Mama Jane, bless her heart, picked up the baton of my lie. “Just let her audition for you. If you don’t like her, I’ll take her to the shelter. They got good programs for runaways.” She looked back at me. “You’ll be okay.”
It sounded like she was trying to reassure herself more than me, but I smiled back at her. Even though I had no idea how I’d survive in a shelter of runaways when I couldn’t even survive high school.
Nicky glared at Mama Jane. “If I listen to her sing, there won’t be any crying afterwards. No more begging me to give her ass a job? None of that?”
Mama Jane nodded. “I’ll take her right on to the shelter, I promise.”
My heart shuddered a bit. At that moment, I really, really wished I could sing.
. . .
Nicky sat down at a shiny black baby grand piano and pulled out a songbook.
“Who do you know?” he asked me.
Then, off my blank look, he reframed it, “Who do you know, song-wise. This here is going to be an old-fashioned nightclub, modeled after the ones from the thirties and forties. I want to attract a certain kind of clientele. Diverse, but with money. The kind of people who don’t mind dressing up to eat. So I’m going to need a chanteuse.”
I stared at him.
“Do you know what a chanteuse is?”
I did, but I didn’t answer. I was too shocked about his vision for this club. Considering what I had seen outside, it did not seem practical.
As it was, Nicky got upset again. He twisted around on the bench and said to Mama Jane, “This ain’t going to work—”
“I know what a chanteuse is,” I rushed out.
And then I just started shoveling words into the situation, trying to prove to him that yes, I could talk and yes, this could work—even though I knew that it couldn’t. “When I was a kid I used to pretend I was Tina Turner. And I know she’s rock and roll, but I’ve got all the words to every Nat King Cole song memorized, because my grandmama left behind all of his albums. And I’m a fast learner, so I could memorize some more songs by other people. I know I could.”
I broke off with a little gasp and waited to see if any of that had worked.
Nicky rubbed a hand over his eyes, but he turned back to the piano. I was extremely grateful for that, until he actually started playing the opening of “Nature Boy.”
“Do you know that one?” he asked me.
I nodded, and then said yes, because he wasn’t looking at me, he was looking at the keys.
“Then sing.” His voice was short and irritated. I knew I had better sing.
I stood there, my body a little leaned forward, my mind screaming, SING! SING! and my heart thumping in my chest so that you’d think it was about to bust.
But nothing came out.
Nicky repeated the opening. Once then twice. But I couldn’t even open my mouth.
He stopped playing with a bang of the keys. “Okay, get her out of here,” he said to Mama Jane.
Mama Jane came over to me. “Wait a minute, Nicky.”
“No, I wasted enough time. I got shit to do, Aunt Jane.”
Mama Jane glared at him. “I changed your stanky diapers for a year while your mama and daddy was finishing up grad school. You can wait a fuckin’ minute.”
There were two things about this statement that amazed me:
1. Nicky apparently had two parents. He had not, as I had previously assumed, been raised by loud and impatient wolves. And
2. Mama Jane’s words actually worked. Nicky got sullen and quiet, but he did not get up from that piano. In fact, he squirmed under Mama Jane’s gaze until she let him go by turning to me.
“Listen, you can do this, baby,” she said. And I felt bad, because that wasn’t true. I had lied about being able to sing. I didn’t have any training, and I had barely spoken, much less sung, since I was a six-year-old Tina Turner in my mama’s vanity mirror.
Mama Jane rubbed my arms. “Yeah, you can do this. I know you can.”