Now he realized that all those years of squinting into the lights had been a foolish waste of time. James hadn’t known that El was a blues man until El had come, as a broken-down charity case, to stay under his son’s roof.
But James had heard him sing his best song, the one that said everything about him, in a beautiful church, on the last day El had been able to walk on his own two feet. Like getting the money to Lily so she could be safe at last, that would have to be enough.
He flipped another photo over and wrote, “My family. Me, Lily, Bubba, Leroy, Bert.”
* * *
HE’S NEVER GOING to shut up, Clarice thought as Richmond, beside her in her bed, asked another question about the venue for their renewal of vows. They had agreed not to discuss the ceremony or, as Richmond referred to it, “the wedding.” Somehow the conversation kept ending up there anyway. At first, the chatter had seemed like an improvement over long discussions about her feelings or the minutiae of her day. Then he’d become relentless, circling back to the same topic repeatedly. Now the sound of his voice made her want to scream.
She stared at the moon through the triangular window high on the opposite wall of the bedroom. She listened to the tinkling of the wind chimes outside as they spun in the steady breeze. She imagined that she was ripping into the first movement of Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata. Nothing made his voice fade away.
“What would you think of a 1970s theme? You know, since that’s when we got married,” he said. “The whole wedding party could have fun with the clothes. We could have the same music at the reception that we had at our first wedding.”
“Sweetheart, I’m a little tired right now,” Clarice said. “I did a lot of practicing today. Let’s talk about it in the car tomorrow.” She intended to take a sleeping pill before she sat down in the passenger seat of the car so she could doze the entire way to Chicago. But there was no reason to reveal that.
“No problem,” he said.
A few minutes later, he was rattling off ideas that had obviously come from her mother. “It wouldn’t be such a bad thing to have the service at Calvary Baptist, would it? It’s where the first one was, and Calvary’s still the most beautiful church in town. It sure would make Miss Beatrice happy.”
“I don’t know if I want to give Mother that kind of false hope,” Clarice said. “If she sees me walk into Calvary, she might slam the door behind me and never let me out.”
He spoke over her, shifting now from discussing the renewal of their vows to talking about Clarice’s move back to his house. “I’ve got somebody coming over to paint your closets while we’re in Chicago. It should be done before we get back.”
Clarice began to grind her teeth.
It wasn’t entirely Richmond’s fault that she was feeling so irritable. She was nervous about the recital. No amount of hand holding or back patting was going to change that. And the one thing that might help her wasn’t being offered, at least not recently.
Though Richmond was now a nightly guest at Clarice’s house in Leaning Tree, they hadn’t made love since that time he had ended up in the emergency room. He’d been given the medical okay to proceed, as long as they used reasonable restraint. But the scare had left them both too nervous to initiate sexual intimacy.
“Carnations,” Richmond said. “Did you know they can dye them any color you want?”
She would have sworn that Richmond didn’t know a daisy from a rose, and yet he wanted to discuss floral arrangements.
This was just too much. She rolled over in his direction and wiggled across the sheets toward him. She threw a leg over his hips and sat up astride his waist. Then she leaned down and kissed him on the mouth.
When their lips separated, he said, “I don’t know if we should.”
She kissed him again and pulled off the T-shirt she’d worn to bed. “Honey, tonight we’re going to gamble with your life,” she said.
Moments later, Richmond’s true nature staged a revival. Soon his arms were around her and they were rolling across the bed together. For an hour, she forgot about Beethoven.
* * *
ODETTE GAVE UP on sleep and rose from the bed. At the sound of the creaking of their worn bedsprings, James snorted and rolled over. He was sleeping well, a rarity. She shut the door behind herself as quietly as possible.
She walked down a hallway lit by the glow of yellow-green night-lights. Purchased by James to comfort the grandkids when they woke during the night, the lights were in the shapes of cartoon characters. Lately, that cheerful illumination had helped their elderly houseguest find his way to the bathroom after dark.
Odette heard the sound of El snoring through the closed door of his room. If she hadn’t just left James, she would have sworn it was him making that racket. The only difference between their snoring was one of volume. It sounded to Odette as if El had connected himself to that old amplifier he’d brought to the house with him.
The cats—there were five living with her and James that week—followed her through the house, thinking that perhaps they would be getting a midnight snack. When Odette didn’t go to the kitchen, where their bowls lay, the cats put aside their disappointment and accompanied her as she proceeded to the family room.
From the table beside the couch, Odette picked up the book she had been reading, the latest in a series of slightly dirty mystery novels about a handsome detective. She didn’t open the book or even turn on the lamp. Instead, she stretched out on the sofa with the paperback resting on her stomach as the cats settled in at her shoulder, hip, knees, and ankles.
Since El had come into their lives, Odette had found herself thinking about her own father more than she had in years. Maybe more than ever. Wilbur Jackson had built the house she’d grown up in. It might be more accurate to say that he’d built and rebuilt it. The place in Leaning Tree had begun its life as a one-bedroom farmhouse that had been just big enough for her mother and father when they’d married. As Wilbur and Dora’s family had grown, the house had expanded accordingly. One of Odette’s earliest memories was hearing the sounds of construction—sawing, hammering, cussing—as her father added rooms.
