Mary Jane, Jessica Blau [diy ebook reader TXT] 📗

cream on Nilla Wafers with three marascino cherrieson top. He was picking through different tunes when Dr. Cone said, “I know that one.”

“Sing it, Richard!” Sheba said. Dr. Cone rarely sang with us. He usually patted his thighs or bongoed the table and noddedwith the beat.

“No, I mean I can play it on the guitar.”

Jimmy smiled and shook his head. “Doc. Come on. We’ve been here all summer and you’re just now breaking the news that youplay the guitar?”

Dr. Cone smiled. “I was in a band when Bonnie and I met.”

“No way!” Sheba laughed.

“I played the guitar. And did some backup singing.”

“But you barely sing now!” Sheba seemed doubtful that Dr. Cone could ever have been in a band. It hadn’t seemed odd when Mrs. Cone told me, but as I looked at Dr. Cone now, hunched over his empty ice cream bowl, I understood why Sheba was laughing.

Mrs. Cone pushed away her ice cream, as if she were done. “I play the flute.”

“Get the guitar, Richard!” Sheba took another bite of her ice cream and Mrs. Cone pulled her bowl back and took another bitetoo.

“And, Bonnie, get the flute.” Jimmy kept plucking.

Dr. Cone looked at Mrs. Cone and they smiled at each other for the first time I’d seen since we’d returned from the beach.He got up from the table and returned shortly with a guitar and a small white case, which he handed to Mrs. Cone. I’d neverseen the guitar in the house, which meant it had to have been in Dr. and Mrs. Cone’s bedroom closet. That was the only spacein the house I had never entered.

“Wait!” Izzy ran out of the room and returned with a tambourine. She placed it on my lap.

“No, you play this. You’re good at tambourine.”

I watched Mrs. Cone assemble her flute. She finally looked relaxed and even a bit happy. Dr. Cone tried to tune his guitar,and then Jimmy put his own guitar down, walked around the table, and took Dr. Cone’s guitar from him. In about a minute hehad it tuned.

“Okay. Here we go. ‘Stairway to Heaven.’” Dr. Cone started plucking on the guitar, his head bent, eyes honed in on his fingers. Jimmy was plucking the same tune, but looking at Dr. Cone. Each time Dr. Cone messed up, Jimmy said the chord, and then Dr. Cone jumped back in. Mrs. Cone picked up her flute and played along. I was surprised by how smooth and pure it sounded. Izzy picked up the tambourine, slapped it once against her thigh, and then looked up at me.

“I don’t like this song. It sounds scary.”

“Okay. Let’s clear the table.”

“I think this song is calling the witch.”

“Hmm, I don’t think so. Witches don’t like music. Not even scary music.”

I stood and started picking up dishes. Sheba had laid a rolling paper on the dining room table and was filling it with marijuana,half singing “Stairway to Heaven.” Izzy and I put all the dishes in the kitchen and then returned to the dining room to saygood night to everyone. Dr. and Mrs. Cone were so into playing their music, they could barely look up to kiss Izzy. Shebawas rolling a second joint. The first one was between Jimmy’s lips.

“Can we sing songs from Hair?” Izzy asked as we walked upstairs.

“Yes. Do you remember them?”

“Yes.” Izzy started softly singing: “Wearing smells from Labradors . . . patching my future on films in space . . . I believe that God believes in clothes that spin, that spin. . . .” The words were wrong, but I let her go. When she got to the Let the sun shine part, I sang along with her.

We sang all through the bath, the wrong words mostly, and then we got into bed. I fell asleep in the middle of reading a RichardScarry book. When I woke up, Izzy was snuggled against me, her face smashed into my shoulder, sound asleep. I slipped outof bed and silently changed into the shorts and top my mother had bought me at the start of summer.

Sheba drove me home alone while Jimmy continued to play music with Dr. and Mrs. Cone. When we passed Beanie Jones’s house, Sheba lifted her middle finger, as she had every night since we’d returned from the beach.

After we’d pulled up in front of the Riley house next door, Sheba leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. “See you in the morning,doll.”

I wanted to say I love you, but instead I said, “I’ll make you birds in a nest for breakfast.”

“Beautiful,” Sheba said. “I’ve been dying for birds in a nest.”

I got out of the car and waved as she drove away.

12

The next morning, when I came downstairs to the kitchen, my mother and father were sitting at the table. Neither was speaking.Neither was moving. The Baltimore Sun was in the center of the table.

“Uh, everything okay?” I was worried someone had died. A grandparent in Idaho, or maybe a member of our church.

“You tell me, Mary Jane.” My father looked at me with hard eyes. He seemed like a stranger, unrecognizable as he glared andmade extended eye contact.

“Tell you what?” I sat across from my father. My mother looked toward the newspaper. I followed her eyes, and then, with asinking feeling, I pulled the paper toward me.

There, on the front page, was a picture of me, Izzy, Jimmy, and Sheba with the staff at Night Train Music: The Greatest Record Store in America. Everyone was smiling except Jimmy, who was leaning into my ear. The headline said Sheba and Jimmy Visit Charm City!

“Well?” my father said.

I looked at the picture again. I was in the terry-cloth shorts Sheba had bought me and a tank top with no bra. I knew Jimmywas whispering to me, but it looked like he was kissing me. The wallpaper tattoo down his arm almost popped off the page inthree dimensions. The combination of that tattoo and his mouth against my ear surely multiplied whatever crime my parentswere imagining I’d committed.

“Uh,” I