A Little Night Music Read Free

proclaiming a new commandment that all boys were idiots.
    “Lawd, girl, you always smells so good. What brings ya’ll over here?”
    “I have a bone to pick with an old man.” Elli raised her voice to overcome the hearing loss Issa had suffered as a tank gunner in Vietnam.
    Issa’s lips pressed into a stern line as if he was preparing to kiss the Devil. “Issa done better sit down fah dis. Hoo.”
    Elli helped him into his favorite leather chair behind the counter and crouched beside him, his arthritic hand in hers. She smiled though the hurt that had wrapped her heart in barbed wire.
    “Daddy’s trumpet,” she began. “I was very clear on my instructions, Issa.”
    “And I done followed dem. To da letter.”
    “You were supposed to sell only to someone who would love and cherish it as Daddy did. That…that… man ,” she nearly spat, “is a horrible individual. None of Daddy’s spirit.”
    “Issa been around, Little Girl. Dat Jon, he perfect fit.”
    “How can you say that? He wouldn’t shake my hand. He looked at me like I was a cockroach, unfit to scuttle across his musical boots.”
    “Handsome, no? For a skinny, white boy.” Issa’s smoky chuckle dissolved into a coughing spell.
    Elli’s face flushed in exasperation. “That was hardly the criteria.”
    “Dis da magic. Issa at work.”
    “Issa crazy, that’s what he is.” She shook her head and allowed a tiny chuckle to escape, but for once, the old man wasn’t smiling.
    “No one evah be good nuff. Dis ain’t about no brass. ‘S ‘bout movin’ on, Child.”
    Elli closed her eyes. Grief slid in like an alligator in calm waters, its ripples nearly undetected but for the threat of a bite powerful enough to sever a part of herself. She couldn’t do this, not now. But Issa had been there when her father took his final breath into those glorious lungs, lungs that no longer produced the most beautiful music to her ears but whose final sound was the reedy, empty note of death. And she was back in that stifling room, sunlight off the Mississippi spilling in the east window like a hot toxin coming to take him, her Mama’s wails rattling the shutters. And then nothing for weeks, silence, the cruelest song of all.
    “Dat man, Dat real man inside, he belong to no other.”
    A strange notion pulled Elli back from that September Sunday. Tension that had pooled in her shoulders eased. “We’re still talking trumpet?”
    Issa shrugged, his dark chocolate irises twinkling.
    “Not that silly love curse again.” Elli stood and walked away more to compose herself than to browse the antique sheet music on a nearby display. “It’s a bedtime story. Nothing more.”
    “Dis da magic. Issa at work.”
    “Well Issa-at-work had better clear some space in that window. Trumpet’ll be back here by tonight. Guaranteed.”
     
     
    Two
     
    Jon awoke mid-afternoon—sweat-thirty it felt like. Half-past the hour anyone who wasn’t reptilian could sleep. The antique fan clattering on the desk in his sparse third-floor apartment slowed intermittently, as if it too gave up trying to do anything but stir the heat. His phone bleated—the sound that must have awoken him.
    He checked the display. James.
    Again.
    Jon stumbled to the window that didn’t house the broken air conditioner, tugged the frame open and chucked his cell phone out the window.
    It rang once more on its thirty-foot descent before smashing on the alley’s broken pavement. Now just a pile of green microchips and spider-web glass, it reminded Jon of being nine and taking apart everything in his friend’s garage to find just the right reverberations for drumming and plucking and strumming and blowing. A junk band. They’d called themselves Playing Smack . Jon smiled then caught himself.
    That had been another lifetime ago. Someone else’s lifetime, because he couldn’t remember the name of the short kid with the horn-rimmed glasses who had a father that didn’t smack him around.
    A breeze