Monasco I: Passage to Anathema promo

Ten-year-old Isaac Bahan is preparing to become a man. He’ll be branded as official property of the city-state of Calabrecia. His entire family are in attendance when a raiding band of enemy soldiers from neighboring Monasco murders Isaac's father and rides off into the Desert of Sähm with his body as a war trophy. Little Isaac vows revenge, however long it takes.

A few miles away, twelve-year-old Monascan army cadet, Tai Ogami, excels in the brutal Monascan military training. Her progress is monitored by the Monascan ruler's most trusted advisor, Lieutenant Arturus Olanga. Tai progresses until reaching god-like status at the age of twenty-one, and Olanga's jealousy boils as she prepares to make her final rite of passage to the most elite warrior status. Her mission is to infiltrate a Calabrecian slave colony, and at the end of one year assassinate one of her generous colony hosts. Deemed “Monasco’s greatest expectation”, Tai knows this assignment will prove her worthy of a grander future than she had ever dreamed.

Tai finds herself in 2^nd-colony-Calabrecia where she befriends a now bitter and unpleasant Isaac Bahan. Her mission becomes dangerously complicated when she soon falls in love with Isaac’s beautiful sister Seraya. Tai must now choose between revealing to Seraya the truth of what she really is, or maintaining her cover to achieve Monascan glory. Love of Seraya—an enemy slave—is treason, but duty means the treacherous murder of a friend and the betrayal of the woman she loves. This is THE PASSAGE TO ANATHEMA.

http://www.amazon.com/Monasco-Passage-Anathema-Book-I-ebook/dp/B0070Z876W/ref=pd_sim_kstore_1

Monasco II: The Last Kappolarian promo

Tàhti Aliviero hasn’t seen the light of day for a month. She’s been holed up in the ruins of her Kappolarian home with the remains of her murdered family. Tàhti fears the outside world might place her at the mercy of their Monascan killers. The Calabrecian War has left Tàhti the sole survivor of an entire city-state, and the Monascan Empire controls the Desert of Sähm. When Monascan soldiers return to her doorstep, ten-year-old Tàhti is certain she will die by the same blade that slaughtered her family. But the newly-appointed Empress Tai Ogami is among those soldiers, and she offers Tàhti a permanent home as the Princess of Sähm, heir to the Monascan throne.

Tai Ogami knows the power with which she now rules the Monascan Empire came to her by default. She is under-prepared for such political omnipotence, so Empress Ogami will simply have to improvise. Her wife, Seraya Bahan, is now ruling alongside her as the Queen of Sähm. They are surrounded by a sundry cast of advisors and staunch politicians who do not always have their best interest at heart. Lieutenant Arturus Olanga’s vendetta against Tai’s uncanny rise to power has been keeping him busy. He’s launched a private investigation into the mystery around her success, and he’s found some unexpected allies willing to help him solve it.

As Tai and Seraya strive toward social progress, the Desert of Sähm spirals into rebellion and chaos with the young Princess Tàhti, the last Kappolarian, at the center of the unrest. The new rulers must find a way to maintain order, protect the life of the princess, and preserve their marriage while the Imperial dignitaries conspire for control with plots against the matriarchs’ lives.

http://www.amazon.com/Monasco-Last-Kappolarian-Book-II-ebook/dp/B00722ZOJG/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1384277003&sr=1-2&keywords=monasco

 

Monasco III: The Red Tide promo

Coming Soon in 2014!

The third installment of the Monasco series currently in progress! 

Everything Ch. 1

The Months of Moon

Chapter One

            Seven years ago, today, I broke my mother’s heart. Literally. I stood on the bed and cursed her with all my thirteen-year-old might, screamed it into her face like a zealot at a protest rally. The next day, Uncle Cameron showed up at the school office. He signed me out on the grounds of family emergency and walked me to his Maxima in a cold gray silence. He sat for a very long while with the keys in his hand, staring at the dashboard as if it contained all the truths of the cosmos, but there was really only one to be told that day as the words fell from his lips like stones.

            She was a musician, a classical violinist by profession, had been playing since the age of six. She was rehearsing for a Christmas performance when her solo suddenly crumbled, and she dropped to a knee, clutching her chest, struggling for breath that wouldn’t come. Someone from the brass section tried CPR until paramedics arrived, and she was whisked away through Atlanta’s morning rush hour to St. Joseph’s Hospital. It was a Tuesday. 10:46 a.m.

