all about heartbreak and tears.
Nora is leaning forward, into the song, her head tilted a little. Caleb says the lyrics, feeding them to her in a kind of dull monotone. Nora repeats them, her lips moving, forming the words of the song, singing them, but so quietly Fitz can just barely hear her:
Every time it rains, I think of you
And that’s the time I feel so blue.
They play it together a few times, Nora’s singing gradually getting stronger and more confident, Caleb adding a little embellishment to his turnaround. It’s some new riff, Fitz can tell from the look on Caleb’s face, something he must have been working on. They sound good. Fitz admires the way they’ve hit it off, just how good their chemistry is, and he feels left out, too. It’s like Caleb has whisked her away on the dance floor and left him on the sidelines, back at the punch bowl.
“Okay, dude,” Caleb says then. “Give me something like the horn part on the record. See if you can mimic that.”
Fitz remembers the song, those horns, a little bit, but he’s not like Caleb, he doesn’t have a freakish memory for tunes. He’s too embarrassed to ask for help, though, not here, in front of Nora and his father, so he goes searching for those notes.
He quietly tries out a couple of combinations, but they’re not only not right, they’re not even close. It’s like he’s playing the bass part for some other song, in some other key, on some other planet. He tries something lower, something higher. Fitz feels as if he’s blindfolded, lurching around a strange room, searching for something small and precious—he keeps banging and crashing into things. He’s lost. Hopeless. It would be funny if it weren’t happening to him. Nora glances in his direction, and now his father seems to be watching him with special attention. He feels himself starting to sweat. Bass Line Fail, he thinks. Epic Bass Line Fail.
And just then, almost as if he can feel Fitz’s desperation, Caleb comes to the rescue. He sings the part, just two notes, the bass notes he wants Fitz to find. He keeps singing them softly, and it’s all Fitz needs. He takes a deep breath. I can do this, he tells himself. I can totally do this. He goes up the neck and finds the first note right away. And after just a little bit of hunt-and-peck, he’s got the other. Caleb gives him a nod. Fitz gets the tempo, and just like that, he’s on board. He’s in the pocket.
They play it through a few times, and just about when Fitz starts to forget the strangeness of the situation and finds himself feeling drawn into the music, Caleb raises his hand and calls a halt. He wants them to tackle the next part of the song.
“The chorus is a little tricky,” he says. He tries out some chords. He mutters a little—to himself, to the guitar, maybe to the song. It’s what he does. Fitz is tempted to explain, but Nora doesn’t look disturbed.
Finally, Caleb’s got a progression he likes. He runs through it slowly, his torso half-twisted so Fitz can see what he’s playing—A, B-flat, and E. Nothing too exotic. Maybe Caleb was right, maybe they do have a way to play a song like this.
After about their eighth or ninth time through the chorus, Nora gives a little smile. “That’s it,” Caleb says. “That’s totally it.”
You wouldn’t think you could smile while you’re singing, but Nora can—she is. Her mouth is busy forming the words, but her whole face is alive with pleasure. It’s like she’s standing back a little from her own voice, from the song, listening and enjoying herself, catching Fitz’s eye, as if to say, isn’t it something?
Her voice isn’t exactly like Ruth Brown’s on the recording—how could it be?—but it has a certain attitude, sass, maybe that’s what it was, maybe something all her own. She has a little bit of a tear in her voice, too.
Just then a brown delivery truck rolls down the street, slows, and stops next door in front of the Wilkersons’. The deliveryman—brown shorts, black socks and shoes, curly hair and mustache—emerges with a package. Fitz recognizes him, their regular guy. Somehow Fitz knows his name: Clay. Maybe it’s stitched onto his shirt.
Clay jogs a package up to the Wilkersons’ porch, deposits it there, and heads back to the truck. But halfway down the walk, he stops and pivots