The day Odette’s father finished his biggest renovation, two additional bedrooms, a bathroom, and a new kitchen, Odette and her brother, Rudy, had run through the house, hopping into each room and declaring, “Mine!” It didn’t matter whether they stood in a bedroom or a closet. Every inch of the house was so special that each of them wanted to lay claim to it. Odette still marveled at the castle her father had fashioned for them with his skilled hands, his strong back, and the fertile soil of his imagination. A part of her was always surprised and disappointed each time she drove up to visit Clarice at the old house and saw that a new room had not been framed out on one side of the place or the other.
Odette’s father had kept on building until a few weeks before he passed. At the end, though his arms were too weak to drive a nail, he’d proclaimed his plans for the next round of renovations from his sickbed. Odette remembered her father, slipping in and out of time and unable to distinguish her from her mother, declaring, “I gotta get over to Odette’s place, Dora. I wanna give her a skylight.” His passion for that project had remained undimmed even after she’d reminded him that he had installed a skylight in her and James’s house the week they’d moved in.
It was only after Odette herself had lain in a hospital bed believing that she was about to breathe her last breath that she’d truly understood her father’s final days. With her adult offspring gathered around her, saying good-bye, fear that she hadn’t managed to construct enough good memories to sustain them had taunted her. Like her father, Odette had wished more than anything that she could rise from her hospital bed and cut a hole through the ceiling, so Jimmy, Eric, and Denise could see the sky.
Whether our daddies do us right or wrong, she thought now, they never really turn us loose. Abraham Jordan, despite his endless string of women and his countless bastard children, had been convinced that
his Clarice was the sun and the moon. Somewhere, deep down, Odette was sure that Clarice believed it, too. They still laughed when they recalled the way Mr. Jordan used to stand, rather than sit, at the back of concert halls while Clarice performed, because he couldn’t contain his excitement for long enough to stay in his seat. When the rest of the audience applauded, Abraham Jordan jumped, whistled, and yelled as if he were in the stands at a football game.
Richmond’s preacher father never saw his son’s flaws, so, for most of his life, Richmond was blissfully unaware that he had any. With all that love and approval behind him, Richmond grew up to be so charming that other men didn’t know he was a scoundrel until they caught sight of him walking off with their girlfriends, and women didn’t realize he was insincere until he was hustling them out of his hotel room door.
Then there were Barbara Jean, Ray, and James. Knowing them had shown Odette what she had taken for granted. It had been left to Big Earl McIntyre to fill in for each of their fathers—a deadbeat deserter, a petty criminal who’d died in prison, and a selfish drug addict.
All of them were sixty years old or older now, but each of them still struggled to either stay true to or avoid the roads their fathers had paved for them long ago. Uphill or down, smooth or treacherous, straight or crooked, those paths kept drawing each of them back.
She stretched and yawned, but she didn’t feel any sleepier. Lying on the sofa was beginning to make her lower back talk to her. She twisted herself into a slightly more comfortable position. Odette and the cats lay together, staring up at the stars through the skylight her father had created for her.
CHAPTER 31
On the Wednesday morning before Clarice’s Chicago recital, the Supremes left Indiana as a three-car caravan. Barbara Jean and Ray led the way in their Mercedes. Richmond and Clarice followed in Richmond’s oversized Chrysler, while Odette, James, and El took up the rear position.
The three drivers stayed within sight of one another at the start of the journey, but they soon separated, and they finished the trip hours apart. Ray and Barbara Jean branched off before Indianapolis to visit a bird sanctuary in Connersville. Richmond woke Clarice from her sleeping pill–induced rest for a lengthy lunch stop near Lafayette. Being a policeman and unaccustomed to strictly obeying speed limits, James put his foot to the floor and made excellent time, arriving in Chicago a half hour before a more law-conscious driver would have.
It was two o’clock when Odette, James, and El parked in front of the Blues Pot. The neighborhood had changed in the decades since El had last seen it, and the Blues Pot had changed with it. Most of the mom-and-pop businesses he remembered were gone. The sharply dressed young men and women who used to parade up and down the block all day had also vanished. The outside of the tavern was, like the by-the-slice pizza joint east of it and the vacant storefront to the west, badly in need of a paint job. The guitar-shaped white sign El recalled from the past still hung above the doorway, but the colorful rendering of the round-bodied woman that had once graced the sign had faded away completely. The faintly legible words “Blues Pot” and a more visible but crudely lettered “Harold’s” occupied the space where the singer’s image had been. Only the “L” tracks that stood just a few yards away from the place remained unchanged.
Odette opened the tavern door for El and James, who was carrying his father’s guitar and suitcase. The three of them walked inside. After their eyes adjusted to the shift from afternoon sunshine to the dimness of the tavern, they looked around at a room that was in the same state of shabbiness as the outside. An ancient television with snowy reception hissed from its perch on the wall. Two men sat at the bar, hunched over their beer bottles, each seemingly unaware of the other’s existence.