She was thirty-nine but didn’t look it. Few people believed her. Some even jokingly requested to see her driver’s license for proof. She’d present it with a sly smirk, chuckle and wave them off when asked to spill her secret. She looked like a young Sophia Loren, they’d say, and I guess that’s what attracted my father, back when they were both just out of college. Not her beauty so much as her humility, because he admired that most in a person: “Carry yourself with confidence but always speak with prudence.” And she most certainly did, so much that I never really knew her until she was gone.

Jolán De Carlo-Edmunds was an anomaly, a finely sketched piece of work that most people thought they could appraise at a glance, but that was only because she’d designed herself that way. There were only two people in the world who had seen everything beneath the recitals and curtain calls, the guest solos and afternoon private instructions, all the shifts and tones and colors between the first and final movements of her life. My father was hardly among them, contrary to what he still thinks. Fifteen years of marriage brought him no closer to who she really was than would thirty or seventy-five more. Some might say she’d tangled herself up in a lattice of lies and feel sorry for him, the unwitting victim of a woman who had the audacity to try to find herself at thirty-eight. Because I did. I spit on her growing, relentless desire to break free of her own constraints and reconnect with a woman long forgotten, promising to destroy our family.

I demanded to live with my father after the divorce, but I was to begin high school that fall, and North Springs was closer with a better music program. So, my future was mutually decided upon by two people who couldn’t even find a way to hold onto their own. As a third-year violin student, myself, I was to follow directly in my mother’s path. Or, was I? That had all been up for some very passionate, awkward debate after her passing, mostly between my father, Uncle Cameron—her younger brother—and the woman who probably knew her better than any of us.

And so this is where I must digress.

Three months before I killed her, my mother and I were invited out with her best friend Jackie, to a poetry reading in Buckhead. Poetry had completely escaped me then. I couldn’t have cared less about it, never understood a word of it and, in fact, pouted all the way into town, buckled into the back seat of Jackie’s Camry while Mom and Jackie complained about the music selections on the radio, manufactured mainstream trash, the decline of innovation, the death of the true artist. Jackie kept switching stations. Every time a song I liked burst through the back speakers, either she or Mom would stab the seek button for something else because at thirteen-years-old my opinions were weightless as feathers on the moon. They finally found something from the seventies, chugging mid-tempo rock guitars, a young woman singing about magic hands and summer love spells. They would have both been in grammar school then.

   Mom turned in her seat and smiled at me. “This was when real musicians actually made it to the radio,” she said, her eyebrows naturally arched, like soft sculpted dark brown check marks. Most of the time they gave her the appearance of great wisdom, unless she was irritated or angry. Then they would sharpen like half-folded switchblades, her green eyes almost electric as she leveled you, making you feel smaller than an atom with those eyes, or larger than love itself, depending. Tonight they flickered with a kind of amusement, the clever creative sage, eager to fill my tabula rasa with poetry and nostalgia that had nothing to do with me.

   Jackie said, “You’d be surprised how many rock stars in our day were classically trained.” She glanced at me through the rearview and nodded once. “It was rock, but they made the good stuff, the stuff that lives forever, music that meant something.”

   Mom settled back in the passenger’s seat and looked out the window, watched the city go by. “Changed people’s lives,” she said to no one in particular as the women on the radio sang. “Changed the world.”

We were to meet Linda Morgan for dinner before the reading, an older woman and fellow musician my mother had known since I was in diapers, and she waved us over to a lucky parking spot on Roswell, not far from Giovanni’s Books.

