Part 2 (2/2)

”Me neither,” he said, too quickly for me to believe him, and we stood in silence for another minute before he asked, ”Do you ice-skate? Because the rink is open year-round now.”

I was a good skater. Jack and I went every winter, as soon as the pond froze. The ice was always thin but we went anyway. The town rink, though-I'd seen the crowds outside the town rink on Friday nights. ”I'm not very good,” I told him.

”Neither am I,” Kevin said.

I was confused. ”So why did you ask?”

He shrugged and looked depressed. ”People do it,” he said. ”What about music?”

I finally figured out what he was trying to do, and thought: coffee, ice cream, a bottle of rum in the alley-anything, but ask me something I know. Then I heard the bell over the door jingle and Jack was there to save me.

”What's taking so long, Jo?” he asked, but his voice was friendly. He looked at Kevin. ”Hey.”

”Hey,” Kevin answered, and they introduced themselves. I stuck my hands in my pockets, fast, before anyone noticed that I'd been wringing them. Jack's grin was just enough, not too much. Someone who didn't know him would never have seen how intent and calculating his eyes were.

”We were talking about music,” I said.

”Oh, yeah?” Jack said easily. ”What kind?”

Kevin coughed and looked embarra.s.sed. ”We hadn't gotten that far yet. But I'm into jazz, mostly, right now. The old stuff.”

”Like Coltrane?” Jack said.

”I don't know much about Coltrane.” Kevin looked as relieved as I felt to have something to talk about. ”But what I know, I like.”

Jack grinned. ”I just picked up Blue Train down at Eide's. Great stuff.”

”Eide's is awesome,” Kevin said. ”They've got everything down there.”

The rest cascaded into place; my brother was a master. Before Kevin could figure out right from left, he had accepted an invitation to come up to the Hill on the following Monday night to listen to Jack's new Coltrane alb.u.m. All I had to do was stand there, smiling at Kevin and nodding enthusiastically when it seemed appropriate. I didn't know who Coltrane was, or what Eide's was, or what was going on, but Kevin's eyes kept drifting toward me and that despairing look was gone. By the time we'd said our farewells, he had begun to look hopeful, even excited.

I was surprised to find that Jack actually had the alb.u.m they had talked about. He dug it out from under his bed when we got home. There was a black-and-white photograph of a dark-skinned man with a saxophone on the cover. The plastic sleeve had a price tag stuck to it that said ”Eide's.”

”What's Eide's?” I asked Jack.

”Big record store in Pittsburgh. It's where all the cool kids go to buy their vinyl.”

I stared at him. ”How do you know these things?”

Jack shrugged. He was looking at the back of the alb.u.m cover. ”That ratty green sweater he was wearing, it had 'dumb white jazz fan' written all over it.” He glanced up at me. ”White boy jazz fans tend to be heartbreakingly sensitive. Maybe he'll write you a love poem or two.”

I pointed to the alb.u.m. ”But how do you know about Eide's? When were you in Pittsburgh buying records?”

”Not records,” he corrected. ”Vinyl. When was I in Pittsburgh buying vinyl.”

”When?” I repeated. ”When was it?”

”Drove down there one day when I was supposed to be getting the truck tuned up.”

”You randomly drove down there,” I said, ”and happened to find the cool kid record store. Randomly.”

”I had that job there for a while. You remember. I told you about that.”

”That was in Pittsburgh?” I said, disconcerted.

He nodded.

I didn't know what to say. ”Well, what if the truck breaks down?”

He threw the alb.u.m down on his bed and took a cigarette from the pack on his dresser. ”The truck is in better shape than Raeburn thinks.”

He lit the cigarette and pitched the match out the window into the still water and rotting leaves in the gutter. I studied my bare toes. There was dirt in the crevices around my toenails.

Finally Jack said, ”I can't take you everywhere,” and I said, ”I know.”

The next Monday, Kevin McNerny showed up at our doorstep at eight o'clock, as arranged. Standing on our porch, his face so hopeful, he looked alien and out of place. For an instant I panicked. I almost told him to turn around and go home. I almost told him to leave us alone. Letting him take even a single step into our house was unthinkable. This was our house; this was where we lived.

Then he told me that my dress looked nice.

”Thanks, it was my mother's,” I said and let him in.

The parlor was ours. Raeburn taught lessons there during the winter, when the light was a little better than in his study. Other than that he never used it. As I led Kevin in from the front hall, I could practically smell the curiosity coming off him in waves. And sure enough, even after the two of us were sitting on the dusty couch, he was still poking around the room with his eyes, inspecting and collecting everything that he saw. For a moment I let myself look through his eyes as if I didn't see the room every day of my life: the fraying, cloth-covered books in the bookcase, the dingy floral wallpaper, the shelves full of odd things that we'd brought from elsewhere in the house. But then I thought, let him look. We've got nothing to be ashamed of.

When he finally looked back at me, he blushed and looked embarra.s.sed. ”I've never been in one of these old houses before,” he said. ”My mom went on that historic homes thing last spring when my aunt was visiting, but I didn't go. Do they all look like this?”

”This is the only one I've ever been in,” I said.

”Are you on the tour?”

”We're not really an open-to-the-public kind of family.”

”No, I guess you're not.” He smiled. He had a nice smile, with straight white teeth. Some of my hostility melted away. ”Well, I bet that none of those houses have as much cool stuff in them as yours does, anyway. Where did it all come from?” He stood up and walked over to the bookcase and took down a tarantula the size of my head, sealed in gla.s.s and framed in wood.

”My grandfather, mostly. That spider is older than both of us put together.”

”Wow.” Kevin sounded awed. ”Was he a collector?”

”Sort of. He was a trader-he sold curios and things-and we ended up with some of the leftovers. I don't really know anything else about him.”

”He was a smuggler,” Jack said from the doorway, three bottles of beer dangling by their necks from one hand. ”Used to ferry whiskey down from Canada during Prohibition. After that, I think he switched to art and artifacts.” He crossed the room and handed a beer to Kevin, who seemed delighted to get it.

”That's awesome,” Kevin said.

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