A stage on the opposite side from the bar appeared not to have been used in ages. Cardboard boxes marked with the names of low-end liquor brands surrounded a tarp-covered piano. Four rusty microphone stands, strung together by worn black cords, stood sentry at the stage’s edge. Dust motes swirling through the air created the most movement in the room.
A toilet flushed, and then a door beneath the television opened. A man with a deeply lined red face stepped out of the men’s room, wiping his hands on a stained bar towel. He had a gleaming, bald head with a sparse fringe of white hair near his ears. He was big—both tall and wide. His belly extended well beyond and below the waistband of his pants. He moved like a younger, fitter man, though. He strutted toward the oak bar, every movement warning observers that this old man was not to be messed with. As he opened the half-door that led to the area behind the bar, he flashed a mouthful of yellowed teeth at the newcomers and asked, “What can I get for you?”
He stopped and fixed his eyes on El. He backed up, then took a few steps in El’s direction. “I’ll be damned.”
“Hi, Harold,” El said. He turned to Odette and James. “This is my brother Harold.” To Harold, El said, “This is my son, James, and his wife, Odette.”
Both Odette and James said, “Pleased to meet you.”
Harold passed the bar towel back and forth between his hands, all the while watching El as if he believed his former nemesis might disappear if he looked away. He said, “You are the last person I ever thought I’d see again; that’s for damn sure. I figured you were dead by now.”
Odette and James exchanged glances as they realized that Harold hadn’t known they’d be coming. El hadn’t exactly said that they were expected, but he’d implied it heavily enough that it was clear he had misled them.
A slice of sunlight cut through the room, and an elderly woman shuffled in from the front door. She was small and thin and so extraordinarily pale that she was almost blue. Her cheeks were dotted with perfectly round circles of rouge that accentuated the gray of her eyes. Her hair had been dyed the orange-yellow color of a manila envelope. She moved very slowly, like someone afraid of tripping and falling. The woman held a plate that contained a sandwich on white bread, a stack of potato chips, and a chocolate cupcake. She mumbled greetings to the two men on the barstools as she walked behind the bar and set the plate down next to the cash register.
As she headed back toward the front door to leave, El called out, “Hey, Lily.”
She turned around and squinted at El. Then she cried out, “Brother?” She moved to the center of the room where he stood. Lily fell against El in a combination embrace and swoon, forcing him to rock awkwardly on his walker. “My brother,” she said, tears rolling down her cheeks and carrying her rouge away.
Lily cupped El’s face in her blue-veined hands. She said, “I can hardly believe it.” Her voice was low-pitched and slightly scratchy.
Lily looked over her shoulder at her husband and said, “See, I told you he’d be back.” She stroked El’s face.
Her speech came in bursts that were separated by sudden pauses, as if she occasionally forgot she was having a conversation. She’s almost here, but not quite, Odette thought.
Lily pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of her faded green housedress and wiped her eyes. She said, “What has it been? Two, three years?”
El looked down at his hands and moved his bony fingers one at a time, counting. “More like ten or eleven, I’m afraid.”
“No, that can’t be right,” she said. She stared up at the television as if she might find verification of the date there. She stuffed her handkerchief back into her pocket and then grasped El’s shoulders. “It doesn’t matter how long it’s been. I’m just glad you’re here, Marcus.”
“That’s Mr. El Walker now, Lily. Remember?” Harold said.
“Of course, I do.” Lily pointed at the cluttered stage across the room. “We named you that right over there.”
“That’s right,” El said. Then he introduced her to James and Odette.
Lily shook Odette’s hand and looked James up and down. “Little James, all grown up,” she said. “Come sit down, y’all. Can I get you something to drink?”
They declined refreshments but allowed Lily t
o guide them to one of several tables that surrounded the stage. Its imitation-wood top was coated with grime, and the rickety chairs complained as they sat. The votive candle in the center of the table was the home of a large black spider and its ornate web.
Lily said, “I wish I had known you were coming. I’d have made myself look like something.”
“You look fine,” El said, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat. “I was hopin’ I could take you out for a little something to eat, so you and me could catch up.” He angled his head toward Harold. “You wouldn’t mind that, would you?”
Harold scowled in a way that made it plain that he would, indeed, mind. But he said, “Wouldn’t bother me at all. I just think it would be nicer if we all had supper together, don’t you, Lily? I can close the place early for the occasion.”
Lily said, “Yes, we should all have dinner here. That’ll be nice.” She turned to James and Odette and paused, trying to remember their names. After several seconds, she asked, “Can you two join us?”
James said, “Thank you, but we’re having dinner with friends.” Odette was about to correct James and say that their dinner plans were for the following evening, but he looked at her with an expression that indicated that he wouldn’t appreciate being contradicted.
An air-conditioning unit above the front door made a loud thud. Lily could barely be heard above the whirring noise that followed. “Maybe some other time.” She rested one hand on El’s arm and the other on Harold’s. “Tonight we’ll have a celebration for the three of us.”
The Supremes Sing the Happy Heartache Blues Page 23