We ate at a fancy Thai restaurant with a long blackwood liquor bar and transparent, amber-lighted wall fountains that trickled in the dining room corners. The waiter brought menus to our table, the sleeves of his white button-down creased like folded sheets of paper, a black satin vest with a little bow tie taut beneath his chin. He presented a wine list and suggested the Cabernet, but my mother had a Pinot Noir preference for the red wines, Riesling for the white. She ordered the California Pinot at the consensus of the table and a Coke for me, then browsed her menu while Mrs. Morgan and Jackie discussed venue options for the Civic Orchestra’s first Christmas performance. The Catholic Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Chastain Park Amphitheater, weather permitting. Emerson Concert Hall at Emory University. They liked best to play in churches and basilicas for the acoustics, Mom always said, but they never rehearsed in them because she said a grand and empty sanctuary blurred the tonality of polyphonic music. Only when filled with an audience did the sound resonate properly, and all the subtleties could be intimated to perfection. She had an ear like a hawk owl, perfect pitch. If a train whistled somewhere in the distance, she could place every dissonant note and tell you the key if it had one, much the way an artisan might find hues of burgundy in the shadows of a willow tree, or a gourmet chef connoting a trace of licorice in a spoonful of brisket, just by wafting it past his nose.  It was a game she played with her surroundings, always testing herself and testing me, but I didn’t have her gift and often wondered how it didn’t drive her crazy, the world and all its sound, so many aural textures hiding in the spaces between. My talent was mediocre at best, and I couldn’t tell the difference between a G-sharp and a B-flat without first finding them on my violin. I shared half her genetics, but so far only the physical features, her dark auburn hair in long natural ringlets, the hazel eyes, her mouth. Everything else seemed to have been bestowed upon her, and only her, by the diatonic Lydian gods of some melodic otherworld.

I scanned my menu but didn’t find anything appealing. Pearl onions. Cashews. Okra and eggplant. Bamboo shoots in hot mustard marinade. I folded it shut and sat slouching, wishing she would have sent me to Dad’s for the weekend so he and I could go out for root beer and pizza, then maybe downtown to The Bodies Exhibition and browse roomfuls of cadavers dancing ballets and playing poker, one of them even conducting an orchestra.

   Mom poked me in the shoulder and gave me a look. It said, ‘Sit up. Now. Do not embarrass me’. And so I did. “Find something you like,” she uttered into the entrée page. “There’s shrimp, chicken, rice and noodles.”

   “And all of it swimming in goo from another planet,” I mumbled.

   “Another country. And it’s sauce, not goo. What is up with your manners?”

   “Everything’s smothered in onions.”

   “Then don’t eat the onions, Myla. Pick them out.” She was growing weary of me, and she glared at me sideways and pointed to the menu.

   I wrinkled my nose.

   After a while the waiter returned, and so she ordered for me, as if I were four. Pad Zee Eu—white meat chicken and rice noodles with broccoli in an herb sauce, the only item I would even consider eating; sometimes I forgot how well she knew me. She got the Panang Nuea, braised beef short ribs with curry and kaffir lime, ordering with explicit pronunciation because, to her, that was the respectful and fitting thing to do, and she handed our menus back to the waiter with a courteous smile. The societal etiquette extraordinaire.

   “I imagine you must be excited, Myla, starting the ninth grade this year,” Mrs. Morgan said. She was a cellist in the Civic Orchestra, a twice-sponsored artist in residence for the National Endowment for the Arts and Chamber Music, just like my mom. She poured herself a glass of wine and said to my mother, “The school’s got a wonderful orchestra, one of the best in Atlanta, so I’m told.”

   “You were told right,” Mom said. She looked over at me then, trying to decide what she thought of my future there, my future anywhere. I had been drifting since the divorce, floating farther away from her ideals than she would have liked, and I could see the tiny lines at the corners of her eyes begin to gather with uncertainty. She didn’t say what she was thinking, that she had no idea if I’d even be in the orchestra at all, come Spring, that she wondered if her accomplishments still inspired me like they once did and if I would eventually just abandon her dreams altogether. She’d been pushing me toward all the things she wanted for so long, and now I was pushing back. Linda Morgan had no business peering through that lens into our life, and so my mother draped an arm across the back of my chair and poured herself a glass of Pinot Noir with the other, smiling thinly. “I’m sure she’ll make the most of it.” She swirled the wine in her glass and watched the pale pink runnels slide down the Bordeaux crystal and took a sip. “What kid of mine wouldn’t?”

   “Have you thought yet about sending her to Richard Bernadeaux?” Linda then asked, and I held my breath and waited for Mom to break into a bitter diatribe. Dr. Richard Bernadeaux was a violin teacher up in Kennesaw, the most sought-after by those who hadn’t yet learned of my mother, a transplant from the Curtis Institute of Music, my mother’s alma mater. The competition, for all rights, and a subject she disliked because it challenged her authority over me.

