Dana smiled — a real one, quick and surprised — and pressed a thick card into Harmony's hand. BrightStar Voices. Dana Whitfield, Talent Scout. On the back, in ballpoint, a time and an address in Manhattan.
"Don't think too long," Dana said, and walked toward the turnstiles, and was gone.
Chapter 2: The Invitation
St. Brigid's smelled like it always smelled at six o'clock: bleach undercut with onions and laundry steam. Harmony came in the side door with her guitar case banging her shin and Dana Whitfield's card burning a hole in her hoodie pocket, and the first thing that hit her was the stew. Odette's beef stew, thick enough to stand a spoon in, and her stomach went sharp again all at once.
Odette Baptiste stood behind the serving counter with a ladle the size of a small oar, her headwrap the color of mango skin, her arms gleaming with steam. She spotted Harmony over the heads of the line and her whole face rearranged itself. "Ti zwazo! Late, and too skinny."
"You say that every day," Harmony said, grinning before she could stop herself.
"Every day it is true." Odette ladled without looking, the way she'd done it for fourteen years, and the bowl she slid across was heaped higher than the rest. "Eat. Then tell me why your eyes are doing that."
Harmony ate standing at the end of the counter, out of the way of the line. The stew scalded her tongue and she didn't care. Odette watched her with the stillness of a woman counting something she didn't want to count out loud.
Tee materialized at her elbow with a second bowl already in his hands.
"I told her yes for you," he announced. "With my face. Did she see?"
"Everybody saw," Harmony said. "You did the eyebrow thing."
"It worked, though." He swallowed. "Tell Odette the lady part. The TV part."
So Harmony laid the card on the counter, and Odette picked it up with two fingers like it might bite, and Harmony told it — the filming, the crouching to eye level, the audition, the catering. Odette listened with her weight leaned on the counter, and when Harmony got to the part about the food, Odette's mouth did a small, complicated thing.
"BrightStar Voices," Odette said slowly. "These TV people eat little girls like you for breakfast, ti zwazo. They chew you up and spit you out in front of everybody, and they call it a dream."
The stew sat suddenly heavy in Harmony's stomach. "You think I shouldn't go."
"I think your mama sang backup for Denise Holloway on a stage in Ohio when she was nineteen, and came home with her shoes worn through and her voice bigger than the bus. Grace would have wanted this for you the way she wanted air." Odette's voice softened. "But you go in there with your eyes open, you hear me? Like you got somewhere to be after."
Harmony nodded, and the tight thing in her chest loosened. Grace's name in Odette's mouth always did that — a hand on her back, steadying.
After dinner, when the trays were stacked, Harmony sat on the loading dock steps with the guitar case open across her knees and took out the cassette. Tee sat two steps down, kicking his heels, gone uncharacteristically quiet. He knew what the cassette was. Everybody at St. Brigid's knew — she'd carried it for two years and never once played it, and some things you don't have to be told.
For My Girl. The label had gone soft at the edges from her thumbs.
"She wrote it before you were born?" Tee asked, which he already knew.
"She used to sing it in the kitchen while she cooked. I remember the chorus, mostly. She never recorded anything else."
"Why'd you never play it?"
Harmony turned the cassette over. The plastic was warm from her pocket. "Because then I'd know," she said. "Right now I still get to wonder."
Tee was quiet for a long moment. Then he dug in his windbreaker pocket and pulled out a red guitar pick, worn at the edges, and pressed it into her palm.
"My lucky one. You take it. For the audition."
"Tee—"
"You bring it back," he said fiercely. "When you're famous — then I'll want it back double."
Harmony closed her fist around the pick. It was warm from his pocket, and the warmth went straight up her arm into her throat, and she had to look away at the brick wall across the alley so he wouldn't see her face do anything.
That night Odette washed Harmony's hoodie in the kitchen sink with yellow soap, wrung it till her forearms corded, and hung it over the radiator. She sat Harmony on a turned-over milk crate, took the rubber band out of her hair, and re-braided it properly — tight cornrows that pulled just enough to make Harmony's eyes water, the way Grace used to do it on Sunday mornings before church.
"You sing your mama's song," Odette said, her fingers working steady. "Not what they tell you. You hear me, ti zwazo? On your terms."
"On my terms," Harmony echoed, and the cornrows pulled, and it felt like armor being fitted.
In the morning the hoodie was dry and smelled like soap and radiator heat. The $11.40 went into the pocket with the card, and Tee walked her to the 4 train and wouldn't get on it with her no matter how she looked at him.
"You gotta go alone," he said. "It's your thing. But you come back and tell me everything," and he shoved his hands in his windbreaker pockets and watched her through the turnstile like she was going off to war.
The ride to Manhattan took forty minutes and felt like crossing an ocean. Harmony sat with the case across her knees and watched the boroughs change through the scratched windows — the Bronx falling away, Harlem sliding past, then the island rising with its glass teeth. Her heart did something complicated against her ribs. She pressed her palm to the case, to the sandwich bag beneath the tips and coins, to For My Girl, and thought about her mother at nineteen in Ohio with her shoes worn through, and then about nothing at all, because thinking had started to feel like falling.