When Ten and Nev get out of the car, the woman turns so pale I worry she might faint.
“I wish you’d informed us… that you were being accompanied,” she says.
I loop my thumbs through my jeans’ belt buckle. Unlike Nev, I didn’t doll myself up. I’m wearing a plain white tank top and my favorite pair of skinny denim. “I emailed you I would come with my family.”
The woman’s nostrils pulse. “Yourfamily?” she has the audacity to say. “I’m not sure I can get you all in.”
“Maybe our mother can get us all in?” Ten says tauntingly.
The assistant’s eyes blaze with annoyance. “I’ll see what I can do.”
She vanishes through the Ryman’s heavy doors.
“You think she won’t let us in?” Nev murmurs.
I wind an arm around her shoulders. “If you don’t go in, I don’t go in.”
The assistant comes back out, pressing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. She holds the door open and gestures for us to step inside the temple of music.
Mona is standing in the aisle, pointing out something on the stage to a man with a headset, her smooth, honeyed voice trickling like caramel and sunshine through the converted tabernacle.
Nev’s shoulders stiffen as her mom looms larger and larger. When Mona turns, Nev stops walking. And then she starts trembling.
59
Ad Lib
Mona Stone’s golden eyes flash over her daughter and then her son. My heart holds perfectly still. I barely dare to breathe, afraid to taint the air with my apprehension.
Ten leans toward me and whispers, “I’ll go find a seat somewhere in the back.”
As he walks away, Mona’s gaze follows him, before settling back on me. Finally she steps forward. “It’s a mighty small world.” She extends her hand toward my mother first. “It’s a pleasure to meet the woman who managed to produce such talent.”
Mom’s stiff jaw tells me the compliment is lost on her. Thankfully, though, she shakes Mona’s hand. “Jade,” she offers politely.
Mona’s berry-red lips curve into the smile that has blinded her fans for the past two decades. “Nevada.” She makes her daughter’s name sound like the opening of a song.
Did she ever write songs for her children? I’ve never heard her sing one about motherhood, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t locked one up inside a drawer.
Nev responds in a voice as light as morning fog, “Mom.”
A camera surges up behind Mona, disrupting the intimacy of the reunion. I swivel my head and come nose-to-lens with a second camera.
Mona lifts her palm in front of the camera next to her. “No filming,” she says. “My kids are off-limits.”
Mom blinks and so do I. Here I was expecting she’d milk the moment.
“We’ll blur their faces,” the cameraman says.
“No.” Mona shakes her head, her mass of curls gleaming as they settle over her red silk button-down, from which a rhinestone-encrusted bra peeks out. “Can I ask how y’all met?”
“Angie’s mother is our interior decorator,” Nev explains.
Mona nods slowly.
“And we go to the same school,” Nev adds.
“And Jeff knows y’all are here?”
