“Your mother used to look at your father like that,” she said, running water over the dish without looking up. “Before she said anything about it.”
I kept my hands in the sink.
“She told me I was wrong,” she went on. “Said I was reading too much into it.”
She rinsed the plate, unhurried.
“Didn’t make me wrong.”
I didn’t answer.
“Some things don’t ask permission to be real,” she added, setting the dish aside.
I stayed where I was, because there wasn’t anywhere else to go with that.
“Just something I noticed,” she said, already turning back toward the table.
Chapter 10
DEION
She had beentalking about Black Lily and the Five Spot for six minutes and I had not heard a word of it.
That is not accurate. I had heard all of it the way I heard everything she said, with the full attention that had become so habitual it operated independently of my intentions. I could have told you, precisely, that she had started with the Five Spot as evidence, moved through the voices it produced, Jill, Floetry, an early Jazmine Sullivan, Bilal, and every artist who had come out of that early 2000s Philadelphia scene, arrived at King Britt and Ursula Rucker, and was now standing in front of a bin inside a record shop in Phoenixville making a case for her mother’s ear as an act of curation rather than collection. What I mean is that I was also watching her, and doing that was its own separate and complete occupation.
She had her hands in a crate, moving through sleeves with the efficiency of long practice, talking without lookingat 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 outThe Scoreand held it up like shewas 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.
“BeforeMiseducation,” I added. “Mama Celeste said she was at Stonecreek visiting a friend when Ruffhouse staff came through handing out advance CDs ofThe 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.”
