The city was doing its Saturday thing around me, a bus exhaling at a red light, someone’s bass carrying two blocks before the car arrived, and I had nowhere to be and a feeling I was going to have to sit with.
I carried my haul up three flights, my Laura pressed against my side. The third stair creaked under my right foot and held, the way it had held under my grandfather’s for forty years before mine. The coat hook by the front doorstill held the scarf my grandmother left there the last winter she was alive.
Some things in this house I’ve kept exactly as they were. My mother never moved back in after her parents passed, even though the house was hers. She stayed in her apartment and came through only when she had to, never lingering, never rearranging more than necessary. Like if she stayed too long or shifted too much, the place might ask something of her she wasn’t willing to give.
Other things I’ve added slowly after the deed transitioned to me, piece by piece. Most days, I can feel where that line is.
I set the bags down in the front room where the crates took up the whole far wall, sorted by feeling, by what the music did to you when you sat with it, a system I had inherited along with the house and the records and the weight of being the one who stayed. My own run sat at the end of the wall, smaller than I liked. Grief had a way of interrupting accumulation.
I looked at the canvas bag with the Laura Nyro inside it. She deserved her moment properly. Not tonight. Sunday, when the house was quiet and I had the whole morning.
Instead, I went to my mom’s section of the wall and found what I was actually looking for. Phyllis Hyman,Living All Alone, the Philly International original, the sleeve worn soft from years of Mom’s hands. I held it the way she used to hold records before she played them, both hands, taking in the weight of it and the act of choosing what you were about to let into a space. She’d played thisrecord at every crossroads. Not the joyful ones; it was for the quiet ones. The ones where you didn’t know yet which way things were going to go.
I lowered the needle and sat on the couch with my legs tucked under me and let Phyllis fill the place. Lord, that voice. A woman who knew exactly what she was carrying and carried it openly, without managing it into something more convenient, without filing it under Not Right Now or Later or This Is Fine. Just carrying it. Singing it. Giving it everything.
I had been keeping that feeling at a careful distance for years, and Phyllis Hyman was out here putting it directly into the air. The sample place I had been trying not to put his name.
My phone lit up at eleven. Five words.Date was good. Talk tomorrow?
I read it twice like it might say something different the second time, and set it back down face up. I went to the turntable, set the needle at the beginning again, and sat back down.
Then I took everything I was feeling, every unnamed, unexamined, inconvenient piece of it, and I put it where I always put it.
In the drawer.
I pushed it in anyway. The drawer, lately, had stopped closing all the way.
Chapter 2
DEION
I had beenin love with Nova James for years, which is not something I arrived at casually. It didn’t announce itself. There was no moment, and damn sure no warning. It arrived like a needle dropping into a groove you didn’t know was waiting. Coffee shop on Baltimore Ave and she was describing a record she’d found, her whole face changed around the description, lit from underneath like a room when someone opens the curtains without asking. That was it. I sat across from her and understood with complete clarity that I was in love with this woman. And then I did what any reasonable person would do in that situation, which was nothing, because Nova James was my best friend and I was not willing to lose her.
Let me tell you what she looks like, because the way Nova James looks is relevant to my predicament.
She is five-two with her shoes on and carries herself like the ceiling is slightly lower than it is, the posture of awoman who has spent years moving through spaces built for someone else’s center of gravity. Her hair is natural and she wears it differently depending on what the day requires, which she will tell you has a system, and it does, but which I have come to understand means loose when she is thinking, twisted back when she means business, and in a half-undone state around hour three or four of any afternoon when the careful morning has given way to just being a person in the world. I have developed an awareness of what hour of the day it is based on her hair alone. This is not information I asked for.
She has a laugh she gives away freely but a smile she keeps for things that actually earn it, which means when the full smile arrives, it lands with the weight of something you worked for. Her eyes move fast, the way they move across record sleeves, scanning for information before she has consciously decided to look. She has a habit of tilting her head slightly right when a song does something she did not expect, like she is trying to hear it from a different angle, and I have watched her do this at tables and in cars and in her living room and have never told her, because then I would have to explain how many times I had.
Here is what I know about her that she does not know I know. She sings under her breath when she is organizing, never a full song, always the same four or five bars of something, and it changes depending on her mood in a way she would never explain out loud. She reads the last page of a book first. Not to find out what happens, she has explained, but to know whether the ending earns the beginning, which she says is useful before you invest.She is never late but she is never early either, arriving at exactly the right moment with the calm of someone who calculated the moment and found it acceptable. She keeps a record she will not play. It lives in the back of the crates her mom left her, in a section only she understands, and in two years of standing in front of that wall I have never once seen her pull it. Whatever it is, she is saving it for something. I have never asked what.
I love her because she is serious about the things worth being serious about and funny about everything else, in that order, without apology. Because she will argue a position she is wrong about with the full commitment of someone who has decided being wrong is information she will process later, privately, on her own terms. Because she walks into a space and hears what it needs before anyone says a word. Because when she handed me a record once and told me to listen to it alone first, I understood she had been paying the same attention to me that I had been paying to her. And we had both been pretending not to notice.
It felt like the best thing that had ever happened to me and the beginning of a very long problem.
It was both.
I had been at WaxCon for twenty minutes before she found me.
She was at a table in the back corner run by the woman with the flower-shaped price tags who had the best eighties and nineties R&B in the building and knew it. Nova’s coat was open, her bag over one shoulder, and she was doing the thing she did at record tables, holdingcompletely still while her eyes moved. Not scanning, just taking it in. The record she was looking at, the physical record itself, was small, but she was holding it with both hands the way you turned something over before you could decide what to do with it. Her head was tilted right. The song hadn’t started yet but she was already listening to what the sleeve was telling her.
She looked up when I arrived at her elbow. Her face did the thing it did when she’d found something, the small brightness she couldn’t quite contain. “Look at this,” she said, and held it out.
I looked at it. Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles on Newtown Records, their first label before Atlantic, before anything. The Philly before the Philly everyone knew. The price tag said the woman with the flower stickers knew exactly what she had.
“It’s the right one,” I said.
“Yes it is,” she said, with the certainty of someone whose ear had already confirmed the decision and was just waiting for language to catch up. She turned it over. Read the matrix number on the back. Confirmed something with a small nod, the private acknowledgment of a woman who trusted her own reading.
