The Unsinkable Greta James(32)
“No, I meant—”
“I know what you meant.” His voice is harsher now. “But she’s not here, so what good does it do to think about it?”
Greta’s heart cracks a little at this. She closes her eyes, trying to picture her mother, and the image that surfaces is of Helen in the front row at one of her shows, bright-eyed and loose-limbed and grinning. Conrad has only seen Greta play once in the last ten years: at her album-release party, which he came to under protest, less than thrilled about missing a work conference. Afterward, when she asked what he thought, he shrugged. “It was pretty good,” he said. “As these things go.”
But Helen—she didn’t just love seeing her daughter perform, she loved the actual shows too. She always had, ever since the days of middle school talent shows and gigs at local restaurants. The first real performance she saw was years ago, before the EP, before the album, before anything really, when Greta flew her out for a short set at a small but enthusiastic venue in Seattle. At the time, Helen was still a school nurse and kept delightedly telling everyone—taxi drivers and waiters, hotel clerks and other musicians—that she was on spring break. Greta had picked her up from the airport and suggested they go shopping for something more concert appropriate, something where she wouldn’t stand out so much in the crowd. But of course, Helen insisted on wearing her usual khaki pants and cardigan and loafers.
“I don’t mind sticking out, honey,” she said cheerfully. “That way, you’ll be able to spot me.”
The crowd wasn’t huge that night, maybe a couple hundred people. But as soon as she stepped onto the stage, Greta saw that her mom was right. There she was, right up front, with her thin glasses and short gray hair and sensible shoes, beaming amid a sea of college kids and hipsters dressed mostly in black. When their eyes met, Helen smiled and lifted a small white sign. Greta was in the middle of a complicated riff, but when the song came to an end, she took a few steps forward and squinted at it, trying to make out the words.
GRETA’S MOM, it said in simple block lettering.
She laughed, her heart lifting at the sight. Then she stepped back behind the microphone. “My mother is here tonight, ladies and gentlemen,” she said. “You can’t miss her. She’s the one with the sign.”
From the audience, Helen beamed, and the delighted fans clapped and snapped pictures, one of which went semi-viral on Twitter the next morning: this tiny woman in argyle in the middle of a packed club, proudly clutching her sign and beaming at her daughter up on the stage. The internet loved it, and for a week afterward, Howie fielded a surprising number of requests for interviews with “the rock-star mom.” When Helen declined because she “needed to finish this month’s book club pick,” Howie sent Greta a screenshot of her reply with the caption Your mom is a trip.
After that, it became a tradition. Every now and then, whenever Helen had some time off from school and wasn’t already enlisted for grandkid duty, Greta would arrange for her to come out to a performance, and Helen would show up with her homemade sign. It traveled to Minneapolis and Orlando, Denver and Los Angeles, Houston and Nashville. In Cleveland, someone spilled a beer on it, and when Helen made a new one, she was sure to laminate it this time. The fans couldn’t get enough.
In March, when Greta touched down in Columbus only to discover that she was too late—that her mom had died while she was in the air—she went straight home. Conrad and Asher were still at the hospital, dealing with all the paperwork—fumbling through the unhappy logistics of death—and so the house was empty. Upstairs, she switched on the light in her mom’s small walk-in closet and closed the door. Then she lay down on the floor and curled up in a ball, the way she used to as a kid when the world felt like too much.
She didn’t cry; already she felt too hollowed out for that, numb from the top of her head to the very tips of her toes. Instead, she pressed her face to the wooden floor, her heart loud in her ears. Her mom was everywhere here—in the neatly folded sweaters and the scarves her dad used to get her for Christmas. The closet still smelled of her perfume, and Greta rolled onto her back and breathed in and out, in and out, her eyes roving around until they landed on a high shelf, on the spine of a book she’d never seen before.
When she hauled herself off the floor to reach for it, she realized it was a scrapbook, bristling with photographs and yellowed newspaper clippings. She opened it up randomly to find her very first mention in Rolling Stone, then flipped backward and came face-to-face with a picture from the eighth-grade talent show, her hair wild and her arm a blur.
She sat down again, the book in her lap. It was all there, everything: a paragraph in the Village Voice about her first gig in New York City, a photo of the two of them backstage before a show in Chicago, even her first guitar pick, fastened neatly to the page with two pieces of tape, and a small handwritten label beneath it, like an exhibit at a museum. There were clippings and ticket stubs, photos and articles, all the flotsam and jetsam her mom had collected over the years, a whole career in one book. And there, in the very back—pressed between the pages and all ready for the next show—was the sign.
GRETA’S MOM.
She sat there holding it for a long time, surprised that such a simple piece of laminated paper could shatter her so completely. And then a door opened downstairs, and the house filled with voices, and she tucked it back between the pages of the scrapbook and peeled herself off the floor.