Chapter 5
NOVA
Before I tell you anything else, you need to meet her the way I knew her.
Not the version of Celeste James I carry with me now. I need you to meet her while she was still here, before everything she gave me had to stand in for her.
This was Thanksgiving. Two years before the October you met me at WaxCon. She died in February, thirteen weeks after this dinner. I didn’t know that yet. Nobody did, but this is how she is… well… was.
My mother had an opinion about everything, and she delivered it with the kind of certainty that made you listen whether you agreed or not.
She could tell you the right way to set a needle on a record, which direction a couch should face in a room, and the exact second a song either landed or didn’t.
She called that moment the catch and said she felt it in her chest before she ever heard it through the speakers.
She also had strong opinions about turkeys, which she shared freely from the living room while Auntie Rhonda stood in the kitchen that day doing the actual work.
“It needs another hour,” my mother called out, not bothering to raise her voice like it had anywhere to travel.
Auntie Rhonda opened the oven, leaned in to check, then straightened with the calm of someone who had been having this argument long enough to know she was right. “You cannot tell if a turkey needs another hour from the living room, Celeste.”
“I can smell it,” my mother said, already halfway back to one of her beloved crates. “It smells like almost.”
“Almost is resting.”
“Almost is where people rush and somebody’s uncle gets sick and starts blaming the cook. Another hour.”
Auntie Rhonda didn’t turn around. “If you come in this kitchen and touch my bird, I’m going to let you regret it slow.”
“Rhonnie, you act like I’m scared of you,” my mother said, not even looking up. “Our friendship survived you dating Raymond. It can survive a turkey.”
Auntie Rhonda paused, just for a second, deciding whether to respond as a woman with sense or as herself. “We agreed never to mention Raymond.”
“Raymond is mentioned. The turkey needs an hour.”
My mother had already moved on, flipping through the crate with the same focused attention she gave anything she loved.
She was wearing a cream sweater she’d found at a thrift store, slightly oversized but intentional in the way it fell on her, as if it had been waiting for her to find it.
Her braids were pulled back. Her glasses were sitting on top of her head, where they had been for at least an hour and where they would remain while she searched for them in increasingly unlikely places.
I wasn’t about to tell her. Watching her look for something she already had was one of those small, perfect routines I had no interest in interrupting.
I was on the couch, legs tucked under me, watching her the way I always had, paying close enough attention to convince myself I might finally understand how she did it.
She pulled a record free. An Evening with Diana Ross.
“This one,” she said, already moving.
“You play that every Thanksgiving,” I said, shifting so I could watch her better.
“I play it when it’s time,” she said. “When something’s about to turn.”
She lowered the needle slowly, steady, giving those first seconds their full space.
“Thanksgiving counts,” she added. “Whether people treat it that way or not.”
The music filled the apartment, warm and full, moving through speakers she had positioned at an angle she had measured more times than she would admit.
The apartment wasn’t large, but the sound was, because she had made it that way.
I grew up knowing that the size of what you felt in a space had less to do with the square footage and more to do with the care someone had taken with it.
She mouthed the words as Diana sang, her lips moving in time, the two of them sharing the space without competing.
From the kitchen came the steady rhythm of Auntie Rhonda working, the oven door, the spoon against the bottom of a pot, the quiet authority of someone who didn’t need to be watched to know she was doing it right.
My mother listened to all of it without looking like she was listening, like she was always taking in more than she let on.
“Come here,” she said, without looking back.
I got up, because when Celeste James told you to come here, you didn’t ask why. She took my hand and pulled me to standing, those two inches she had on me doing just enough to make her feel like she was still looking down when she needed to.
“Close your eyes.”
I did.
“Listen.”
“I am listening.”
“Not like that,” she said, giving my hand a small squeeze. “Listen with everything. Feel what the space is doing.”
So I stood there with my eyes closed and let it all come in.
Diana Ross in the speakers, smooth and sure.
Auntie Rhonda in the kitchen, building something that carried through the walls.
The wind pressing lightly against the windows.
