Lately, I’d been listening to one of Miles’s songs before I went to sleep. It was called “June Nights,” and the lyrics did more to settle my mind than even my most reliable mantras did. Nothing is better than a summer evening/Fireflies and crickets putting on a show/It’s hard to find the words to say what home is/But it’s those plus you, that’s all I know.
I liked it because it was about the feeling of a place and not a person. The song felt like if you could wrap yourself in a perfect Sunday afternoon and carry it around with you like a comfort blanket.
But it would be overload to listen to Miles before sleep when I’d be seeing him the next day. Tomorrow needed to be all about distance.
Permanent distance. The lines were blurring for me, and it was time to hand him off to another agent completely. I owed him the courtesy of telling him to his face.
That was much, much harder to do when I came face to face with Miles the next day. It was such a cute face, I just kind of wanted to look at it some more when I parked beside him at the address he’d texted me. He was leaning against his Mustang and straightened as I climbed from the car.
“Hey,” he said and reached out for a hug like he was Dylan or something. He did this with everyone. If he’d met them once, the next time he greeted them with a hug like they were his favorite cousin.
His hard chest met mine, and the zipper of his soft hoodie grazed my cheek. I had a quick image of pulling the zipper down with my teeth and sliding my hands inside the hoodie to slip my arms around his waist and match our hips up too.
Oh no. No, nope. Uh-uh.
I stepped back and pushed my hands into my pockets instead. “What are we here to see?”
“You ever been to the community center? Or seen Tambourine and Fan?”
“Of course,” I said. “Home of the second line.” A second line was a jazz parade of at least a dozen musicians on brass and drums, parading down the streets to celebrate all kinds of things. Weddings, graduations, Saints wins. There were multiple ones every weekend in the Quarter, some weekdays too, where the wedding party and invited guests walked along with the band, who didn’t march so much as dance through the streets. Everyone from bystanders to family could fall in and dance down the street with them for as long as they liked. It was common to step into an antique store to browse and walk out to find a small parade going past, led by a bride in her wedding dress, holding her groom by one hand and a frilly parasol in the other.
“Central might argue with you, but yeah. Most of them start here,” Miles agreed. “Jerome Smith revived the brass bands through Tambourine and Fan, and you’re about to meet Jordan Goodman, who wants to do the same thing for jazz piano.”
He led me around to the front of the modest cinder block building. Freshly painted script lettering on the front glass window read, “Tremé Music Center” in red letters outlined in gold.
“This is what keeps me busy when I’m not thinking about the Turnaround,” Miles said, holding the door open for me.
I stepped into a lobby like a dentist’s office, except instead of waiting room chairs, there were display stands full of music books. A middle-aged receptionist looked up from behind the counter. “Hey, Miles,” she said, her smile a bright flash in her brown face.
“Hey, Miss Addie,” he answered. “This is my friend Elle. Elle, Miss Addie runs this place.”
“Can you tell that to Jordan? Because he seems to forget that.”
“I’ll set him straight,” Miles said, grinning. “Come on back, Ellie.”
It felt good to hear him call me Ellie again. I followed him past two practice rooms, the small ones with doors that cut some but not all of the sound of musicians practicing inside. Through the window of one, I could see a young guy around fourteen or fifteen, working on a piece of sheet music at a Yamaha keyboard.
As we approached a door at the end of the short hall, the sound of music grew louder, bursting into full cacophony as Miles pushed open the door. I followed him into a space the size of the music room at my