Chapter 21
NOVA
The tingle started before I knew why.
I had been at WaxCon for forty minutes, working my way through the jazz tables at the back of the hall the way I always worked them, methodically, sleeve by sleeve, when something pulled me left instead of right.
Not a sound. Not a sight line. Just the thing deep down in my chest that had never once been wrong about anything, pointing me toward the table in the far corner like it had somewhere to be.
Deion was at the tables on the outer perimeter.
I could feel him across the floor the way I had always been able to feel him across a floor, one frequency slightly separate from the rest of the room, and he was not following me.
He was holding something up to the light with the focused attention of a man who was absolutely not watching me walk toward the corner table.
He was definitely watching me walk toward the corner table.
I kept going.
The man behind the corner table was someone I had been buying from since forever.
The Coltrane Man. Sixty-something, reading glasses on a chain, a cardigan washed so many times it had achieved a second, better life.
He had his faded poster behind him that I had spent years studying.
He had the best jazz in the building and he knew it.
He looked up when I arrived. And then he smiled in a way I had not seen before, something particular in it, like he knew something.
“Nova James,” he said.
“Mr. Ellis,” I said.
“I was wondering when you’d get here.” He took his glasses off and let them hang. “I’ve been holding something.”
I looked at the table. Nothing unusual visible. “For me?”
“For the right buyer.” He tilted his head. “Though I will say, when I got my hands on it, I thought to myself, I know exactly one person in Philadelphia whose tingle is going to go off like a smoke alarm the second she walks past this table.”
I stared at him. “My what?”
He smiled. “The tingle.” He said it with complete authority. “I’ve been watching you work record fairs for years, young lady. I know about the tingle.” He paused. “I also know a young man who confirmed it when he came to see me last month.”
I turned around very slowly.
Deion was still a couple of tables away. Still holding something up to the light. The absolute picture of a man with no involvement in anything happening in this corner of the building.
“He came to see you?” I said.
“Very politely,” Mr. Ellis said. “Knew exactly what he was looking for. Knew exactly who it was for.” He reached under the table. “He also told me you call me Coltrane Man.”
I opened my mouth.
Mr. Ellis set a flat archival box on the table between us. Acid-free, clamshell style, a box that meant what was inside it was being taken seriously. “Now. I want you to put these on first.”
He produced a pair of white cotton handling gloves and set them beside the box.
I looked at the gloves. I looked at the box. Something in my chest was doing something I did not have a name for yet, the tingle but underneath it something else, something that was not about the record.
I put the gloves on.
Mr. Ellis opened the clamshell box with the care of someone who had been handling things that mattered for a long time.
Inside, nested in archival tissue, was an acetate pressing.
I could feel the weight difference before I touched it.
Heavier than vinyl. The density of something that was not supposed to be at a record fair on a Saturday morning in October.
“Mr. Ellis?” I said.
“Go ahead.”
I lifted it with both hands the way she had taught me, the way I had taught myself. I turned it. Saw the label.
John Coltrane. A Love Supreme. Supersense Archival Tape Edition. Austria, 2021. Number 47 of 500, pressed directly from the original master tapes.
“This should not be here,” I said.
“No,” he said. “It should not.”
“This is—” I stopped. I knew what this cost. I knew within a range narrow enough to make my stomach turn. “Mr. Ellis, this is not in my budget.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s why it’s not for sale.”
I looked up.
“Go ahead,” he said. “The tissue paper.”
I set the acetate carefully back in its nest. Lifted the first layer of archival tissue. Underneath it, on a small card in handwriting I had been reading for years, were eleven words.
I found something that tops Minnie. Say yes. - D
I stood at the corner table in the back of the drill hall at WaxCon and read those words on a small card and felt the floor do something it was not supposed to do. I put one gloved hand on the edge of the table.
Mr. Ellis said nothing. He had the grace of a man who had seen a lot of things and knew when to be quiet.
I turned around.
Deion was no longer elsewhere. He was now standing about six feet behind me, not making anything of it, not down on one knee, not making a production.
Just standing there in the middle of WaxCon on a Saturday morning with his hands in his pockets and the expression that meant he was not going anywhere and was not going to need me to explain.
