Chapter 31
Hold up. Rewind on what Joey’s sister just said. Joey’s life had been about to change? He’d quit the trampoline place? And—
“There’s … a ring?” I said finally, when it seemed as though neither Heather or Sachin would say anything more.
“I have to pee,” Heather announced, and struggled to wedge herself out of the couch. Sachin tried to help, but she slapped him away.
He watched her until she was far down the hall and then shifted his attention to me. “Their mother’s ring. Dark sapphire, white gold band? You don’t have it?”
“You’re sure he brought it with him?”
“He didn’t bring much with him at all, except his banjo,” he said. Rather darkly, I thought. Maybe Joey’s welcome had worn thin over a week, help with the nursery or not. “This is bad,” he said. “Do you think he was robbed for it?”
I hadn’t thought of that. “I mean, maybe?” If he’d been carrying it, and someone just happened to mug him, then the rock was gone. I had the tiniest bit of relief at the thought, that there was a reason, and it had nothing to do with me.
Shut up! At least I recognized that was the wrong emotion and tamped it down.
“Or he left it in the apartment,” I said.
“Best-case scenario, really,” Sachin said.
“No, that’s bad, too. I don’t have keys anymore, and everything inside belongs to the landlord. Possibly by law?”
I tried to picture Cam letting me back in to search for something of actual value. “I could try…”
“Yeah? That would be…”
Sachin might have fallen asleep mid-sentence.
“I’m going to go,” I said.
Sachin led me back to where I’d left my boots but must have felt something like pity for having to shove me back into the cold. “Can I interest you in some take-out fettucine?” he said.
I don’t know why, but the fettucine got me.
I thought of Alex caving to my demands that McPhee’s use the ugly gray Earth-friendly to-go containers, even though he hated them and thought everyone else did, too, then of Oona wanting to hug me and stopping herself.
Because of the spikes I’d inherited. No one could see them, but they could sense they were there.
“I was going to tell you,” Sachin said. “Earlier, about the song? The thing you were saying, about Joey?”
“The— Oh. I’m sorry about that. Can you just tell Heather … Actually, I don’t know what to tell her.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “That’s what I was going to say. The song. That made a lot of sense to me.”
“It did?”
“The song you want to sing, yeah. What I wanted to say is … It doesn’t matter that you don’t know the words. Or not that it doesn’t matter, exactly. Of course it matters, words matter.” He stopped and rubbed at the spot between his eyes. “I’m sorry. It’s been a long couple of days.”
Of course Sachin would be in mourning, too.
And taking on so much of Heather’s grief, and the baby on the way.
It was everything, and nothing I understood.
But, for a moment, I could. I could feel the weight he carried—and Sicily, sobbing and begging someone, even me, the dead end I would turn out to be, to help her find her mom.
How could a white suburban lady just disappear off the face of the planet? But Joey had, too, in a different way. Both of them, as they tried to be near me. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, to Sachin, to them all.
Just when I thought I could slip out, Sachin reached for me and pulled me into a hug.
I’m sure I stiffened. No one had hugged me in a long, long time. Just—
Joey.
Into my hair, Sachin said, “You came to see us, even though you knew it would be hard. You knew it would be hard. The words don’t matter as much as … as you sing, anyway. Do you know what I mean? That’s what I wanted to say. Sing anyway.”
SACHIN OFFERED TO CALL ME a rideshare, but I didn’t want to bother him any more than I already had.
I was deposited back on the street, dark now, evening.
Another long day, somehow spent. I lurched past all the identical houses of their neighborhood toward the main road and a bus stop.
Wiping at my running eyes and nose, gut sick and aware of how out of place I must look to anyone peering out their windows right now, crying in fringe and cowboy boots along this cute street.
I didn’t want to go back to the apartment. Oona, if she was there, would pester me to talk or suggest another restorative walk with the dogs. Or worse.
Yoga.
She’d just be another person expecting me to have draped myself in widow black. It felt like a show. I usually loved a show, but …
I was sad, but not just about Joey—about everything.
Joey and Alex and Marisa and Heather and Sachin and the blue nursery somewhere in their house and Joey’s fingerprint somewhere along those walls, forever, blue.
And also the state of the world and hungry people lined up at the food pantry on Lawrence Avenue every day and my life and everyone’s life right now, man.
Sometimes it was just too much to sort out.
How did anyone get through this? This … this living?
Wasn’t there anything for it, besides booze and pills and misery?
