meanie, and Minie Moe—all they saw was a white man and a Black girl, and they started in on hassling me.

“We were in the convertible with the top down, parked at the pump, when they rolled up in the pickup. We were close together on the front seat, with the gas nozzle stuck in our tank. Eenie, the biggest one of the three, said, ‘Why you want to go do that?’ Off stage without a hat, Jericho didn’t look like Jericho. And he especially didn’t look like himself with a Black woman wearing overalls beside him, instead of a Black girl wearing sequins behind him.

“Jericho gave the country-biker boys—they looked so familiar to him—his big Jericho smile, the smile he had given so many biker boys and farm boys and state trooper boys and grocery clerks just like them from the stage. It was a smile that usually won him a smile back. Then he said something that was a riff on one of the opening lines in one of his biggest songs. ‘Howdy, boys, let’s turn this thing around.’ He knew if he flashed that smile and said those words, they would recognize, they would see he was Jericho. So he flashed the smile and said the words. And snap, it all went strange.

“Suddenly, it wasn’t some white man with some Black girl. It was their Jericho, the friend whose voice had been present at every intimate moment in their lives, from the day they buried MiMaw to the night they laid their first girl to the afternoon they punched their best buddy for no reason whatsoever to the day they cashed their first paycheck and to the first time they called in sick on a Monday. Jericho, the voice in their head through all of that, was sitting with a colored gal plastered to his side. Eenie, Meanie, and Minie Moe blinked: Jericho was at their local gas station and Jericho was loving, not fucking, a hippy Black chick.

“My man had blown their sunburnt little minds. They didn’t like it one bit. I’d like to think it was the hippy thing that got to Jericho’s fans. The tallest fellow said, ‘I’m going to go home and break all your records.’ The fattest one said, ‘You spending the money you made off me, off us, off three upstanding white men, risking our lives wrestling oil up out of the sea, on some Black bitch wearing dungarees?’

“‘Shut the fuck up!’ Jericho said this loud, firm, and smiling. He was a mesmerizing performer. Nobody said anything as Jericho got out of the car and pulled the gas nozzle out of our tank. He took out his wallet. Everyone watched as he tucked a hundred into some crevice on the pump. We were all still watching when he threw three one-hundred-dollar bills, one after another, in the direction of the pickup.

“Now, Eenie, Meanie, and Minie Moe were insulted. Minie Moe said something horrible to me. Why did he want to do that? I screamed-ordered Jericho, ‘Get in the car!’ But Jericho had already started hard drinking for the day, so neither taking orders nor backing down was a gear available to him. You have to understand, he shot up one summer to six foot two and filled out. He had been short and chubby for all of middle school, the kind of boy who made folks say, ‘It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.’ There was ginormous fight in Jericho, and now he was six foot tall and his shoulders were broad. He punched one of those boys, Eenie, right in the face, and Minie Moe started whaling on him, and it was looking like they were trying to keep it a fair fight because no one else jumped in. But the bastard Meanie looked over to me. So I started to cry. Jericho peeped that immediately and took a step back toward me. Nobody was paying attention to me except that sadistic bastard, Meanie.

“I knew he was sadistic because my tears got his eyes shining. I bit my lip, and I let him see me bite my lip. My fingers twitched like I was trying to grab the seat of the car for strength. Meanie called out to Jericho, ‘Your bitch want me.’ At which point, sad sadistic Meanie looked away to see Jericho’s reaction, and I took the opportunity to reach for both the guns I kept loaded and tucked into the seat of the car, the guns I had been tapping with my fingers wondering how this event would unfold, and in a flash, I had shot part of blue-eyed Meanie’s ear off.

“They were not prepared for that. Jericho was, he knew me. The moment tears had risen in my eyes, he started backing up to the car. By the time I bit my lip, his hand was reaching for the car door. He knew how I rolled. My daddy taught me to shoot straight, and fast, and first. We lit out of there with me shooting out the tires on that redneck truck using both guns. We only stopped to buy more ammunition. We pulled into Jackson laughing and singing Johnny Cash.

“We played the show in Jackson. We played Shreveport. We played Dallas. We didn’t drive the Cadillac, but we played the shows and rode the bus as far as Dallas, then flew back to Nashville first class. We didn’t back down. We didn’t get scared. I didn’t forget my fifteenth birthday present. I had my lucky moon around my neck and Jericho’s ring on my finger.

“But when we got back to the house in Nashville, every nice thing Jericho owned reminded him of sad, sadistic, and vicious people. He couldn’t see any of the pretty in his house or hardly see me—all he could see was the people who had paid for everything he owned. And he did not love them anymore. I was the only thing left in the house he did love.

“He decided he would stop writing and performing songs and write novels instead and have all new fans who would love us both. He flew up to New York City without me and rented a nondescript apartment under an alias. He stopped playing stadium gigs and big clubs and started only playing places like the Bottom Line, and the Cellar Door, and the Birchmere—and only when I was playing there, too.

“The Mother Dixie album became a small cult phenomenon, but he assured me it was an unrecognized masterpiece and tucked all his Grammys into my side of the bookshelves.

“Then he stopped playing out and we became, for a minute, full-time hang-out-at-the-clubs-as-performance-art people. Before he moved to New York, the only music he had known was country, bluegrass, and a little jazz. When we moved here, we started eating smoked salmon from Russ and Daughters and listening to punk and jazz and glam rock. We bounced from Club 57 and CBGB and the Bitter End, to Gerde’s Folk City and the Bottom Line. We were welcomed behind velvet ropes and gritty glares. He had record money and I had sop sauce money, and if in the VIP rooms they thought his records were shit, they thought I was doing something strange enough to be interesting. They didn’t know about the Black cowboys and the Black whores of the West, so everything we could tell them was a revelation. And we looked pretty together, like a sculpture—Basquiat called that. The first night he met us, he marveled at the tall and straight, the short and dangerously curved of us, the thrilling wingspan of Jericho’s arms that sheltered the immense mass of my curly hair and boobs that hung authentically and improbably high. He predicted we would be widely welcomed and seldom home before dawn. He was right.

“We didn’t have one particular club; we roamed the whole East Village like Daddy and me roamed Galveston, but we had a place where we never went: Harlem. Neither of us wanted to risk having what happened to us with his people in Mississippi happening to us in New York with mine.

“One day I awoke at noon, and my ring was missing. I looked for it all afternoon long. I asked Jericho about it. Then I had to go out. I was interviewing guitar players. I was ready to make another studio album. When I came back midevening, he was in a chair, dead. It was like that song ‘Whisky Lullaby’; he put a bottle to his mouth and pulled the trigger. He was kind enough not to use one of my guns. I quick figured out he had pawned my ring and bought a gun. He left a note. His handwriting was pretty to the end. It said: ‘I put the lease in your name when I took this place. I said it was because your credit was better. That wasn’t it. I am tired of the world and of my people. You are ready for the world and for all your people. This is my last will and testament. I leave you a guitar with a lot of songs in it, and the key to a room with a lot of stories in it.’

“He didn’t know we were going to have a daughter, Jericho. I call her Pardner. I gave her the guitar on her tenth birthday and the key to the apartment on her twenty-fifth. Jericho was wrong about a lot of things. But there were songs in the guitar and books in the room. He was right about that.”

* * *

Pardi halted. “That’s my love story, hate story, and in-between story.” She turned to Wurly. “Enough music in there for you?”

“Oh, yes.”

“As love stories go,” said Eurovision, “that one didn’t have much of a happy ending, either.”

“It was happy enough,” said Pardi. “Happy enough is better than nothing. And I got a beautiful daughter out of it.”