The familiar scent of the apartment grounding me in a way that I never had words for but would have known anywhere.
And underneath all of it, something else.
Not a sound, exactly. A feeling. The way the space held us.
“The room,” I said quietly.
“The room,” she repeated, squeezing my hand. “That’s the work, baby. I don’t play music at people. I make spaces feel right.”
She said it the way she said most things about music, not as theory but as practice, the same way she did when she was behind the decks, headphones tipped to one ear, watching a floor until it gave her what she needed.
“The music is just how I get there.”
I didn’t know it then, but that was the first time she handed it to me plain.
“You have this,” she said, turning just enough to look at me. “You walk into a place and you know what it needs before anybody says a word. I watch you do it.”
I let out a small breath, eyes still closed. “I don’t know what to do with it.”
“You will,” she said, easy, like there was no question. “A space will be ready, and you’ll know.”
Back then, I thought she was talking about music. Now I know she was talking about everything that comes with it. What you build. Whom you build it with. Whom you leave space for without saying it out loud.
She lifted the needle and set it back at the beginning.
“Some things you don’t rush,” she said. “The turkey. The record. The thing you’re scared to step into.”
She looked at me over her shoulder with that look that meant she saw more than I had said.
“The thing you’re scared of most.”
I didn’t ask her what she meant. I already knew.
Auntie Rhonda came out of the kitchen wiping her hands, taking in the scene with the patience of someone who had accepted that this was just how things went.
“The turkey is done, Celeste.”
“Five more minutes.”
“It has been done for ten minutes while you’ve been back here restarting Diana Ross.”
“I was saying something to my daughter.”
“You were having a whole moment.”
“Those are not separate activities.”
Auntie Rhonda held her gaze for a second, then shook her head slightly. “The turkey is on the table in five minutes.”
My mother smiled, just a little. “Four minutes and fifty seconds.”
We ate at a table covered in a cloth she’d found at an estate sale, surrounded by mismatched plates she had collected one at a time over years, each one chosen for a reason she could explain if you asked her.
Food moved across the table without pause, hands reaching, passing, adjusting, nobody asking who needed what because everyone already knew.
After we finished, she disappeared into the back and came out with a shoebox, setting it down like it mattered.
“I was going through the closet,” she said, easing the lid off.
Inside were photographs. My mother before me, behind turntables. Laughing with people I didn’t know. Living a life that had existed fully before I ever entered it. And then there were the outfits.
“Mom,” I said, holding up a picture of her in a velour tracksuit with a Baby Phat bag hanging from her shoulder like it was part of her identity.
She lit up immediately. “That was a look.”
“That was a whole era,” Auntie Rhonda added, leaning over to see.
“She loved her a Juicy Couture set,” I said, shaking my head.
“As I should have,” my mother replied without hesitation.
I kept flipping through, slowing down as it started to settle in.
I had spent so much time thinking of her as my mother that I hadn’t made room for the woman she had been outside of me. I didn’t realize until much later that I was doing the same thing to myself.
She told stories over wine, one leading into the next, Auntie Rhonda laughing hard enough to lean into the table, and my mother watching it all like she always did, like she knew exactly what the moment needed and had already given it that.
It was the last Thanksgiving. I didn’t know that yet.
What I knew was the sound of them together, the ease of it, the way love lived in that space without needing to be explained.
She died in February. It came fast; there was no easing into it. Just a shift from presence to absence that the apartment didn’t know how to hold.
I didn’t play anything for three weeks. Not because I didn’t want to. Because I couldn’t stand the idea of hearing her not be there.
I moved into the house she left me in Spring Garden a couple of months later. It was a house her parents had left her along with the ache of their absence, and now I inherited the same. She never could bring herself to live there, but somehow I did.
The records came with me, all twenty crates. I stacked them the way she had them because changing their order felt like a decision I wasn’t ready to make. My own collection sat at the end of the wall. Only three crates. It was a beginning I hadn’t stepped into yet.
She told me I would know when it was time. I thought that meant I would feel ready. Lately, it feels like everything around me has started moving anyway.
And I’m the only one still standing still.