A Little Night Music (7 page)

He had
been
Samuel Leroux.

And it scared the hell out of him.

                                                            ****

         Macy walked up behind Elli in the Modesta Garden drawing room and whispered “Some anonymous donor just dropped an obscene amount of money.” And as if she hadn’t emphasized
obscene
enough through her exaggerated covert message, she repeated it. “Obscene.”

Night moths took flight in Elli’s stomach. Obscene meant a Honduran school, didn’t it? She pressed a hand against the boned corset of her red silk gown, counting the minutes until she could slip back into something comfortable—or at least clothes that would allow her anything deeper than a half-breath.

Macy flitted away on the arm of an old-money widow from the St. Charles Avenue crowd. Elli tried to feign excitement over the event she had been planning for months, but ever since Jon refused her kiss and dropped her off, a humiliated wet-sponge to Macy’s ten thousand questions, her heart had been absent the fight for money and recognition of the foundation’s achievements and the children who would benefit from her work.

Almost immediately, a touch nudged Elli’s bare elbow.

“Ellington?”

She turned to see Cedric Martin. No longer in a Green Lantern costume but Armani, contacts replacing those awful glasses, she had never seen him so refined. Of course, any spit-shine seemed leaps and bounds from the boy who used to rub boogers in her hair and catch frogs in the creek behind her house. He used to call her
Helly
or
Smelly
before he joined the high-profile law firm in New Orleans. His slight drawl had vanished. She knew he had to be the anonymous donor.

“Cedric.”

He planted a well-bred greeting on both cheeks, his lips lingering longer than expected.

Elli smiled away her discomfort. “Thank you. I can’t think of a more beautiful place to honor my father’s memory.”

“I can’t think of a more beautiful host.” He lifted a flute of bubbly and sipped as if he hated the stuff, staring at her over the crystal rim.

An awareness stirred in her abdomen—welcome or not she couldn’t say. Different from what she had felt with Jon. At the thought of the temperamental trumpeter, Elli came down clearly on the side of welcome.

“So many children will benefit.”

“Elli…” Cedric hesitated. He set his glass on a nearby table and took her hand. “I think you know how I feel about you. I hope you do…”

His hand was warm and manicured, nothing like the firm, callused hands of a musician. The orchestral music swelled. Elli attempted a deep inhale only to be bound by clothes that weren’t her—would never be her. Cedric fit in Modesta Gardens. Elli, with no family left but a brother stationed overseas, fit nowhere, with no one.

The song ended. In the polite applause that followed, Elli’s gaze drifted past Cedric. There, in the veranda’s open doors, stood Jon.

His hair was closely cropped, every wavy strand that remained held in meticulous place by some product that made it shine in the chandelier lights. He hadn’t shaved but the dark, even growth was no more than a day in contrast to the crisp whiteness of his tux collar. His casual hands-in-pockets pose against the French door frame indicated he had been there for some time, watching, listening, waiting.

Hot needles prickled up Elli’s spine. How dare he show up uninvited?

Cedric turned to where Elli’s attention had drifted. His hold on her hand tightened.

“Excuse me for a minute,” said Elli, attempting calm and serene when all she felt was the swell left over from her battered pride. She nodded to a few attendees on her way to the veranda when all she really wanted to do was scale the lavish furnishings and tackle the bastard for having the nerve to show up here.

“What are you doing here?” she hissed when they were close enough to have a private conversation.

Jon nodded behind her. “That’s the guy, isn’t it? The one your father wanted for you?”

Elli grabbed his sleeve and tugged him out into the night air, still warm, still oppressive. He smelled of citrus and spice and a sophistication that reeked of a corner office in a Chicago high-rise, and she realized this was yet another Jon she didn’t know.

“I don’t see how that’s your business.”

“He’s perfect for you.” His disingenuous tenor was not lost on Elli.

“Why are you here?”

“I need to know the rest of the story—the one where your father played
Taps
and your grandfather sent him away.”

“Wha—? Jon, you’re not making any sense.”

“I know he told you. It had to have been one of the Leroux family stories. I saw it, Elli. I was there. I have to know what happened after she went back in the house.”

Elli shook off her confusion. Trying to remember what she had been told about the night of her uncle’s funeral proved nearly impossible when the man with whom she was angry crowded her and made her want to make the same amorous mistake all over again. When she saw his eyes glisten in the party lights flooding past her and replayed the faint desperation in his tone, she focused.

“Issa said Daddy came to his place after. Didn’t eat for a week—just played and played until there was nothing left. Then one day my mother showed up at Issa’s door with a suitcase in one hand and a crumpled bus ticket in the other. She never saw her father again.”

Jon backed away and lowered himself to an upholstered chaise. “And her name? Your mother’s name?”

“Maria.”

Elli couldn’t have imagined the effect of that one simple word. But Jon’s expression told a story she hadn’t expected. His eyes slid closed, lost to a power she didn’t understand.

“It brought them together,” Jon said, more a whisper to himself than anything he intended to share.

“What did? Jon, you’re talking crazy.”

“The instrument. Don’t you see? It isn’t rougarou.”

Elli couldn’t hold back a grin. She adored the way he had taken the bayou werewolf of French folklore and made it his. “What is that? Code word for bullshit now?”

But Jon wasn’t laughing. “I never wanted this. I still don’t.”

They were back to the ambiguous nature of them, together, none more ambiguous than the man seated before her. Before she could summon a response, Jon spoke again.

“Go. Be with the man your father wanted.”

Elli had had enough of the wounded, manipulative timbre in his voice. She had wounds too, the most recent of which left him holding the bloody knife. Her voice dropped low in an attempt to control her barely-there decorum.

