Chapter 32
I HAPPILY WALKED THE SIX SHORT BLOCKS to the Sojourner Truth School with Nana and the kids. I wasn’t dressed up. They were in their finery, but it didn’t matter. There was suddenly a bounce in my step. I took Nana’s arm, and she smiled as I tucked her hand into the crook of my arm.
“Now that’s better. Seems like old times,” I exclaimed.
“You’re such a shameless charmer sometimes,” Nana said, and laughed out loud. “Ever since you were a little boy like Damon. You certainly can be one when you want to.”
“You helped make me what I am, old woman,” I confided to her.
“Proud of it, too. And I’m so proud of Damon.”
We arrived at the Sojourner Truth School and went directly to the small auditorium in back. I wondered if Christine might be there, but she wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Then I wondered if she already knew that Damon had made the Boys Choir, if he had told her first. I kind of liked the thought that he might have told her. I wanted them to be close. I knew that Damon and Jannie needed a mother, not just a father and a great-grandmother.
“We’re not too good yet,” Damon informed me before he left to join the other boys. His face clearly showed the fear and anxiety of possibly being embarrassed. “This is just our second practice. Mr. Dayne says we’re horrid as a tubful of castor oil. He’s tough as nails, Dad. He makes you stand for an hour straight without moving.”
“Mr. Dayne’s tougher than you, Daddy, tougher than Mrs. Johnson,” Jannie said, and grinned wickedly. “Tough as nails.”
I had heard that Nathaniel Dayne was a demanding maestro—nicknamed the “Great Dayne”—and that his choirs were among the finest in the country and that most of the boys were said to profit immensely from the dedicated training and discipline. He was already organizing the boys up on the stage. He was a very broad man of below-average height. I guessed he carried about two hundred fifty pounds on his five-seven frame. He wore a black suit with a black shirt buttoned at the collar, no tie. He started the boys off with a few playful verses of “Three Blind Mice” that didn’t sound half bad.
“I’m really happy for Damon. He looks so proud up there,” I whispered to Nana and Jannie. “He is a handsome devil, too.”
“Mr. Dayne is starting a girls choir in the fall,” Jannie loudwhispered in my ear. “You watch. I mean, you listen. I’ll make it.”
“Go for it, girl,” Nana said, and gave Jannie a hug. She is very good at encouraging others.
Dayne suddenly called out loudly, “Ugh. I hear a swoop. I don’t want any swoops here, gentlemen. I want clean diction and pure pitch. I want silver and silk. I do not want swoops.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I suddenly saw Christine in the hallway. She was watching Dayne and the boys, but then she looked my way. Her face was principal-serious for just a moment. Then she smiled and winked.
I walked over to see her. Be still my heart.
“That’s my boy,” I said with mock pride as I came up to her. She was dressed in a soft gray pantsuit with a coral-pink blouse. God, I loved seeing her now, being with her, hanging out, doing nothing—the works.
Christine smiled. Actually, she laughed a little at me. “He does everything so damn well.” She didn’t hold back, no matter what. “I was hoping you might be here, Alex,” she whispered. “I was just this very minute missing you like crazy. You know that feeling?”
“Yes, that feeling and I are well acquainted.”
We held hands as the choir practiced Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” Everything felt so right, and it was hard to get used to.
“Sometimes… I still have this dream about George being shot and dying,” she said as we were standing there. Christine’s husband had been murdered in her home, and she had seen him die. It was one of the big reasons she was hesitant about being with me: the fear that I might die in the line of duty, and also the fear that I could bring terror and violence into the house.
“I remember everything about the afternoon I heard Maria was shot. It eases with time, but it never goes away.”
Christine knew that. She had figured out the answers to most of her questions, but she liked to talk things through. We were both that way.
“And yet I continue to work here in Southeast. I come to the inner city every day. I could choose a nice school in Maryland or Virginia,” she said.
I nodded. “Yes, Christine, you do choose to work here.”
“And so do you.”
“And so do I.”
She held my hand a little tighter. “I guess we were made for each other,” she said. “Why fight it.”
Chapter 33
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING I was back in the write-up room at the Seventh District Station, working the John Doe homicide. I was the first one in there.