The Silent Sister(53)

SEPTEMBER 1990

23.

Jade

She spent most of the morning realphabetizing the rock albums. In the five months since she started working at Grady’s, she must have done that a hundred times. The kids who came into the shop mixed them up so badly she thought it must be on purpose. That never happened with the classical albums, which stayed in perfect alphabetical order. Classical fans, who tended to be older and less wasted, kept things orderly.

She’d built up a small, carefully selected collection of her own CDs now. Grady gave her a discount, saying she was his best customer. He thought she was amazing, the way she knew so much about music and musicians, but the truth was, she was dumbing down everything she knew.

Grady was working behind the cash register that morning while she organized the albums. His curly blond hair fell over his shoulders and Jade knew that many of the teenaged girls who came into the shop were only there to get a look at his amazing green eyes. He also had a pierced eyebrow, adorned with a small gold hoop. It had looked bizarre to her at first, but now that she was used to it, she liked it and wondered if she should get her own eyebrow pierced. It would make her look even less like Lisa MacPherson.

She worked slowly that morning, her mind only half on the records. Today was Danny’s birthday. Wherever her family was living now, they would be going out to dinner tonight. That was their tradition—celebrating birthdays in a restaurant. She could picture it. Even though they’d moved someplace else, she still imagined them in the Chinese restaurant on Route 1 in Alexandria, which was where they usually went for a celebration. They’d sit at the table by the aquarium so Riley and Danny could watch the fish. Riley would be in one of those restaurant high chairs … or, now that she was two, would she be big enough for a booster seat? And Danny was seven! Unbelievable. She supposed she’d think that to herself every year: I can’t believe Danny’s nine or ten or fifteen or twenty. God, that was so depressing.

It was September. She would have been settling in at Juilliard right now, if things had gone according to plan. She didn’t want to think about that or it would make her crazy. Instead of studying where she’d dreamed of studying her whole life, she was hiding out like a fugitive. Not like a fugitive; she was a fugitive. She was thinking about that impossible fact when an old man walked into the shop. He headed straight for the classical section, so it was clear that he’d been there before, although Jade didn’t remember seeing him. He was short and mostly bald, with wire-rimmed glasses and a mustache, and he wore an ancient sweater very much like the ancient sweater her father always wore in the winter months. It was beige with patches on the elbows, and even though he was much older than her father and looked nothing like him, she felt like walking up to him and asking for a hug.

Instead she walked up to him and asked if she could help him find something.

He smiled at her. “I doubt it,” he said. “I’ve been looking for a certain record for years. It was my late wife’s favorite, but it’s obscure.” He rested his hand on top of the Bach albums. “We owned it when we lived in England long ago and we left all our records behind. I checked here about a year ago and, of course, no luck. I’ve tried the big record stores and no luck there, either. So I was passing by and thought I’d check again. And anyway, I wanted to pick up a few other albums if you have them. I love looking through the old records you have here.”

“What was it?” she asked. “Your wife’s favorite.”

“Well, that’s part of the problem. I can’t remember the artist. The record had both a Bach and Mozart concerto and the cover had two little statues on it and the violinist was Italian.” He chuckled. “Not much to go on, I’m afraid.”

Her heartbeat quickened. It was plenty to go on, actually. She knew the record he was talking about. He was right—it was obscure, and she hoped she wasn’t about to give herself away, but she couldn’t play dumb with this. She began humming the melody of the Mozart and the old man’s eyes widened as he grabbed her arm. “That’s the concerto! That’s it!”

“And you’re looking for Gioconda de Vito,” she said.

“Oh, good Lord. That’s right! That’s the violinist! How did you know?”

She felt Grady’s eyes on her. She was sure he wondered the same thing.

“Oh.” She shrugged. “My family was always into classical music and I remember that one.”

“Amazing! Do you have any idea where I could find it?”

She was definitely going to make his day. She couldn’t stop smiling. “I do,” she said. “We got a bunch of records from an estate sale the other day and I went through them. They’re still in the back room, but the one you want is in one of the boxes. It’s mono, though.”

“Mono’s fine! That’s what we had in England.”

“We have it?” Grady asked from behind the counter. He looked as surprised as the old man.

“Uh-huh. It’ll take me a few minutes to dig it out.” She looked at the man. “Can you wait?”

“Yes, yes, of course!”

“Give me a minute.” She started toward the back room. As she neared the door, she heard the man say to Grady, “She’s a wonder,” and Grady said, “She knows more than I do.”