Chapter 10
DEION
She had been talking about Black Lily and the Five Spot for six minutes and I had not heard a word of it.
She had her hands in a crate, moving through sleeves with the efficiency of long practice, talking without looking at me, her voice doing the thing it did when she was on a subject she cared about.
She didn’t get louder, just more precise.
The shop owner’s father had run a store in the city back in the day.
Now the son ran this one. It was smaller and quieter, with the inventory of a man who had learned to stock what was worth stocking rather than what sold.
He was studying Nova from behind the counter with the expression people got when they watched her work a crate, the specific attention of someone recognizing a quality of care that matched their own.
“My mom had all of it,” she said. “She was curating a whole conversation and for years I was immersed in it without understanding that’s what it was.”
I had one of those moments that had been showing up more often lately, the kind I had stopped trying to name and had started recognizing for what it was the second it arrived. Clarity.
Celeste James had built a wall’s worth of musical legacy, and Nova had grown up inside it.
The ear she carried wasn’t accidental. It had been shaped, sharpened, passed down whether she had been aware of it at the time or not.
And as she moved through the space now, more animated than she had been when she first walked in, talking through what she wanted to do with the wall in her house, how she planned to make it her own without losing her mother in it, I could see it already.
Whatever she built would not replace what Celeste had done. It would extend it.
“I remember her talking about Ruffhouse,” I said, cutting in as she pulled out The Score and held it up like she was reacquainting herself with it, mentioning that Philly didn’t claim it enough for what it was.
She stilled, then turned toward me. “Say that again.”
I leaned one shoulder against the crate, watching her. “That brunch in Conshy we took our parents to for Mother’s Day. She said Ruffhouse Records was based out of Conshohocken. Cypress Hill, Kriss Kross… The Fugees.”
Nova blinked once, slow, like something had just shifted in her understanding. “Yeah. Lauryn’s label,” she said, more to herself than to me.
“Before Miseducation,” I added. “Mama Celeste said she was at Stonecreek visiting a friend when Ruffhouse staff came through handing out advance CDs of The Score. Called them gifts, but really they were showing off. Letting people know what was coming.”
I watched it land. Nova’s expression changed the way it did when she came across a record she hadn’t expected to find. Not excitement first. More like recognition, then the excitement.
“My mom told you that?” she asked.
I nodded. I had been holding on to that one. Not for any particular reason I had claimed out loud, but because it belonged to her and I knew what it would do when it came back around.
There were things Celeste had told me over the years, small details Nova hadn’t been there for or hadn’t caught, and I had kept them without deciding to, the same way I kept everything about Nova’s world. It mattered because it was hers.
Seeing her receive it now settled somewhere quiet and satisfying.
“It was out in Gladwyne around that same time,” I said. “Same stretch off the Schuylkill, and I pass that exit all the time and it’s hard not to think about what was sitting right there back then or even in Conshohocken in a place that’s probably a pub or something now.”
She was already moving again, flipping the record over in her hands before setting it down and reaching for another.
“Did she ever tell you Jazzy Jeff had his studio out there too?” she asked, stepping closer to the crate, her energy picking up. “Before they bought it, when it was still Kajem. Teddy P recorded there during that era. They had to install a freight elevator for him after the accident.”
She glanced up at me, already halfway into the next memory.
“She used to take me to Stonecreek sometimes. I barely remember it, but I remember the elevator. I used to make one of the interns ride it up and down with me like it was an amusement park. That jawn was old and probably a death trap in the making.”
She smiled then, quick and unguarded. She had come fully back to life in the way she always did when something genuinely met her where she was. She didn’t just take information in. She responded to it, built on it, and took it somewhere else without asking permission first.
I had seen it before. Her mother had done the same thing.
I’d sat across from Celeste James many times and always left knowing more than I had when I sat down, not because she was trying to teach anything, but because she moved through conversation like it was something meant to be shared and expanded. Nova did it the same way.
I watched her reach for another record, already mid-thought, already carrying the conversation forward.
“Fun fact. The building was an old gun factory,” Nova was saying. “Civil War. It was converted to offices and apparently a chunk of Philly history.” Then she looked at me with an expression that was almost an accusation. “You’ve been sitting on all of this.”
“I was waiting for the right conversation.”
“The right conversation,” she said. She picked up her crate find, the D’Angelo Live at the Jazz Cafe she’d come out here for, and turned it over in her hands. Then she looked at me again, brief, the second look, the one she didn’t always know she was giving. I knew it. I had the whole catalog.
We made our way out. I got her door then walked around to the driver’s side and got in and neither of us said anything for a moment, and the not saying anything had a texture it had recently developed, a texture I was not going to examine out loud yet but was aware of the same way I was aware of a room’s acoustics before anyone in it said a word.
I put the car in drive. The D’Angelo sat on her lap in its paper bag, her hands folded over it, still. I did not look at her hands. I had learned that looking at her soft, delicate hands was a thing I needed to ration.
We got on 422 just after riding through Valley Forge then hopped on the Schuylkill to head east. The city came into view ahead of us, the skyline of a place that had never tried to be anything other than what it was and had made something out of that.
“She always loved this place,” Nova said. Not to me, exactly. To the window, to the city, to whomever she talked to when she was talking to her mother in the middle of a sentence about something else.
“I sometimes wish she were here to tell me what she thinks of it,” I said. “Like, not how she showed up for it, but her core thoughts on why here. Why Philly. Why did she perform every set like it was the last love letter Philadelphia would ever hear?”
She was quiet. The lights of the city got closer.
“No matter what she would’ve said, though, the ear I always lean in for is yours.”
Nova turned to look at me. Something was moving in her face, and I watched her manage it and did not push.
She had said earlier she was closer than she was.
She had said she would tell me when it was ready.
I was a man in possession of both those sentences and I knew how to wait while praying it was just what my soul ached to hear.
She looked back at the road. Her hands stayed folded on the paper bag. We drove the rest of the way home in the comfortable silence of two people who were not yet saying the thing and both knew it, the silence with the shape of the thing inside it, solid and patient, waiting to be named.