there would be more, and she’d breathe a sigh of relief and praise my father like she was saying grace. ‘Thank you, Bo Johnson.’” Esther raised her hands and closed her eyes, mimicking Gloria Mine perfectly. “Lee Otis heard her once and started thanking Bo Johnson in his prayers too. Mama smacked him and told him not to say that name again. She was more careful after that, but even still, she never said a bad word about him.”
For a long stretch we were silent, the topic exhausted. I thought Esther would give in and close her eyes, but she didn’t.
“Why did she name him Lee Otis?” I asked finally, plucking out a wandering, random thought.
“She thought it sounded smart.”
My eyebrows shot up.
“Don’t give me that look, Benny. Lee Otis is smart.”
“I never said he wasn’t. But Lee Otis sounds like a baker . . . or a bread company. Lee Otis Breads.”
“Ask him anything. He knows every song—who wrote it and in what year. Rockabilly, jazz, blues, even the classic stuff. He knows it. He’s a walking encyclopedia. He loves information. He soaks it up like a big kitchen sponge. He should be a scientist. Or a doctor. But we make him play. Just like Mama made me sing.”
“She made you sing?” The statement surprised me. “You didn’t want to?”
“I didn’t want to do it all the time. I didn’t want it to be work. But I had a gift. Mama said, ‘Having a gift and not using it is like having a garden and letting your family starve.’ It was more responsibility than I wanted. I resented it.”
“My piano teacher, Mrs. Costiera, used to say, ‘Not everyone has a tree inside them.’”
“A tree?”
“Learning to play the piano was the most natural thing in the world for me. It felt like remembering, like it was something I’d done before. The more time I spent, the more the scales fell from my eyes and my mind, and the river of music that ran through my veins became this rushing current. Plucking melodies from the water was like plucking low-hanging fruit from a tree. When I told Mrs. Costiera how easy it was, she smacked me in the forehead with the palm of her hand.” I adopted my thickest Italian accent, which always made me think of my old teacher.
“‘You must still take care of your tree,’” I said, mimicking her. “‘Give thanks for it. Water it. Prune it. Keep the birds away and the beasts away. If you don’t care for your tree it will stop producing fruit. And there will be nothing to harvest.’”
“Use it or lose it,” Esther summarized.
“Yeah. Basically. But Mrs. Costiera didn’t really have to convince me. It was all I ever wanted to do.”
“I wanted to write books,” Esther murmured.
“What kind of books?”
“All kinds.” She shrugged like it didn’t matter, and I waited in silence for her to tell me more. My silence made her defensive. “I’m smart. I was reading before I was five. I taught myself. The way you taught yourself piano. I didn’t want to dance or sing. I wanted to read. I wanted to learn. I wanted to write. But reading didn’t pay. Learning didn’t pay. And I could sing, so that’s what I did. I got my first big gig when I was thirteen.”
I whistled.
“When I was thirteen the money stopped for a whole year.” She looked at me in the soft glow emanating from the dash. “For months we waited. We were desperate. Mama started taking me to auditions. But I didn’t get any work. I had too much attitude.”
“Even then?” I teased.
“Even then. I’ve been this way all my life. Better get used to it, Benny Lament.”
“So what happened? Did Gloria give up?”
“Mama was even more stubborn than I am.”
“So . . . no?”
“No.” She chuckled, but her voice hitched as though the laughter surprised her. “I haven’t ever laughed about that. What do you know?” she said. “She took me to El Morocco on Fifty-Fourth. They had the African theme—zebra stripes on the seats and the walls that looked like the inside of a genie’s bottle. Rumor was they were putting together a new show. I was small, but I was pretty and I had lighter skin.” Her voice trembled, and I didn’t know if it was anger or sorrow or laughter that caused the quaver. “They liked it when the girls weren’t too dark.”
Ah, definitely not mirth.
“I didn’t have to do anything complicated. Didn’t have to