When Venus Fell Read Free Page A

leaned toward him. “Who are you?”
    He pointed to the boy. “Gib Cameron,” he said. “Does that mean anything to you?”
    My head reeled. When I was a child I’d decided I’d never meet Gib Cameron in person but I would love him forever. That childhood memory had become a shrine to all the lost innocence in my life.
    But now the shrine was real.
He
was real. “I remember your name,” I said with a shrug.
    “I remember yours,” he said flatly. “And it’s not Ann Nelson.”
    “Why are you here?”
    He smiled with no humor. “I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse.”
    It was appropriate that Gib Cameron knew who I really was. After all, he’d helped my mother name me before I was born.

Two
    As long as I could remember, I knew we Arinellis of low-country Louisiana had a special bond with the Camerons of high-country Tennessee. I put a voodoo love spell on Gib Cameron the year Mom retired from her singing career and our family settled in New Orleans. I was six years old. Mom wanted to stay home with us and be the kind of Donna Reed-type mother she had wished for hopelessly when she was a girl.
    Pop would have given her the moon if she had asked. New Orleans and Donna Reed were easy then. I believed my father could accomplish anything. He was a very successful composer and all-around brilliant jazz man. Although he was half-Japanese, with black hair and golden skin, he stood over six feet tall and his eyes were gray. As a kid I watched as restaurant maître d’s called for Max Arinelli then did double takes when Pop stepped forward. He was raised Catholic but he had no god he would speak of. He brought up Ella and me in the Church only because Mom wanted it that way.
    Mom was the blond daughter of a hard-drinking Louisiana truck-stop guitar player named Big Jane Kirkelson. Big Jane died young and my mother, a southern nobodywith the strangely redneck-Nordic name of Sherry Ann Kirkelson, was taken in by a Catholic foster home, which turned her loose at eighteen, a loving, morally determined girl with a pretty singing voice and ambitions. She got a job with an early-sixties ditty-bop girls band then moved to New York, where she managed to earn a respectable career as a backup singer by the time she met Pop. By then, Sherry Kirkelson had become Shari Kirk.
    We had plenty of money when we moved back to Mom’s home state. Pop bought a nightclub in the French Quarter and began remodeling it. He created elegant dining rooms and fine jazz music, champagne brunches and smooth blues. I think his combined devotion to Mom, Ella, me, and the nightclub would have been enough to protect him from his demons for the rest of his life.
    Ella and I had Pop’s soft black hair and slightly hooded eyes, but the color was green, like Mom’s. People might imagine our Asian grandmother peeking out through our eyes if they tried hard, but my sister and I were more mysterious than exotic. We felt perfectly secure among the heat-steamed blossoms of New Orleans nightclub society, where our mixed-race father fit in easily with the Cajuns and Creoles and Africans and other varieties and mixtures of humanity that made that world so exciting.
    Our house in the old-money Garden District was filled with luxuries I took for granted, with joy and passionate music that was as much a part of me and my family as the blood in our veins, and with fervent left-wing political meetings that would have gotten Pop blacklisted for life during the McCarthy era.
    Pop’s fire-breathing friends would have been stunned to know about Mom’s long friendship and correspondence with Gib Cameron’s family. Even Pop cherished that bond, deep down, though he never admitted it. He couldn’t bring himself to say he respected and admired a family so all-American they must bleed red, white, and blue.
    I think he feared we would always be measured againststandards the Camerons epitomized. Compared to them and their two centuries of pioneer Scottish