   Mom set her glass down on the table and didn’t look at Linda. “No, I haven’t.”  

   Linda said, “I know you’ve been teaching her for the past few years, but objectivity is key if you want her to improve. Studies show—“

   “I know what the studies show, Linda, and I’d just feel better that she learns from me. At least until she’s further into high school. We’ve been over this.” Mom stopped there, held her tongue because we were in public, but I could almost see her eyes changing color, pleasant golden-green to a dark, agitated emerald, like mood rings forever bound to her psychological chemistry.

   Linda gave her a scolding glance over the brim of her glass. “He’s a good teacher, a phenomenal musician,” she pressed, unmoved by my mother’s distaste for this topic. “Objectivity. Distance,” she reminded her again. No one had even considered asking me what I thought, but had they ever?

   “I heard he’s a recluse,” Jackie then muttered, scrolling through her cell phone. She always knew just when to douse the fire. “A total shut-in when he’s not teaching. Never even performs, anymore, hasn’t done a show in six years. He’s gotta be about a hundred now, anyway, isn’t he?”

   Mom gestured to Jackie with conclusive shrug. “So there you go,” she told Linda. “I’m not carting my kid off to Kennesaw to learn from a hundred-year-old hermit, even if he was once the artist chair of performance studies at Curtis. Sometime during my parents’ childhood,” she smirked.

   “The man’s my age, which would be nearly a half-century from a hundred, thank you,” Linda said. “And so what if he’s an eccentric? Does it really matter? This is art we’re talking about.”

   “Jolán’s plenty eccentric,” Jackie waved her off. “Never know what you’re gonna get with this one,” and she tossed a finger toward my mother. “I’ve known her for a decade and still can’t figure out whether she’s a closet hippie or just a straight with a flair for breaking all the right rules.”

   She made my mother smile. “I’m no hippie,” she huffed with a grin. “Way too many responsibilities for that.”

   “You know all the words to Voodoo Chile,” Jackie taunted. She had taken out a compact mirror and sat primping, and she glanced at my mother with a guiltless shrug.

   “Who over the age of thirty-five doesn’t?” Mom insisted. “Hell, for that matter, so do you, Lotus Moonbeam. We weren’t even old enough to be hippies then, anyway, and by the time we were, it was the eighties, and that was the end of that.”

   “The beginning of the end of music as we’d known it,” Jackie muttered. She snapped the compact shut and dropped it into her purse. “The dawn of the button-pushers. Thank God classical never fell victim. I can still perform Stravinsky as it was intended, work a little, earn my spot in that woodwind section.”

   “Hear, hear,” Linda declared, and she raised her glass. “To traditionalism.” But then she reconsidered and pulled her drink away and raised an eyebrow at my mother. “You’re sure you want to toast to that, Ms. De Carlo? Queen of creative license, sower of the misplaced grace note? It just might fly in the face of your aesthetic liberties.”

   Mom lifted her glass and looked intently at Linda Morgan. “It’s called improvisation,” she said. “And the name’s still Edmunds. I’m keeping it for professional reasons. How’s that for tradition?” she smirked with a wink. “Cheers.”

   Jackie grabbed my soda and handed it to me. “You, too, kiddo. Come on.” And the four of us clinked our glasses to all the musical rules my mother so loved to break.

.  .  .  .

Giovanni’s Books was a new place, its grand opening heralded by a reading from up-and-coming poet, Rachel Kingsley. Mom remained rather indifferent about the event and was there only to replace Jackie’s husband who’d been called away on last-minute business. I was hoping maybe we’d forego this and stay at the restaurant so I could listen to Mom eviscerate Linda Morgan in a debate about classical improv, but they’d dropped it when our food came and spent the meal talking about politics, something they all agreed on.

Mom was unfamiliar with Giovanni’s guest reader and shook her head when Mrs. Morgan asked if she’d seen Ms. Kingsley’s feature in The New Yorker that month.

   “Never heard of her,” she confessed with a simple smile. “But then again, she might turn up in the reading I plan on doing when things slow down a bit.”

