Priceless (22 page)

Charlotte smiled. “Yes. My dad must have been keeping it for me or something. Millie, she has the same voice as mine! That’s where it came from!”

Millie gestured for the check. “Well, it came from God, Charlotte, but if your momma had the same voice, then I guess he liked you both. Do you want to come over for dinner tonight after work? You can show me the film, and I can show you some Creole cooking that is more down home than this fancy joint.”

“I’d love that. Can I bring my friend Kat?”

“Kat Karraby? Surely. She was in my seventh-grade history class. It will be fun to see her again.”

“So you became a teacher when you came back?”

Millie nodded. “I needed to keep a close eye on Jackson and his sisters, and the best way to do it was to teach high school. Thanks to your dad, I had enough money to get my master’s at the same time.” She stood up and swung a large and obviously heavy bag onto her shoulder. “And now that my kids are done with school, I’m teaching teachers at the university.”

“That’s so cool.” Charlotte looked at her wrist and jumped. “Shit, I have to run.”

Millie gave her a quick hug. “Yes, run along, work hard, and I’ll see you and Kat tonight, OK? Around eight or nine?”

Charlotte headed toward the kitchen, nodding and waving over her shoulder.

SCARSFORD WAS GONE
. Her phone had beeped while she was working, and she’d had to ignore it, seeing as she was up to her elbows in hot, greasy water. Now, walking toward Millie’s house with Kat, she checked her messages.

“Back to NY. Will be in touch.” Chatty as ever.

She wasn’t sure what she was feeling. On the one hand, she felt anxious that he was gone, because his being there meant someone was looking out for her. On the other hand, she was relieved. His being there reminded her of her dad, not that she was trying to forget him, exactly, and he also made her behave badly. On the whole, she was glad she hadn’t slept with him. She would have regretted it.

And God knew she had plenty of regrets already.

They knocked on the door just after nine, but it sounded as if the party was in full swing.

When Jackson opened the door, he smiled broadly. “Kat Karraby!”

Ah, not smiling at her, then, Charlotte thought. Not that she cared, of course.

“Jackson! Hey!” They hugged, and Kat led the way into the house, chatting nineteen to the dozen.

Jackson looked over his shoulder at Charlotte. “We were in biology together!”

“Super.”

She wasn’t jealous. That would be ridiculous. And she was glad Kat looked especially gorgeous tonight, in a see-through man’s shirt from the ’40s over Katharine Hepburn–style wide-legged pants. What did it matter that her own hair was stuck to her head or that she had a faint line across her forehead from the hairnet or that her plain white T-shirt had a tomato sauce stain the shape of Rhode Island on it? It didn’t matter, apparently, because nobody was looking at her.

The kitchen seemed almost too full to enter. Millie was standing over a huge pot, a pot that usually held gumbo, Charlotte had learned, and her children were milling around. Jackson and
Kat were getting beers, Lilianne and Camille were laughing over photos on the back of a camera, and through the door she could see Camille’s toddler asleep on the sofa. She was impressed with his ability to sleep through all the noise, but maybe New Orleans kids got used to it.

Surprisingly, it was Bob Marley blasting, rather than the jazz she had come to expect from Millie.

Jackson brought her a beer. “Hard day at work?”

At first, she thought he was laughing at her, but she searched his face and found he was just asking. She decided to get over herself and nodded.

“Yeah, I know it sounds wimpy, but my back is killing me. The pots are heavy, and the water is way above my head.” She made a rueful face. “It turns out that an hour at the gym three times a week just isn’t good preparation for anything except getting a tan.”

He laughed. “You’ll get used to it. I know when I started working construction, I was as stiff as a board for days. Now I hardly notice it.”

“Is that what you do when you’re not playing music?”

He laughed again. “No, music is what I do when I’m not working construction. I wish I could play music all the time, but there’s not really a living in it, you know? I like doing something physical, so I started after Katrina, rebuilding houses. They taught me everything on the job, so now I can pretty much do anything in that line.” He looked proud. “It’s silly, but I love taking a broken-down, mud-caked house and turning it back into a home. People lost everything, and we give something back.”

Charlotte remembered the footage from Katrina. The bodies covered with sheets. The whole lower part of the city underwater.
The stories. The days it took for help to come. She’d given money. Everyone had. And then she’d forgotten all about it, more or less. But here it was, years later, and the work continued.

Jackson was still talking. “There are whole neighborhoods that no one returned to. It’s sad, because they were once full of people, generations of families all within blocks of one another. But I guess they set up elsewhere and started over.”

“Like me.”

“Yeah, like you. They lost everything; you lost everything.”

“Not everything. I still have some money. I still have some friends.”

He took her hand suddenly and squeezed it. “And you still have your talent.”

She frowned, not getting it at first. “My voice?”

He raised his eyebrows. “You’re very blasé about it. Your voice is incredible. If I had half that much of a gift, I’d be doing everything I could to get out there and get famous.”

Kat wandered over. “Get famous? Isn’t she famous enough already?”

Charlotte laughed. “I’m not sure infamous and famous are the same thing.”

She told the assembled company about the Charlotte Williams Sucks Web site, and of course they all wanted to see.

“Oh, crap. There’s Mom.”

