Chapter 7
NOVA
Monday morning I was back at work, moving forward because the alternative was to sit in the house and examine a Sunday that had felt different from other Sundays in a way I was not prepared to name at eight forty-five a.m. while looking for parking.
I circled the block once, then again, before a spot opened halfway down the street. I pulled in, cut the engine, and sat there a beat longer than necessary, my hand still resting on the wheel.
I was still thinking about how quiet Deion had been at the table during Sunday dinner, even when Auntie Rhonda and Simone brought out my favorite strawberry crunch cake to kick off the celebration early.
My birthday was coming up at the end of the week, which I had been aware of in the same way I was aware of anything that showed up on a calendar whether I intended to engage with it or not.
It had never been a complicated day for me, not one I built plans around too far in advance, but over the years it had developed a shape to it I hadn’t consciously set.
Deion had been part of that more often than not, in ways that didn’t require discussion, which was maybe why I found myself thinking about it more than usual this time around, even though nothing had actually happened yet.
I work at a dental practice in Center City.
Dentistry is one of the least glamorous-adjacent professions available.
It’s also mine in the way a job becomes yours after four years of knowing which filing cabinet sticks, which patients need a reminder call, and which insurance codes Dr. Adeyemi uses when she wants to give someone a break without their knowing.
I hadn’t chosen dental administration as a calling.
I picked it the way people choose something that pays the bills while they figure out what they’re meant to do.
Then four years passed and before I knew it, I got very good at it.
Dr. Adeyemi gave me two raises and a key to the supply closet so the next thing I knew, I stopped thinking of it as temporary.
Crystal was already at her station when I arrived, as she always was, the senior hygienist with twelve years at the practice and the diagnostic confidence of someone who had spent that long looking into people’s mouths and decided the mouth was a window to everything.
She looked up when I came in, then looked again, her second glance lingering just long enough to register before she said nothing, snapping on her gloves and returning to her setup.
The morning took shape. Mr. Okonkwo, who came every six months with the disciplined regularity of someone who had been told once about the relationship between gum disease and cardiac events and had taken the information seriously for the rest of his life.
The Tillman twins at ten, their mother arriving with the expression of a woman who had managed two kids with anxiety about the dentist all the way from Twenty-Second Street and was depleted.
A man named Gary who apologized to me, apologized to Crystal, apologized to her actual desk at the reception station, then fell asleep in the chair before Crystal finished the preliminary exam.
For most of the morning, I had been thinking about a record listing.
A Swedish copy of a Minnie Riperton album a collector had been sitting on for weeks, the price either reasonable or aspirational depending on how the month was going.
I considered it longer than necessary, letting it hold my attention.
Then I thought about how I would have texted Deion the listing, and that was the end of that.
He hadn’t said much on the weekend, not in a way anyone else would have noticed. He’d been present, answered when spoken to, even laughed once or twice, but there was a slight delay before he responded, a quiet that lingered at the table even when Jerome gave us every reason to be loud.
I pulled up the thread to send him the link, but when his name came up, I put my phone back in my bag.
At lunch, Crystal sat in the break room with her sandwich, giving it the same focused attention she gave everything else.
“My best friend has a girlfriend,” I said.
“Had. Has. I don’t know what the current status is.
He told me about her a few weeks ago and hasn’t said much since, and there’s been enough chatter to make me think something shifted, but nothing I’d call information.
I have been completely normal about it… I think. ”
Crystal set her sandwich down. “Is this the one who came to pick you up when your car was in the shop? The tall one… very calm. Brought you soup that one time when you had the flu and left it at the front desk so you didn’t have to come out and get it.”
I looked at her. “He brought me soup?”
“A while back, like, last year. You left early sick one day. He came by later with a container full of soup with a note that said heat it first, don’t eat it cold because you always eat things cold.
He left it at the front for you, but that girl we used to have working the desk didn’t know you were gone.
You remember how simple she was. Anyways, we put it in the fridge, but you ended up being out the rest of the week, so it got tossed.
” She folded her hands on the table. “A man doesn’t know how a woman eats her food on that kind of level unless he has been paying very close attention for a very long time. ”
I sat there for a second, trying to place something I had apparently missed entirely. “That’s the friend,” I said.
“How long have you been in love with this man?”
I opened my mouth then closed it. “I don’t know.”
“Okay,” Crystal said, already satisfied with the answer.
She stood, tossed away her wrapper, and then paused at the door.
“The not knowing is just the last part of the knowing.” She looked at me once more.
“Go fix the cabinet or something. You know how it sticks has been bothering you. It’ll give you something to do with your hands. ”
She left me to sit there thinking about a note at a front desk I had never known about. That was not a productive direction for a Monday.
I went back to the cabinet and fixed it. All it took was a good forty-five minutes, a screwdriver, and the focused physical satisfaction of a problem with an actual solution. Not the kind of problem I was living in, but it was something I could finish.
So I did.
By the time I got to Reading Terminal that Saturday, my birthday had arrived without much ceremony, which I told myself was fine even as I found myself paying attention to it more than I usually did, noticing the quiet where there would have been a call at midnight, her voice coming through before the day had the chance to begin.
I went the way I always did on Saturdays, a habit that had started with my mother and stayed with me long after, back when I was small enough to be carried through the crowd on her hip, my face tucked into her shoulder while she talked to vendors who had known her long enough to greet her by name without looking up.
Miriam’s stall sat exactly where it always had, Dutch Country signage hanging above jars of spices arranged by color instead of alphabetically, a system that made no sense until you realized it made perfect sense to the person who built it.
“The smoked paprika,” Miriam said before I had the chance to ask, her hands already moving. “And the sweet. You always buy both.”
She had been reading the women in my family before we learned how to read ourselves, and I let her do it again without correcting her.
I paid her and moved through the market without rushing, letting the noise and heat settle into me, the press of voices, the call of vendors, the shuffle of people shoulder to shoulder making space where there wasn’t any.
It didn’t leave much room to think, which was exactly why I stayed longer than I needed to.
On the way out I grabbed something I didn’t usually pick up, a small slice of cake wrapped in wax paper that I told myself I would have later and knew I probably wouldn’t wait that long to eat.
When I stepped outside onto Twelfth, the air shifted just enough to make me aware of myself again, and I stopped in front of a building that did not ask to be noticed but had once held more than most places ever would.
Sigma.
Sigma Sound was a recording studio that held more than an era of music inside those rooms, with Gamble and Huff building a defining legacy there alongside artists and producers who shaped the sound just as fully, from the O’Jays to Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, from the Sweethearts of Sigma to MFSB to the Stylistics.
Records left that building carrying the city with them long after they were pressed, the kind of sound that didn’t stay put once it was made.
And it didn’t stop there. The room kept working.
Jilly from Philly came through there. Rumor has it she hit a wall during a session, stepped out to Maggiano’s with a couple people, including a young Adam Blackstone, downed a shot of Henny, set the empty glass down with a crack on the bar, and went back to record “Hate on Me” in one take.
A young John Legend, back when he was still a Penn student figuring out what his voice could do, put in time in those same rooms. Black Thought and Questlove had carried the city forward in their own language, part of that same lineage, whether people said it out loud or not.
Different eras, same bones underneath it.
My mom had pointed it out to me once when I was in middle school. Said people still gave American Bandstand the credit when they talked about the sound of Philadelphia, but we knew better. This was where it was built. Then she kept walking like that was all I needed to know.