   “Interesting young woman,” Mrs. Morgan said as we found seats in the back of a surprisingly crowded little shop. “In fact, she’s about your age, been struggling for years to get published, but you know it’s more difficult for poets. It’s a genre for a dying breed, I think, trying to breathe life into a lost art, gifted as some may be.”

   Mom gave that a nod and a half-smile. Something in her eyes scrutinized Linda Morgan for a microsecond, but she kept that fleeting judgment to herself and instead turned to me.

   “Must you mope?” she insisted. “You’ve been doing this all evening. What is your deal?”

   “I’m not. I’m here, aren’t I?”

   “Well, Myla, it wasn’t as if you had a choice, now was it?”

   “Exactly.”

   She opened her mouth to say more but then reconsidered and let it lie.

            Soon the place fell silent, and the poet Rachel emerged from the back room and took a seat before a store full of patrons. She was sandy-blonde, her hair pulled up into a casual twist, and she wore a cream-colored, peasant-style, bohemian shirt but was otherwise difficult to see around the heads and hats in my view line.

   “Forgive me if I’ve interrupted your journey,” she began over the hush. “But it seems my muse has taken a shine to you. She’s cast herself down upon you, spinning the embers of your sparkle spirit into a thousand diamonds, diamonds that melt into raindrop perfection and shower me with a fascination for everything that moves you…”

       I heaved a deep sigh and propped a foot across my knee and toyed with a loose thread at the cuff of my jeans, secretly hoping this subtle display of discourtesy just might prick my mother’s nerves. But this time she said nothing. There was no peripheral ominous glare, no hand reaching over to swat me from my fidgeting, and so I began picking at the scuffed rubber soles of the Birkenstocks she asked me not to wear tonight but hadn’t yet noticed, either.

   “Out here, in your universe, your smile commands the stars to dance a glittering ballet for you to watch from a mountaintop on Venus. And I am spellbound. Earthbound. Listening to your smile. Wondering if there is enough room on that mountaintop for an imagineer and her muse. Or, would you flutter away on frightened wings, like a dove, fearful of my approach. In slow motion flight….”

I dared peer over at Mom again to see if she saw my insolence, to see if she could intimate the quiet loathing I had for the absolute power she held over me since Dad left, the disdain I felt for being dragged here against my will. Rachel’s first presentation concluded and Giovanni’s filled with applause. But Mom didn’t move. She just sat there, still as stone with her hands in her lap, and she scarcely issued a breath. I watched her for a long moment as the applause began to settle. That’s when I realized her olive complexion had gone suddenly pale as she stared out at the poet at the head of the room. I frowned and craned my neck around the man in front of me for a better look at Rachel Kingsley who smiled at the audience and began a personable and enthusiastic preface to her next work, a story of her time as a student at USC in Los Angeles, which had inspired her next poem about emotional resolve.

Mom shifted in her seat. She inhaled a gentle but shuddering breath, then brushed imaginary dust from her jacket sleeve and then looked back out at Rachel Kingsley. A very small droplet of sweat had begun to bead beneath the wavy auburn baby hairs at her temple, and I thought I’d been transported into some other galaxy, some parallel universe where self-assured, dauntless women came quietly undone at the mention of celestial mountaintops and raindrop diamonds. She looked as though she were facing execution by firing squad as her eyes swept anxiously around the room and stopped at the exit.

   “I really do hope she does the one from The New Yorker,” Mrs. Morgan leaned in and whispered to her. “Such a great piece. I’m surprised you’re not familiar with it, as much as you read that thing.”

My mother shot her a glance that could have seared the lashes from her coral-shadowed lids, but it went unnoticed, and I couldn’t figure what Linda Morgan said to deserve that one. Many thought Linda was pretentious, the haughty first cellist in an orchestra over which my mother was concertmaster and first violin. Professionally, they had always been on fairly equal footing, so I never understood the subtle, ongoing battle of wills that served as a friendship. Linda indeed made my mother twitch with irritation, and my mother brought out the arrogance in Linda Morgan, but that wasn’t what that look was for. Linda had spoken amid some other kind of turmoil, a turmoil that wrung my mother’s hands in her lap as Rachel Kingsley told pining love stories in syllabic meter under golden-amber track lights.