“How
dare
you come here, insinuating yourself into my life and my history when you made it clear you want nothing to do with me”

Jon sat, elbows on his knees, hands knotted, awash in the party’s glow. His gaze dropped to his polished shoes. He had no response.

Elli moved toward the French doors. She had almost crossed the threshold when he spoke.

“He would want you to move on.” His non-answer came out hoarse, defeated from some inner war where he ruled both sides.

She paused.

“Your father. I know. Because when I pick up that horn? I
am
him. Everything he felt, I feel. He wouldn’t want you living in the past.”

Elli turned. “That’s rich coming from a man who fled a thousand miles to escape
his
past. A man who can’t
exist
in the same room as a woman because he’s afraid there’s some female conspiracy against his happiness. We’re all bitches. Isn’t that right, Jon? Sent to take you down.”

Jon stood, hands slung low in his pockets. “Enjoy your school in Honduras. It’ll be amazing because of you.”

He walked away, down a flight of veranda steps, his retreating heels clicking against the concrete faster than her accelerating heartbeat.
My God
.
He
was the anonymous donor. That knowledge, along with a swarm of anxiety in her chest,
I might never see him again
, spilled out into one truth she could no longer contain.

“I don’t know who you really are, Jon,” she said, loud enough for him to hear. She hated how her throat twisted the words into something needy and desperate, like a woman holding on to something that had never been hers.

Almost at the grass, he paused and turned. There was no anger in his eyes, only sadness.

“That makes two of us.”

Jon slipped into the darkness of the west garden and disappeared into the night.

Elli wrapped her arm around the Greek statue beside her, still warm from the sun.  She found it hard to balance and her body had grown stone cold on this hottest of summer nights.

Five

“There’s a boy at school. He pickin’ on me.”

Elephant sat beside Jon on the fire escape. It was the first day she had returned since she fled in the green dress. When he asked, she had shrugged and changed the subject to butterflies.

“Want me to beat him up?”

Elephant squinted up at him, half-giggling, half-assessing his seriousness. Her crooked, too-big teeth poked out of her full lips. “You’d do that?”

“Sure. Anyone picks on my girl.” Jon winked for good measure.

“He threw tomatoes at me. The big juicy kind that makes good gumbo.”

“What did you do?”

“I hugged him.”

Sweet tea slid down Jon’s windpipe. He choked and said, “You didn’t.”

“I did. He went home wearin’ as much tomato as me.” Elephant fiddled with the fastener on her loafers. “Boys are stupid.”

Jon took a deep drag of stifling city air into his lungs and felt its crass thickness all the way to his crossed ankles. “Yes, we are.”

“Why’d he do it?”

Jon considered the intricacies of the question and tried to find the seven-year-old answer to a universal male shortcoming.

“Boys don’t always know the best way to tell a girl how they feel.”

She seemed satisfied with the answer until she added, “Did you ever throw tomatoes at a girl, Mr. Jon?”

Does last night count?

“No. Not tomatoes.”

“Frogs?”

Jon laughed. “No.”

“Then you’re one of the good ones.” Elephant again took the spray of tiny white flowers from her hair and placed it in his shirt pocket. Jon could have set his clock by it, her daily offering for his playing. He pressed every one of them into his wallet to keep.

He thought for a moment that he would gladly trade every dollar he owned to have a white flower each day for the rest of his life. But then he remembered, flowers die. Nothing lasts forever.

                                                     ****    

On a break at The Lotus that night, Jon threaded his way to the bar. Gabe had a tall glass of ice water ready for him before Jon’s boot heels hooked onto a bar stool and screamed
thank you! thank you
! for a rest from the longest Friday night set to date. Gabe’s gaze lifted past Jon’s shoulder as Jon felt someone bump him.

Jon turned to see the guy who had held Elli’s hand at Modesta Gardens. He wore one of those fine silk shirts that showed every wrinkle but there were none.

“Nice playing, man.”

“Thanks.” Jon took a sip and waited for the ice to cool the hot tongue he longed to unleash. He couldn’t tell if the guy was genuine or not, but he’d bet every ounce of tonight’s water supply that the guy wasn’t here to appreciate the wide range of jazz The Lotus offered. “Man.”

Gabe backed away, hands hidden in a white-toweled surrender as if to say
you’re on your own, dude.
He obviously knew the guy, which meant the cat was even closer to Elli than Jon previously thought.

“Well, for a man not
from
here,” the guy continued. “S’pose you gotta have a little dark in your veins for the real deal.”

Jon smelled whiskey on the jackoff’s breath. Too bad his carefully composed exterior crumbled the moment he opened his mouth.

“S’pose so.” Jon downed more water and watched Mongo lift his ample frame off his stool and crash a few keys with his elbow.

“Which is why you need to stay away from Elli. The real deal,
man
. Nothing for you here.”

The dude’s rank body cologne and peacocking hand gestures picked at Jon’s last nerve. The guy had kicked it back from high-society to brother. Jon wondered if Elli knew all men had this—two sides. Jon clenched his glass. Dezi needed one more reason to kick him out—one. This asshole wasn’t going to be it.

“Hear me, Wonder Bread?”

A few choice comebacks came to mind, none of them the words of a gentleman. Could Sir Real Deal really be what Elli’s father wanted for her? Elli’s insatiable desire to please her dead father left no doubt in Jon’s mind that those cards were dealt long ago. If this pencil-neck made Elli happy, he was good with it. He wasn’t supposed to care anyway. But it didn’t mean he couldn’t dish back a little.