Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans by Rosalyn Story Page B

too—a ladies’ man. Or so the story goes. In Simon’s stories, Buddy Bolden’s power was mighty, fierce, and the sound of his horn could level mountains and raise the dead. Julian’s young eyes lit up, his mind filled to overflowing, and he could not wait to play.
    He wondered if Bolden were here tonight, what notes would blast from his horn. For a moment, he wished his father’s fables were true. But even if they were, it would take something more powerful than Bolden’s horn to bring this dead city back to life.
    After a while, his jaw was still sore, but his breathing felt easy and his head lighter from the lift of his music, so he got back in the car and drove toward his Baton Rouge motel. He didn’t turn on the radio—the road hum and darkness beyond the headlights’ reach felt right for thinking. He thought of so many things. Simon. Ladeena. A pot of red beans and rice saturating the kitchen air on a Monday afternoon with a smell to make a grown man weep. His daddy, stirring the pot and going on and on about Silver Creek. His mother, reading by the window on a summer Sunday after church. The city he called home, sick at heart and sinking.
    All of that, and Velmyra Hartley’s smile.

    If he hadn’t remembered that she rose early, sometimes before dawn, to capture the colors of morning light on her canvas, he would not have gone. But she was one of the few people he knew for whom seven a.m. was not an unreasonable hour to call.
    He had called Sylvia at midnight after lying in his Best Western bed, sleepless, for an hour. He could have sworn he heard a small chuckle of glee in Sylvia’s voice when he told her what he wanted. Sylvia hadn’t hesitated. It was as if she’d been waiting for him to ask.
    “She’s not too far from you. She’s staying at the Day’s Inn right there in Baton Rouge, the one closest to the river,” Sylvia had said. “Room 212.”
    Of course. Half the town of New Orleans had picked up and moved to Baton Rouge, at least temporarily. And even though Velmyra’s house in Uptown was not damaged by the storm or the flood, she was still without power and her plumbing didn’t work.
    He had gotten up at five so he could bathe and shave unhurriedly, then called the auto club to get directions to Silver Creek, a place not even MapQuest seemed to know about. He hadn’t brought his good clothes with him, mostly just T-shirts and jeans. He found a pair of clean black denims he hadn’t yet worn, then reached in the bottom of the suitcase to find one of his newer T-shirts, one emblazoned with the logo of a new New York club where he’d played a year ago, and pressed out the packing folds with the iron he found on the closet shelf.
    When he had showered and arranged himself in a reasonable way—face meticulously shaven, hair washed and neatly combed, shirt tucked in—he got into his car and drove from the Best Western toward the Days Inn, which was, to his surprise, at the next light.
    The streets were still quiet, shiny after an early mist that beaded his windshield, the silver sky fissured like marble, the red and green of the traffic lights and cars protruding in bold relief from the flat gray of the wet, early morning streets. He pulled into the lot as light misting thickened to light rain.
    This was not something he particularly wanted to do. Through his night of fitful sleep, he’d remembered his tears, actually crying over this woman. Whatever he felt about her now, however undefined, was clearly uncomfortable. It wasn’t that he wanted to be with her—it was so over after all this time. He just wanted to clear out whatever lingering webs of hurtful memory still cluttered his mind, and then move on.
    And since he’d been raised not to be an ass, running out of Sylvia’s house like some loser would nag at him until he did something about it.
    He knocked softly three times on her door.
    When she answered, he couldn’t help but float his gaze down, then upwards again. Her hair,