26. Chapter 23 | Dom
Dom loved watching Elle dress in the morning — silk scarf knotted at her hairline, unhurried about slipping into her slip and dress like it was choreography she'd never bothered naming.
Dom had gotten used to women ashamed of her in the morning light, who dressed with backs turned and slipped out before dawn.
She'd made her peace with that, or told herself she had.
And then there was Elle, who turned around smiling instead of hiding, who crossed the whole room half-dressed just to kiss her good morning like it was nothing at all.
"You're staring," Elle said.
"My eyes are thirsty. I'm just drinking you in."
Elle crossed the room and kissed her. "You ready to watch Papa Louie cut his debut record?" she said, pulling back.
Dom sat up, wide awake now.
It was an extraordinary idea, and it hadn't even been Dom's.
A man at the rent party had offered to record Elle's voice onto a disc.
She'd laughed him off on the spot. Then the revelation.
"We shouldn't record me," she'd said, standing right at the bar with the ad in hand. "We should record Papa Louie."
Dom couldn't say anything back right away.
She'd grown up on that piano, on his stories of Storyville, falling asleep some nights to him playing downstairs like it was the safest sound in the world.
Only the last couple of years had his hands started failing him, and it had never once occurred to Dom to do anything about it beyond a hot towel and a worried look.
Dom loved her for a hundred reasons. She'd just found a hundred-and-first.
Papa Louie still didn't know a thing. Three days of hot towels, no lifting, no hauling — Dom taking every crate and keg herself and calling it strength training.
CJ was the only one let in on it. "He needs sunglasses," he'd informed Dom, already sketching in his notebook margin.
"Like Ray Charles. For the album cover." There's no album cover, CJ.
"Not yet there isn't. Get me a pair and I'll draw you a cover good enough to go gold. " They never did find the sunglasses.
The day had come. His fingers moved easier than they had in months.
Dom loaded the family into a cab and gave the driver an address low enough that Papa Louie didn't catch it.
"St. Roch," Papa Louie said, reading the signs. "What's in St. Roch?"
Neither of them answered. He let it go, and rode the rest of the way in silence.
Broussard's Sound was a converted shotgun house, front room lined wall to wall with records. Papa Louie stopped dead in the doorway. "That's Kid Ory. That's — Lord, that's Burke." His finger landed on a sleeve near the corner, his voice catching. "We used to play with him. Down on Perdido."
His hand dropped. "I miss those men," he said, half to himself. "Wars took some. Time took the rest. I'm about the last one of us still standing, far as I know. You know they used to call me—"
"Louie the Buoy." A man emerged from the back room, wiping his hands on a rag — Emile, judging by the sign out front. "It's an honor, man. I've heard a lot about you."
Papa Louie stilled. "Heard about me from who?"
"Everybody who ever heard you play. Louie the Buoy keeps the beat floating, isn't that what they say? Come on back. Got a spot set up just for you."
Papa Louie looked at Dom, then at Elle, a question plain in his expression.
"We're cutting you a record, Papa," Dom said. "Today. Right now." Her excitement showed too fast to hide. "It was Elle's idea," Dom added, before she could argue herself out of deserving it. "I can't wait to put your record in the jukebox," Dom said, tears stinging.
"And Dom hasn't let you lift a finger in three days," Elle said. "All so you'd walk in here limber enough to play like it's forty years ago."
Papa Louie looked between them, throat working, and didn't say anything. He didn't have to.
Emile set him up at an upright piano and nodded for him to start when ready. CJ settled cross-legged on the floor, pencil moving — sketching Papa Louie's face, no sunglasses necessary after all to make the old man look like a million bucks.
Papa Louie's hands found the keys the way they always did — that first hesitation, the flinch he tried to hide — and then he settled.
Dom had heard him play a thousand times but never once seen, underneath the swollen knuckles and the seventy-three years, the boy he must have been.
She saw it now: twenty years old in a Storyville parlor much like this one, sharp suit, quick hands, a whole city's music running through fingers nobody had told yet that they'd fail him someday.
Dom loved him so much it nearly took her knees out — and loved Elle too, for noticing an old man's hands before anyone had to ask her to.
He didn't play just one song. "Tiger Rag" bled straight into "Basin Street Blues" without a pause, and from there into something older still that Dom couldn't name but knew in her bones.
Dancing music, all of it, one song wearing the shoulders of the next.
Only at the end did he slow it, settle into "Misty," and play it all the way through. No place where it came apart.
"Play it back," Dom said, her own throat tight.
Papa Louie's hands rose to his mouth, listening to himself as a man listens to a voice he thought he'd lost. CJ scooted closer, sketchbook forgotten, and Papa Louie rested a hand on his head, as he'd done to Dom a thousand times on that same bench.