   “I’ve got no tales of glory,” she recited, peering into the faces before her with an honesty I thought inappropriate for a roomful of strangers. “I’ve got train wrecks and mid-air collisions and sinking ships. And as I crawl from the wreckage, away into the weeds to watch it all burn, you find a wildflower and place it in my hair.”

            I looked to my mother again, and she was following along with profound ambiguity, her knee bouncing as if her heel was on a loaded spring. I stretched my neck for another glimpse of Rachel Kingsley, the voice behind my mother’s sudden, inexplicable anxiety.

   “Sit back, Myla, please,” she uttered lowly, and so I did.

       Jackie handed me a program to share for distraction. I took it and perused seven glossy pages filled with several, short, six-line poems, apparently her signature style. A biographical blurb on the back with a black-and-white headshot. She was beautiful, really. Brown-eyed with full lips and a warm smile that pulled you in close. I offered it to my mother, but she didn’t take it. She stared down her nose at it instead, like an idle grenade, as if taking it from my hand might cause it to detonate and blow us all to hell.

   She shook her head and looked away. “I don’t need that.”

            She spent the next thirty minutes in a peculiar daze, her legs crossed, then uncrossed, another smudge of invisible dust on a pant cuff, overwhelmed and trapped there by an invitation we wouldn’t have even accepted if her evening student hadn’t canceled.

            When the reading concluded, the audience rose from wooden folding chairs and turned to one another for goodbyes and small talk. Some wandered to a table of Gouda cheese hor d’oeuvres and tiny lemon cake squares. A second table was lined with sparkling Sommelier glasses of pink Chablis. Mom took one, and I followed as she worked her way through the crowd, heading for an inconspicuous spot by the door, but then someone stopped her. It was Gabe Neale, a French horn player in the Civic Orchestra, and she switched on a smile and turned to him with a friendly embrace. She was very good at that, good at giving people what they wanted, at keeping in step with everyone’s expectations, even when she was so unimaginably distressed that she wanted to dive through the front bay window to escape. Jackie was immersed in conversation with a University of Georgia literature professor over by the refreshment table, so Mom indulged Gabe Neale for several unending minutes while he discussed song selections for their upcoming performance at Emory. He was frumpy and balding, older than she, and he had the continuous habit of pushing his wire-rimmed glasses up onto the bridge of his nose as he spoke, but I think she just made him nervous.

   “…and I was thinking we could finish with Paganini,” he finally suggested. “Violin concerto in D minor? It’ll certainly give you a chance to shine, but of course it’s up to you and the conductor at the end of the day. Just some thoughts.” He sipped his wine and gave my mother a smile that hovered between kindliness and flirtation. It might have been thought this kind of swooning began the first time Jolán Edmunds’ ring finger was noticeably bare. But in truth it had always been this way and merely peaked when whispers of “irreconcilable differences” fluttered around rehearsal sessions and out into the concert halls.

Dad was absent for most of my mother’s musical events. He dressed me up and shuffled me along to the major performances and only if they hadn’t fallen on a school night. He would otherwise offer his complimentary seat to a neighbor or co-worker, and Mom and I would find him fast asleep in his recliner when we got home. He was a jazz man, a fair-weather fan of Pat Metheny and Manheim Steamroller, an executive mechanical engineer for LMI Products in Adamsville who blamed the majority of his disinterest in my mother’s career on an exhausting daily commute. He had our neatly packaged suburban life covered with a healthy six figures, so my mother never needed to work, but she couldn’t be dragged away from the classical community by a Peterbuilt semi and a sixty-foot towing chain. Music was oxygen to her, and so my father left her to her ‘hobby’ and waved her away to the ogles of other men, to the Ph.D’s in crisp Oxford button-downs and salt-and-pepper sideburns, and the post-graduate neo-hippy boys who longed to impress her with experimental improv on Schubert or Liszt. Gabe Neale fell somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, too old for clever innovation and too young not to undress her with his eyes, hoping to disguise it with shoptalk.

   “I’ll see what I can do, Gabe,” she smiled with a wink and touched his forearm with manicured fingertips, just enough to send him on his way without condescension. There was a wisp of her Omnia Crystaline cologne on his jacket from their embrace as he turned away, which would linger for days until he saw her again at rehearsal. Subtle traces of her presence. Like lipstick on a wine glass.

   Jackie joined us at the door and asked if we were ready to leave.