Millie whirled around to where her children were huddled around the kitchen table, Jackson’s laptop open to the Web site. For a long second, she just looked, reading the evil caption that
mentioned her being an “ex-servant.” Then she grinned.

“I look so skinny! I should run out and buy another pair of those pants, who knew I looked so good in them?” Then she turned back to the gumbo, singing along with Bob under her breath.

Her kids all laughed, but Charlotte was impressed. Maybe she should try to be that cool about it. She was finding it hard.

Kat broke into her thoughts. “But what were you saying, Jackson, about Charlotte’s voice? The other night at the club, she was amazing.”

“I know. She and I worked yesterday on some of my songs, and I think she agreed to sing with my band.”

“I did.” Charlotte blushed. “But I have to check with Mr. Karraby.”

“Watch out, Charlotte.” Camille, Jackson’s sister, looked sternly at him. “It starts off as fun, and then, before you know it, he’s got you touring the diviest bars in Louisiana, playing for nickels and generally working your ass off.”

Jackson snorted. “Coming from you, that’s funny.” He turned to Charlotte. “Camille is a documentary filmmaker.”

His sister interrupted. “I work at the local public TV station. He’s exaggerating.”

“She’s a genius. She’s being modest, but when we were kids, she would have me dress up as whatever and film me. She was the smallest dictator you ever saw.”

Camille threw a piece of bread at him.

“What do you do, Lilianne?” Charlotte looked at the younger of Jackson’s two older sisters.

“I’m a resident at TMC.” Charlotte must have looked confused. “Tulane Medical Center. It’s the big hospital in town.
Well, one of them.”

Millie pulled bowls from the cupboard and started serving great steaming bowls of gumbo, along with long loaves of crusty French bread.

“It’s hard to believe all three of you even got through school, the shenanigans you got up to, and yet here you are, respectable professionals.” She grinned. “Well, largely respectable.”

Camille got a green salad from the fridge, and for a moment, there was silence, only the sound of spoons at work.

Charlotte put down her spoon and looked at Jackson. “You realize I’m being stalked right now by some wacko, right?”

He nodded.

“And that my dad just got sent to jail for fraud.”

Another nod.

“And that if I come and sing with your band, all anyone will talk about is that, and what a bitch I am, and how you’re trading on my notoriety, and that I’m just being even more shallow than ever.”

A nod and a shrug. “Look, they can think what they want. When they hear you sing, they’ll realize that it doesn’t matter what your background is. What matters is that you’re really talented and have something rare—talent and drive and beauty. And”—here he pretended to blow on his fingernails—“you’ll be singing my arrangements, which are brilliant.”

“And”—this from Kat—“you’ll also look like a million bucks, because I’m going to style you. It’s going to be awesome. When’s the next gig?”

“Wednesday. Time enough to rehearse with the rest of the band and get ready.” Everyone around the table looked at Charlotte. “What do you say, Charlie? Are you up for it?”

She thought about it. About how she was trying to lie low and start over. About how scared she was about this guy who was stalking her, despite everyone else taking it so lightly. And then she thought about her mom singing to her and how nice all of these people had been to her. She owed them. And she owed herself.

“Sure. Why the hell not? I love singing, and people here don’t really know who I am, so much.”

She hoped.

JACKSON WAS A man of his word. By the time dinner was over, he’d been on the phone to his band, and a rehearsal was set up for the next day.

Millie clucked at him. “The girl’s been through a lot, Jackson. Go easy, OK?”

He shook his head, looking at Charlotte. “Nope. She’s much tougher than everyone thinks. Just because she’s had a pampered life doesn’t mean she isn’t capable of standing on her own two feet and kicking some butt.”

Kat laughed. “Well, she’d have to be standing on her own two feet to kick some butt, or she’d fall on her ass.”

“Again,” added Charlotte, wondering how long it’d been since she’d laughed at herself.

At first, the thought of performing with Jackson had made her nervous, but now she recognized the feeling as exhilaration. She knew her voice was good, and she’d loved the music he’d taught her, and why not go for it? Besides, she was encouraged by Jackson’s faith in her. He was right—she was tougher than everyone thought.

Working with Jackson turned out to be just as hard as his sister had warned her. The easy, affable guy from dinner turned into a focused ball buster once he got in front of the band.

The rehearsal was taking place in an old theater in the Quarter, which was available as a practice space. The curtains were dusty, and the chairs looked as if they hadn’t been sat in for decades, but there was something magical about it. Old posters lined the backstage area: King Oliver, Cab Calloway, Fats Domino. Charlotte wondered how many amazing singers had looked out at the auditorium just as she was doing. Startled from her dreaming by Jackson barking her name, she tried to pay attention.

It was hard work, getting two dozen musicians to do what you needed them to do, especially if you were also trying to introduce a new singer. Generally speaking, the band members were young native New Orleanians, like Jackson, with the occasional old-timer. The lead sax player had come out of retirement, he said, to play with Jackson’s band, and she was chatting with him when Jackson lost his temper at her.

“Charlotte, are you actually listening to me? Because I’m talking to you.”

She spun around, horrified. “I’m sorry, Jackson, I was chatting with Chick.” She grinned over her shoulder at the old man. “He’s very charming.”

Jackson wasn’t buying it. “I don’t care if he’s Prince Charming, pay some fucking attention, or you won’t know the arrangements, and when we play tomorrow night, I’ll look like an idiot.”