The Sweetest Hallelujah. Elaine Hussey

side, then sat in the green plastic lawn chair on top of the bus. She was in her own place now, high up in the sky. The fading rays of sun felt comforting, like God’s eyes peering down through the oak leaves. Alice wouldn’t dare show up in a tree already occupied by God.

      Billie gazed upward where she imagined the Holy Face would be. “You gotta make my mama well.” Did God listen to little girls who eavesdropped at keyholes and told lies? “If you make my mama well, I promise to be good.” She made a sign over her chest. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

      Quick as she said it, Billie wished she hadn’t. What if God reached down and snatched her off the bus? She’d never get to see Queen and her mama again.

      Billie didn’t want to be an orphan. Orphans didn’t have mamas to plait their hair in cornrows and make sure they wore clean socks and remind them to say their prayers at night. Maybe God was punishing Billie for not minding her mama.

      “I promise I won’t go to Lucy’s again when Queen tells me not to. And I won’t tear my shorts and tell lies about hating my mama.”

      Tasting the salt from her own tears, Billie swiped at her face with the sleeve of her T-shirt. “I know I’m not a good little girl, God. But please, don’t take my mama.”

      If God heard her, He’d send a sign. That’s what He did in the Bible. Maybe it would be a rainbow. Billie looked up through the limbs of the oak tree, waiting.

      Two

      LOVING SOMEBODY WAS THE most dangerous thing Cassie knew. When you lose them, they take so much, it’s a wonder you don’t become invisible. She’d always prided herself on being in control, and yet here she was in a psychologist’s office trying to keep herself from coming unraveled.

      “Cassie, when the jackass is in the ditch,” he said, “don’t ask how he got there—just get him out.”

      It took her a while to digest this piece of advice. For one thing, she had a hard time thinking of herself as a jackass. For another, she was in a ditch that had no way out. She couldn’t change being a widow because Coach Joe Malone was dead. No amount of wishing would bring him back.

      “Get out of the ditch, Cassie.”

      The no-nonsense advice was typical of Sean O’Hanlon. That’s one of the reasons Cassie had chosen him, that plus the fact that he was a hometown man with a Purple Heart displayed on his bookshelves. Sean had served at Guadalcanal. You could trust a man who had risked his life to save others.

      “I can’t see that I’m in a ditch, Sean. I’m just feeling a little blue. And even that makes me feel guilty.”

      “Why?”

      “I’ll never have to worry about my future the way poor old Eleanor Cleveland did when her husband went off the bridge.”

      Cassie was the only heir to the fortune her daddy had made farming a thousand acres of cotton. Still, Joe’s death had consigned her to spend the rest of her life alone in a house that rattled with regret.

      “That’s no reason to feel guilty,” Sean said. “What else is bothering you?”

      “I could never have the one thing I wanted most. Joe’s child.”

      She pictured the Empty Room, meant to hold a crib and bookshelves stuffed with teddy bears and dolls and books about Winnie the Pooh.

      Sean waited, a kind man whose mere presence opened up a floodgate.

      “After Joe’s death, people kept telling me, You’re lucky to have such a full social life. If I have to plan one more charity event or sit through another book club discussion on As I Lay Dying, I’m going to run down the street naked, screaming.”

      “What do you want to do, Cassie?

      “I want to discuss Lady Chatterly’s Lover. I want to write something besides wedding and obituaries at The Bugle. I want to march down the streets knocking on doors and telling anybody who will listen that women can do more than put Faultless Starch in their husband’s shirts.”

      Maybe she was born out of her time, and that, as much as loss, was the reason her sister-in-law, Fay Dean, had caught her standing in her closet last week with Joe’s sweatshirt stuffed in her mouth, crying.

      Waiting for Sean to speak, Cassie smoothed a wrinkle from her slacks. Her pants were barely socially acceptable, a small defiance that suited her right down to the bone.

      Sean reached for a doughnut from the edge of his desk then passed the box to her.

      “What’s wrong with me, Sean?”

      “Nothing. It’s perfectly normal for widows to feel pain and loss acutely around the first anniversary of a husband’s death.”

      “Joe was too young to die. It was his birthday. I was planning a party for him.”

      She’d been in her flower garden gathering roses for the centerpiece when all of a sudden she’d heard a harmonica, haunting as the mixture of poverty and violence and hope in Shakerag. Her heart had separated from the rest of her body and landed at her feet among the scattered rose petals, bleeding.

      Common sense told her that on a still summer day it was possible for the music in Tiny Jim’s Blues and Barbecue to reach her prestigious Highland Circle neighborhood, separated from Shakerag only by Glenwood Cemetery and a block of modest houses that belonged to middle-income whites. But Cassie not only knew the legend of Alice Watkins, she’d been there eleven years ago when it was born. She’d been filling in for the crime reporter at The Bugle that day and had used her press pass to gain access to the parents, Tiny Jim and Merry Lynn Watkins.

      For two weeks, the murder had been the talk of the town, and then the case was closed. In 1944 with a world war raging and a town strictly divided by a caste system, Alice Watkins was just another little colored girl who’d disappeared. The only thing left of her was Cassie’s story, “Avenging Angel,” which had spawned a legend. Her yearning could still be heard in the blue notes that haunted a town.

      A year ago, standing in her garden with the soulful sound of a harmonica ripping her heart out and turning her blood to an elegiac river, Cassie had known the source of her fore-boding was Alice, stripped of justice and restless for vengeance, predicting a disaster too terrible for even a sometime crime reporter to imagine. By the time Joe’s best friend, Ben, had arrived to tell her Joe had died of a heart attack while he pulled a catfish from Moon Lake, Cassie had already let go of the idea of a birthday celebration and was standing among the fallen rose petals, paralyzed with pain.

      Funny how you sometimes know a thing before it happens, how you can be going about the ordinary business of living when suddenly you feel electrocuted, shocked with the certainty that your world has just tilted sideways and you are about to fall over the edge.

      Cassie was feeling that way now. The faint strains of a blues harp crept under the windowsills, overtaking her with a truth that was both heartbreaking and inevitable. There was no escaping the past. It was stitched to the future as surely as the thick rubber soles were attached to her black-and-white saddle oxfords.

      “Cassie, before I see you again, think about finding a project that will fully engage your interest and your energy.”

      “Thanks, Sean.”

      “When you see Fay Dean, tell her I said hello.”

      Feeling the emptiness of her womb and the loss of her husband like a severed limb, Cassie left Sean’s off ice. Her car was parked under a chinaberry tree out front, baking nonetheless in the blistering heat. The summer was turning out to be a scorcher, with the temperature hovering around ninety degrees.

      Before she stepped off the porch, she checked to see if anybody was watching. Old Mr. Hanneford was walking his dog, an ugly shepherd that had lost most of his hair when Mrs. Hanneford dropped dead in front of the dog house last year. In spite of the fact that Mr. Hanneford was half blind and hard of hearing to boot, Cassie