Elle stood behind him, palms light on his shoulders. Dom came to his other side.
"That's really me," he said. A statement more than a question.
"That's really you," Elle said. "Forever now."
Dom stared hard at the ceiling, counted to ten, and did not cry. She'd survived Lewis Jordan's fists without doing that.
"Can I hear it again?" CJ asked, and no one argued. They played it three times before anyone moved to leave.
Outside, Dom flagged a cab for Papa Louie and CJ. Papa Louie was exhausted, and CJ was eager to get home and finish the cover properly. The cab pulled off down St. Roch, leaving just the two of them on the sidewalk.
"We could catch the next one," Elle said, not moving toward the curb.
"Or we could walk. Just us."
Elle weighed the heat against the rest of the afternoon, and smiled. "Just us, then."
Dom's fingers laced through hers properly this time—no quick daylight test, but a full commitment.
"Dom." Careful, even with only the street to see them. "We're in the middle of Claiborne Street."
"I know exactly where we are." Dom didn't let go.
They'd gone another half block when Dom felt the pull toward the gap between the laundry and the shuttered barbershop—an alley she'd bled in once or twice before she'd had anywhere better. She tugged Elle's hand.
"Dom—"
"One minute. No one's looking. No one we know, anyway."
Dom pulled her into the shade and kissed her slow and unhurried. Elle kissed her once more. Dom tasted her lipstick. She didn't bother fixing it. Just took Dom's hand again and pulled her back into the sun.
That was when she saw Claudette coming out of the drugstore on the corner.
Dom felt herself stiffen before she'd even placed why—that shift in the air she'd learned to read years ago, the one Claudette's presence never failed to mean: money, or trouble, or both.
Claudette's gaze went straight to their joined hands and lingered before she rearranged her face into something easier. "Well. Look at you two, out in the open. Real particular friends."
Dom didn't let go.
"Claudette."
"See you've healed up from the Jordan match." She fell into step. "Heard about a rent party too. Heard a lot of things about you lately."
Dom looked at her — really looked, the way she hadn't in a long time. Makeup caught in the wrinkles at her eyes. That sneer dressed up as a smile. Hard to believe now she'd ever mistaken any of this for caring. Harder still to remember how much she'd cared back.
"Claudette, is there a reason you stopped to talk? Because I was a little busy."
"Matter of fact, there is." Claudette planted herself square in the middle of the sidewalk, forcing them to stop.
A woman with a grocery sack had to step off the curb to get around all three of them.
"Big fight coming up. Big kitty too. Two hundred, maybe two-fifty if I work the crowd right.
I know you need the coin — you can't throw a rent party every month. "
"Bar's been doing good. We're fine for now."
Claudette's gaze slid to Elle and stayed there a beat too long, but she didn't reach for her — she was smarter than that, and Dom's stance must have said as much.
"She's a pretty little piece, I'll give you that.
" Back to Dom, smiling wider. "But can she stand between you and trouble when it comes? I always could."
Elle started to say something. Dom stopped her with a light but sure hand.
"Don't start with me, Claudette. All you ever did for me is make me bleed."
"And so what if I did?" Claudette's voice dropped, familiar in a way that had nothing to do with fighting. "That's what I've always loved about you — you'll bleed for the people you care about. Bled for that boy. Bled for Papa Louie's roof. Bled for me plenty, back when it was just us."
"I don't have to bleed anymore," Dom said.
Claudette's smile lingered a beat too long before it started to slip. "A woman like you doesn't have a choice, Dom. The world's going to make you bleed no matter what. Look at you."
It stung. A few months ago, Dom would have believed her. Now she looked at Elle — thought of her soft touches, her morning smile — and didn't want to bleed anymore. She just wanted to heal.
She didn't answer. Just started walking, and didn't slow to see if Claudette followed.
"Good luck with this one," Claudette called after Elle, who was already following Dom and didn't turn around either — no warmth in it at all.
"Take care of yourself, Dominique," Claudette added — almost honest, a sentiment Dom didn't turn to examine too closely.
Neither of them answered. Elle put her hand flat on the center of Dom's back instead, and Dom had never in her life felt stronger, walking away from all of it, Elle's hand warm in hers, the two of them still a good long walk from home, in no rush at all to close the distance.
They walked in silence before Elle spoke.
"She's wrong, you know. You don't have to bleed for anybody. Not for a fight, not for rent, not for anything else this city wants out of you."
"What, you gonna protect me now?"
"Maybe." Elle didn't smile when she said it. Just meant it, plain as anything.
Dom looked over at her — at her set jaw, the easy grip of her hand, a whole afternoon of daylight still wrapped around both of them — and thought that a woman offering to stand between her and the world was the strangest gift she'd ever been given.