I didn’t want to be sad or confused or worried about the future or alone but I had nowhere to be and no one texting me where was I and when would I be back.
And I didn’t have a working phone, so they couldn’t start, could they?
Who would I even hope to hear from?
Saturday night in the big city, and I would soon be on the bus back toward the apartment and—if Oona was out, if the people next door weren’t banging around, best-case scenario—silence.
I was not a person who suffered silence willingly.
I preferred any kind of noise to the noise in my skull.
Luckily, Chicago was a place filled with sound: the cacophony of voices on the streets, the rattle of a train on an elevated track.
The car-horn section wailing. Oh, Chicago, music everywhere, when you listened.
Street festivals in the neighborhoods every summer weekend, concerts in the shell downtown no one could keep you from enjoying from outside the fence.
Magnificent Mile shops spilling pop tunes onto the sidewalks, and accompanying on percussion, celebratory fireworks any time of year and bucket boys banging on their five-gallon plastic tubs for whatever change you can spare.
By the time I reached the cross street, I was feeling a little better. I searched the block for the nearest bus stop toward the city. A bus was just pulling away, revealing a woman in a cowboy hat, stomping out a cigarette on the sidewalk.
Are you kidding me? Maybe I hadn’t been sticking out in this neighborhood as much as I liked to think.
I watched the woman walk to a storefront bar with an old-fashioned sign, a couple of bulbs burned out. THE ADDISON ROSE, the sign read.
As I stared, the front door opened, expelling a few people—laughing, singing—and a bit of fiddle-and-string bluegrass.
To paraphrase Conway Twitty: Hello, darlin’.
This is what there was for what ailed ya.
Music. Opening my mouth wide and singing, like, I’m here, world.
Creating music, the self dissolved, cares faded into the background.
I didn’t need pills or booze or a higher power.
Nobody’s god spoke to me like the joyful noise coming out of that unlikely shoebox honky-tonk.
At the door, a muscle-head took my ID. “Daaal-ya,” he drawled in that nasal Chicaaago way. “You named after da flower?”
“You’ll have to ask my mother,” I said, “if you can find her.”
I edged into the standing-room crowd and looked around. Was McPhee’s losing money to this place because we didn’t play live music on Saturday? I might need to talk to Alex.
The ceiling was lined with big-bulb Christmas lights, red, green, blue, and a series of hanging lamps, Tiffany-style, but with beer logos on the plastic panels. On the walls: neon, decommissioned parking signs, vintage photos.
On the stage, a couple of dudes in plaid were picking at a banjo and mandolin, riffing through a highly embroidered rendition of “Turkey in the Straw” and giving each other extended solos. They were being backed by a drummer I knew from around the scene.
I would know a lot of people here, probably, I realized. I dipped my head and slipped through the crowd toward the johns. In the ladies’ room mirror, I assessed the damage. Red eyes and nose, smears of mascara under my eyes, ponytail lank.
One of the stall doors behind me opened and a big gal emerged in heavy makeup and an impressive bouffant. She wore a yellow-and-black-striped sequined dress.
“Sweetheart of the rodeo!” she exclaimed, coming up to the sink next to me. “We can surely do better for ourselves, honey. Hold on. I have emergency everything.”
A few makeup wipes, a spritz of something lavender-scented, and a dramatic lip later, my hair loose and tousled, Bee-Ann Rhymes had invited me by to see her drag act.
“I do a mean ‘Sweet Dreams,’ would make you cry real tears, honey,” she said, gesturing to her dress. “I always say honey, honey. The bees.”
“Honey,” I said, slipping a bit into Doll Devine’s drawl. “I see you in all your Bee-ness. You should come to McPhee’s on Milwaukee Avenue and do a Patsy song with me and my band.”
Lourey would have a fit, but what was the point of keeping the stage to ourselves when it sat empty most of the week?
We should be sharing the stage, showcasing other local talent.
If McPhee’s had more space, a back room quieter than the one with three TVs playing all the time, we could have hosted song circles, cowriting sessions.
“McPhee’s,” Bee-Ann gushed. “I’ve heard about that place!”
“You have?” Maybe it was just flattery, or maybe word was getting out about the band better than I thought.
She had stopped applying her mascara to think. “Like, recently?”
I saw it coming a second too late.
“Didn’t they just find a dead guy in the bathrooms or something?”
Word was, indeed, getting out.
Forget the ghost, forget Capone’s gold. McPhee’s had a brand-new legend, and it was going to be a hard one to shake loose.