But I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that some days I missed her so much, it felt like I was dying a thousand deaths.
Velvet gave me Jane updates now and then, but they weren’t substantial, and Velvet had left for Spain, so I had to rely on Jane’s social media for a filtered picture of her life. Which turned out to be a life that moved around the L.A. metro region… from Santa Monica to Burbank. Every time she posted a photo, my chest buzzed with bees. But I kept my distance. Left no comments. No follows. No trips down to Southern California to surprise her.
Okay, there was one time when Moonbeam had to physically restrain me from driving after her in the middle of the night. But still. I didn’t go, and that’s what was important.
I just played my music. And for the first time in my life, it felt as if I had a reason to play. At night, I sat down in front the piano, called forth every ghost I knew, and I had myself a fucking séance.
When I was finished, I prayed to all the saints that Jane was able to commune with her ghosts too.
“Do they have to wake him up and get him dressed?” my father said, one leg anxiously bouncing. “What’s taking so long?”
“He’ll be here any second,” I said, scrolling on my phone to escape conversation.
After a few seconds, he mumbled, “It’s the song.”
“What?” I asked, glancing up to see him scowling at the built-in speaker in the ceiling.
“The National,” he explained. “I tried to book them at the festival a couple of years ago, and their guitarist and I… had words.”
Huh. He never shared his failure stories. I wondered howmany there were. How many bands had he pissed off over the years? Funny that I’d never really considered it. Maybe because all he did was brag about his achievements.
“Weird you say that…,” I told my father. “I did an assessment of Mike Winfrey’s record collection last week for the store? It was almost all reissues, and he had everything the National released on vinyl.”
My father snorted. “Why doesn’t that surprise me? Mike is a sentimental fool.”
“Music attracts sentimentalists and the downtrodden,” I said, thinking about when Jane told me.
“True,” he said quietly. “Anything interesting in Mike’s record collection?”
I was surprised he was interested. “Most notable was a Joy Division EP from 1978. Worth a few thousand. And he had a couple early punk singles—got me excited that he might have something I was hunting, but nope.”
My father stroked his mustache. “What were you looking for?”
Was I really having this conversation with him? It was weird to go from Outcast to Tolerated Family Member in just a few months.
“I’m looking for a rare 1980s L.A. punk record,” I told him. “I’ve been searching online since the summer, and I nearly had an owner who was willing to part with theirs, but they changed their mind at the last minute.”
“Is this for the store? This record? You trying to find it for a store client?”
I shook my head. “It’s for Jane. Her father, actually.”
His brow shot up.
“Not Mad Dog,” I corrected. “Her actual father. Leo. The man who fixed my Jeep. I talked about him in therapy last week.”
I talked abouteverythingin therapy. Jane. The dam. My thinking tree. Moonbeam. My music. What did I care about holding back anymore? Let him hear everything. Let Eddie hear it too. Every time we had a session, I said my piece, stated the facts, and told how I felt. Nothing more, nothing less. If I cried, I cried.
The private details I kept for me and Jane. Those were ours.
A short silence stretched between us, then my father said, “You know who you need to ask about your record? Miss Tiger.”
“Who is Miss Tiger?”
“Lives in the green ski chalet on Old Bone Hill.”
I vaguely knew the person he meant, an older trans woman at the far side of the lake.
“They used to call her the disco queen,” my father said. “She owned a club in San Francisco in the seventies, then a bar in the eighties. Avid vinyl collector.”