   “You have no idea,” Mom breathed as we turned for the exit. But then Linda Morgan called from the back of the shop, waving a hand above her head to flag us down. She had someone by the arm, leading her to where we stood at the threshold to freedom, just paces from the sidewalk.   

   “I’ve got a surprise before you go,” she sang and commenced a rather formal introduction between my mother, Jackie, and Rachel Kingsley herself. “Rachel, this is Jackie Lembke, second clarinetist in the Atlanta Civic Orchestra.”

   Jackie offered a hand. “Wonderful to meet you,” she smiled. “Beautiful work, just beautifully written, like painting pictures with words. A pleasure.”

       Rachel Kingsley nodded her thanks but her eyes began to dart between Jackie and my mother, and her expression dampened and went flat, as if she’d swallowed something sharp. But she kept her professional bearing as Linda presented a rather stiff and unresolved Jolán Edmunds.

   “She’s our concertmaster and premier violin soloist,” Linda boasted, not so much for my mother’s benefit as for her own, for having lassoed the star performer from the exit door and into a personal chat.

            Their eyes met and locked, and it was like an iceberg dropped between them, the very same iceberg that sank the Titanic. Linda prattled on.

   “She’s been performing here in Atlanta for…what has it been, now, Jolán? About twelve years?” she mused. “Recently she was a guest soloist for the Atlanta Symphony, performed Schubert’s Der Erlkoenig with the grace of a magician, I’ll tell you. And now she’s all ours with the new Civic Orchestra,” Linda beamed. “Now that you’re living in the area, Rachel, you should try to make it to one of our concerts. I do think you’d enjoy yourself.”

            Linda was the only one in our slowly dilating circle who hadn’t noticed the stale air. Then Mom broke the tension and extended her hand. “How’ve you been?”

   Rachel Kingsley stared at my mother for a long moment, as if she’d lost something in those hazel eyes that she didn’t know how to get back. Finally, she reached for the handshake, slack with misgiving. “Um, fine. I’ve been fine. I didn’t…I mean…” Her lips began to form what looked like an apology but she stopped short and smiled strangely instead. She flitted a glance down to my mother’s empty wedding finger, then across to me—Jolán Edmunds’ little mirror image, and her eyes narrowed with subtle bewilderment.

   “You two know each other?” Linda chuckled, at once thrilled and perplexed. “Well, now doesn’t that beat all.”

   “Been a long time,” Rachel uttered, and my mother nodded, much the way a surgeon might respond when asked if he did everything he could before pronouncing someone’s mother, sister, daughter. Then she snapped out of it and remembered me.

   “This is my daughter Myla.” She rested her hands on my shoulders and urged me to mind my manners with a nudge to offer my hand. I did. Rachel took it into hers and gazed at me like a delightful mystery. Her hands were warm and soft, and her smile was the sincerest I’d seen all night.

   “Well, you are just beautiful,” she said and looked up at my mother as if she’d done very well, though it puzzled me as to why that came as such a moving surprise to Ms. Kingsley. “And you’re how old?” she asked me.

   “Thirteen and a half,” I told her. “I’ll be fourteen in two months.” I wanted her to know that I wasn’t a child, that I could handle whatever was looming between them like a radioactive dust cloud, but then my mother suggested that I go with Jackie who had excused herself to mingle, leaving Mom and Rachel to some reluctant privacy. Linda Morgan finally took that cue and wandered off as well.

            From an empty folding chair I watched them, tried to read their lips as they muttered awkward explanations, shrugging away a clearly inscrutable history. Whatever it was, even I knew this wasn’t the time nor the place. College alumni? Grade school classmates, perhaps? No. It wasn’t that simple. Not the way my mother did quick and cagey scans of the room for scrutiny as she spoke, the way she shoved her hands into her coat pockets, insecure, sniffing the air for danger. I’d never seen her so shifted off her axis, so utterly rattled while struggling to keep face, the woman whose very presence was required on stage before a single symphonic note could crack the air, who garnered applause just for showing up to work. No, this was something much more complicated than losing an old address or searching hopelessly for an unlisted number. I couldn’t have been more certain of that as Rachel Kingsley bid my mother a good evening with a lonely smile and left her standing by the door, lost in a flurry of troubling thoughts.