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.”
The boxes from the estate sale were stacked in one corner of the back room, and she was happy to see the one she wanted was on top. She opened it and pulled out album after album, finally finding the prize. The black cover with its two porcelain statues was a little faded from being tucked between other albums for a few decades, but she pulled the record from the sleeve and held it up for a better look. Pristine. Probably worth a hundred bucks. She carried the album back to the man, who’d found three others that he wanted. He took it from her with tears in his eyes and tried to press a twenty-dollar bill into her hand, but she shook her head.
“I’m just excited we had it for you,” she said. She really was. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so happy.
“What’s your name?” he asked her.
She almost slipped. In the eight and a half months she’d lived in Ocean Beach, she hadn’t slipped once, but he’d touched that part of her that was still so connected to Lisa. “Jade,” she said.
“Oh, what a beautiful name. Beautiful name for a beautiful girl. I can’t thank you enough. I’m Charlie, by the way.”
“Glad to meet you, Charlie.”
She stepped behind the counter to slip a note to Grady. Worth $100, it read, though she hoped he wouldn’t charge that much. Grady looked at her note, then at Charlie’s glistening eyes. “Ten for this one,” he said, touching the album. “Five for each of the others.”
Charlie paid, thanked her again, and left. When she returned to the rock albums, still smiling to herself, she felt Grady’s gaze on her.
“You’re spooky,” he said after a minute.
“Spooky?”
“Just … that was amazing.”
She shrugged like it had been nothing, and moved Neil Young out of the Bs and into the Ys.
“How come you’re not in school?” Grady asked.
“What?” She looked up quickly, panicked by his question. What was he asking? “I graduated in ’89,” she said. Another one of her many lies. She’d barely started her senior year when everything fell apart.
“I mean college,” he said. “You’re smart. You’re not a stoner. You don’t seem broke. Why aren’t you in school?”
“Oh,” she said. “I wanted some time off after high school.”
“You planning to go?”
“Eventually.”
“Do you know you can have in-state tuition at San Diego State after you’ve lived here a year? It’s superaffordable.”
“I didn’t know that,” she said, running her fingers thoughtfully over the tops of the albums. She hadn’t thought about being able to go to college since her escape. Her life had been all about surviving. Pretending. Lying. She hadn’t thought about actually living the rest of it. But a state school? After coming a hairsbreadth away from Juilliard? She felt like a snob for thinking that way. She’d been cut down to size pretty quickly.
She knew Grady’d graduated from San Diego State University with a degree in business and then opened the record store. “Are you glad you went?” she asked. “I mean, you’re not exactly using your degree here.”
He laughed. “Oh, I use it and it’s good to have. And college was a blast. You need to have some fun, Jade. You’re very serious, you know?”
She could hardly disagree. “I know,” she said.
“I don’t know what you went through with your family and everything that you needed to get away from, but I can tell it took a toll,” he said. It was the first time he’d talked to her about anything personal and he must have seen her discomfort. “Sorry to get in your business,” he said, “but I like you. I don’t want to lose you as an employee, but I think you need to go to school and cut loose. You could still work here part-time.”
“I’ve only lived in California eight months,” she said. “But I’ll think about it.”
“What would you major in?” He was looking down at the CDs on the counter, marking them with pricing stickers and acting like her answer didn’t matter, which made her wonder if it was a trick question. If she said music, would he somehow guess who she was? And of course, she couldn’t major in music, but she’d never considered anything else. “I have no idea,” she said.
“You’d make a great teacher, I think.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said again, wondering how you went about taking the GED test, since she had no high school diploma. She’d need to retake her SATs, a thought which made her groan to herself. But then she pictured herself in the front of a classroom of little kids. Kids like Danny and Riley. She might like that, she thought, and for the first time since leaving home, she thought that maybe, just maybe, she could have a future.