In one hand he was holding a small box.
“You talked to Coltrane Man,” I said.
“Mr. Ellis,” he said. “His name is Mr. Ellis.”
“You told him about the tingle.”
“He already knew about the tingle. I just confirmed it.”
I looked at him. The box in his hand. The card still in mine. The floor still shifting under me since I read it. “You planned this.”
“I did.”
“You have been planning this.”
“For a while,” he said. “You told me once that you remember everything. I’ve been counting on that.”
“You said one day you were going to find something that impresses me,” I said.
“I remember.”
“That was eight years ago.”
“I know how long it was,” he said, quiet.
I took the gloves off. I handed them back to Mr. Ellis without looking at him. I looked at Deion, at the box in his hand, at the patience of a man who had been waiting a decade and was now standing in the middle of a hall in Philadelphia asking to stay.
He opened the box.
“Nova Celeste James,” he said. “You told me once that you remember everything.” He looked at me steadily. “I have been counting on that. But I want you to know that I remember everything too. I also have a drawer.
“Eleven years,” he said. “Things I noticed and did not say. Things I kept because they were yours and I had no right to put them down… The way you laugh before the joke is finished because you got there first… When you apologize to people you bump into, then look embarrassed for apologizing… How you go completely still when someone you love is hurting, like stillness is the thing you have to offer and you are going to give all of it.”
He paused.
“The way you called your mother back. Every time. Even when it was hard. Even when the conversation was the kind that took something from you. You always called back.” His voice was even.
Unhurried. “The way you cried at the end of that movie we saw and then looked out the window for three blocks so I wouldn’t see during the drive home, and I saw, and I have never loved anything more than I loved you in those three blocks.
” He paused again. “The way you are with people who are grieving. You don’t try to fix it.
You just stay. Most people can’t do that.
You do it like it costs you nothing. It costs you something.
I know it costs you something and you give it anyway.
“The way you got up at six to drive Miss Lorraine to her appointment because her daughter was out of town and you had mentioned once, eight months earlier, that you were available if she ever needed it, and she remembered, and you went. You didn’t tell anyone.
I found out from Jerome. The way you move through the world like everyone in it deserves your full attention.
The way you give it. The way you have always given it, to the rooms, to the people in them, to me, for years, and never once made me feel like I had to prove anything in exchange for it. ”
He stopped.
“I have been in the second chair for eleven years,” he said.
“Not because I did not want the first one. Because you were in it, and watching you in it was the best thing I had ever seen. I would rather be in any room you are in than the best room in the world without you.” He held the box out.
“I would like to stay there. Permanently. With my name on it. Next to yours.”
He glanced down for a moment, like he was steadying something that had finally come loose, then took a breath. When he looked back at me, his eyes had gone glassy, and he didn’t try to hide it.
“Nova…” he said, quieter now. “You top Minnie. You always have.”
A small pause, just enough to let it land.
“Say yes.”
“Yes,” I said. It came out quiet. Not because I was uncertain. Because the word had been waiting inside me for a long time and when it finally arrived it did not need volume. He heard it. He always heard everything.
He put the ring on my finger with hands that were steadier than mine, and I let him, and when I tried to look at my hand I had to look away because the looking was more than I could hold all at once.
He kissed me while Mr. Ellis slow-clapped behind us with the dignified satisfaction of a man who had been in on something and had seen it through. When we came up for air, I looked at the ring and then at Deion and then at the archival box still open on the table.
“The record?” I said.
“Yours,” he said.
“Deion. That is a Supersense acetate pressing of A Love Supreme. That is not something you just—”
“It’s yours,” he said again, simple.
I looked at Mr. Ellis.
“Don’t look at me,” he said. “I just held it.” He picked up the clamshell box and handed it to me with both hands. “Congratulations, Nova.”
I held the box. I looked at the ring on my finger. I looked at Deion, who was watching me with the full attention he had stopped pretending not to have, one hand easy in his pocket, the other reaching for mine.
I took his hand. We stood in WaxCon in the Saturday morning light in October and I felt the tingle, present and certain, the same as it had always been, pointing me exactly where I already was.
I had been right. The tingle never lied.