Good for him, she thought. She hoped he’d meet somebody foxy.
Niki put her face up next to Leda’s so she could see through the crack. She grinned and said, “Get it, Grady.”
The woman at the table tossed her hair and laughed.
Leda frowned. “Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. But now that I’m really squinting at her, I think that’s his daughter.”
“What? I thought she was a kid.”
“She’s a teenager. And that’s a teenager. Look at her jacket,” Leda said, raising one finger to point it through the curtain. “Her shoes, her backpack.”
“I carry a backpack all the time, and I’m a grown-ass woman.”
“Yours doesn’t have a steampunk Wonder Woman logo on it, and you haven’t drawn on your Chucks with a Sharpie in a number of years. Correct me if I’m wrong.”
Niki squinted a second look through the curtain crack. “Drat, I think you’re right. That’s gotta be a kid.”
“Yup.” She leaned back and let the curtains slip shut. “Maybe you need to have a word with Steve—he’s the one checking IDs at the door, right?”
“Steve’s a pushover. You know it, I know it. Homeless dudes know it. Even dogs know it.”
Leda nodded as she dabbed her shirt one last time. “How many dogs is he up to now?”
“Six, I think. But you know what probably happened? She probably told him that her dad was a cop and she was joining him inside. Steve folds like a paper crane anytime anyone mentions anything about the cops.”
“You might, too, if you were a black ex-con in this town. Or any town, I bet. Either way, who cares. She’s here now.” Leda gave up and tossed the paper towel into the nearest trash can. She pointed at her shirt. “Am I dry?”
“Dry enough. Too dry, even. Here, it’s dangerous to go alone—take this.” Niki handed her a drink.
“What is it?”
“Just drink it.”
“It smells like bananas. Is this death by bananas? Again?” Leda asked, pointing a solid stink-eye at the glass of brownish liquid.
“It’s death by bananas 2.0. Drink it. Get up there. Do your thing.” Niki gave her a little shove.
Leda followed its momentum until she was standing onstage and people were clapping and the girl at Grady’s table turned around and yes—she absolutely had to be his daughter. Grady gave her a little wave, and Leda waved back. Her stage smile was locked into place, and she did her best to forget that someone she actually knew—apart from the Castaways folks—was out there watching. It shouldn’t have been weird. It didn’t have to be weird. She was making it weird.
She cleared her throat and took the mic, and when the bar was fairly quiet, she covered the basics of what to expect. Her first offering came from a man in the middle of the seating area. He was white and heavyset, with a pair of caterpillar eyebrows and a silver soul patch. He gave her a cell phone case that was covered in glitter and pink flamingos.
She took it, held it to her chest for a few seconds, and picked up the thread quickly, almost easily. A young man. Not a son, not a lover. More like a mentee, she thought. A student, perhaps. Yes, student sounded right.
“All right, I’ve got it,” she said—and handed the case back. She didn’t think that the case had belonged to the young man, but it’d had some other significance for him. She didn’t know what, and her powers of divination weren’t strong enough to tell her anything else.
That was another useful result of all this practice: she was learning the limits of her abilities. Once she knew the limits, she could push them. It was all progress; even when she hit a brick wall, at least she learned where the wall was. Maybe, with time, she could take a sledgehammer to that wall. Or pick at it with a chisel and a hammer, for slower and steadier progress.
Each song was a hammer tap. Each happy audience member, a crack in the plaster.
To Matt she said, “We have to get into the way-back machine for this one. Give me, ‘To Sir with Love.’ ” Soon the first bars were filling the room.
The man in the audience immediately burst into tears.
Leda was startled, but she kept going. By the time the song was over, the man was smiling broadly, accepting tissues, and talking softly to people nearby who were asking him if he was all right, and if the song was the one he wanted to hear, and if it’d meant anything to him. She knew the answers to all those things, not because she was psychic—but because she paid attention to details.
The brightness in his eyes were happy tears. The way his hands shook… that was relief, not fear. He nodded and chattered breathlessly, happily. Whatever she was telling him with the notes of the song, he understood it better than she did, and he was happy.
That’s all she wanted.
The next offering came from a young Asian woman in a blue velvet dress, a denim jacket, and black combat boots.
The dream of the nineties will never die, Leda thought, but did not say out loud. The woman handed over a tiny key—the kind that goes to a locker, or a mailbox.
Leda took it, closed her fingers around it, and shut her eyes.
She saw feathers. Not like birds, but like a dancer’s boa. Bright red and bright makeup. Bright mirrors with rounded light bulbs the size of her fist. It wasn’t literally what was intended by the key, or so Leda didn’t think. This hint was oblique, like they sometimes were. She didn’t like those kinds of flashes, because she had the very strong feeling that they were as likely to be helpful as they were to be way off the mark.
“Okay, this is a tricky one… but I think I’ve got it.” She gave the key back to the nearest audience member, who passed it back to the owner.
Leda was getting a music video. An older one, from a bit before her time. Another woman. That was nice. Leda had a bit of range, but she always had to adjust and struggle for a way-high soprano or a deep-voiced male singer.
“Matt, give me some Annie Lennox.”
He opened the catalog and flipped the pages. “All right, which one?” Rationally, she knew he was only a few feet away, but his voice sounded small, soft, and very far-off when Leda was on the stage.
She hesitated. She was thinking of the video to “Why” but feeling like “Walking on Broken Glass” was closer to the mark. “Broken Glass. Give me that one, I think it’s right.”
A minute or so into the song, Leda saw the woman who’d requested it. She was standing with her arms folded, a soft, smug smile on her face and a faraway look in her eyes. Leda hoped that meant she understood and she was getting something useful from the performance—but it was hard to tell.
Now and again, she’d slip a glance down to Grady and his daughter. The girl was enthralled. Grady was intrigued.
The girl unzipped her backpack and started rummaging around in there, and for a minute Leda was on the verge of panic. What if the girl handed her something? What would she do? What if she saw something dark or terrible?
Thank God her father made her put it all away.
The show ran another ninety minutes, and then Leda was finished and so was her voice. She cut off the requests after a rousing rendition of “Shiny Happy People” that had the whole bar acting like merry first graders.
“Thank you so much, everyone—and good night!” she said, as she worked the microphone into its holder and took her bows. Then she ducked back behind the curtain, leaned against the wall, and exhaled so hard she thought she’d turn herself inside out.