The Sweetest Hallelujah. Elaine Hussey

      He loves music, she’d tell herself after he was gone and she was trying to get up enough interest to brush the moo goo gai pan out of her teeth. All blues musicians are like that, she’d say after she finally found enough energy to crawl into bed. They go wherever they can find the gut-bucket blues, racial divides as wide as the ocean vanishing in the commonality of music. Joe had even gone to the Delta once, the cradle of the blues, seeking the old songs, the laments invented in cotton fields by a people with a hoe and no hope.

      Later, after she’d climbed out of her depression enough to bury herself with work at The Bugle, she’d glance out the window, hoping to glimpse a gibbous moon, that lopsided miracle in the night sky that never failed to lift her spirits. She’d see a blanket of stars and suddenly feel as if somebody had thrown a sack over her head.

      Fighting that same smothering sensation, Cassie jumped up and raced to the attic. She wouldn’t look at the baby stuff, didn’t trust herself. She wouldn’t even look at her dusty art-supply kit and her easel, but went straight to the corner where the dressmaker’s dummies stood. Grabbing one under each arm, she struggled across the floor. The fold-down ladder presented another problem. Even banishing ghosts of the past didn’t seem worth a broken neck.

      “Cassie? What the hell?” Fay Dean stood at the bottom of the ladder, craning her neck.

      “Thank God.” Cassie poked the male dummy down the staircase. “Here. Take Tarzan.”

      “What are you doing up there?”

      “I’m coming down with Jane.”

      “That explains everything.”

      Jane bumped down the stairs behind her, and Cassie hoped she didn’t lose body parts in the process. Finally, both of them stood at the bottom, Cassie triumphant and the dummy intact.

      “Fay Dean, do you remember when I used to sew?”

      “Back in the Dark Ages, I believe.”

      “Keep it up, and I won’t be giving you a hand-tailored suit for Christmas.”

      “If I recall, you don’t tailor.”

      “What’s to keep me from learning?”

      Fay Dean pumped her fist in the air. “Now, that’s what I’m talking about. Soon you’ll have so many projects, you won’t have time to think of what you’ve lost.”

      They dragged the dummies into the room where the white wicker bookcase from Cassie’s sunroom now sat along the west wall holding her favorite photographs. She placed Tarzan in the rocking chair, and Fay Dean stood Jane by the bookcase.

      “They look natural, don’t they?” Fay Dean said.

      “They look naked.” Cassie went to the hall closet and came back with one of her gardening hats for Jane and one of Joe’s baseball caps for Tarzan. Her husband’s scent clung to the hat, and he whispered through her mind like a song with lyrics she was struggling to remember.

      “Cassie? What is it?”

      “Nothing. I was trying to figure out how to get the sewing machine down from the attic.”

      “Daddy will do it,” Fay Dean said. “Let’s have something to drink. A celebration.”

      They kicked off their shoes, linked arms and went into the kitchen where the moon was shining through the window and anything at all could happen.

      Suddenly they heard a knocking at the back door.

      “Anybody home?” It was Ben, carrying a bottle of Pinot Grigio. “I saw Fay Dean’s car in your driveway and thought we might all enjoy a drink.”

      The bottle in Ben’s hand reminded Cassie of Joe, of how they’d celebrated every major milestone with that same type of wine, and how, in a heartbeat, events you think of as triumphant can turn into regret that follows you everywhere, no matter how you try to hide.

      Cassie took down three glasses instead of two. They drank their wine while Fay Dean regaled them with stories from the courtroom and Ben chatted about doings at The Bugle. If anybody noticed how quiet Cassie was, they didn’t say.

      Afterward, Ben toted the heavy cabinet-style sewing machine from the attic and moved it around the room four times before Fay Dean was satisfied that it was just right.

      When they both left, Cassie sat in the rocking chair staring at the sewing machine. Would her little lost girl have loved pink ruffles on her dresses or yellow ribbon?

      Five

      IN BETTY JEWEL’S DREAMS, her daughter was a young woman dressed in a real linen suit with dyed-to-match pumps. She was eating at a restaurant where waiters served sweet tea in crystal glasses and sliced sirloin on china plates.

      Betty Jewel jerked awake. Her afghan was on the floor, and the only light in the room came from the pattern on the TV screen. Across the room, Queen had turned sideways, one foot hanging off the couch, an arm flung over her eyes as if she couldn’t bear to view her dreams.

      Was she dreaming about the years she’d spent cooking other people’s meals at the Jefferson Davis Hotel, the extra job she’d taken scrubbing other folks’ toilets so she could send her only child to college?

      Scooping up the afghan, Betty Jewel covered her mama, then tiptoed down the hall to Billie’s room. It took a while before her eyes adjusted enough to see the small lump under the covers. Her daughter had finally come down off that old bus. Betty Jewel said, Thank you, God, or maybe she just thought it.

      She stood awhile in the doorway, listening to the sound of Billie’s breathing. Then she slid across the room as silent as a moonbeam and folded her daughter to her, all fragile bones and sharp angles, the beauty as yet unformed in her freckled face. Betty Jewel was thinking of dark rivers that swallow you whole. She was thinking of deep waters that rush by while you fall down dead in a drifting boat. She didn’t want to let go this child of hers. She wanted to hold on to her until they were both very old, and then lie down together in a cool spring meadow and open up like springboks whose brown fur unfurls along the backbone when they die to reveal white as pure as a newborn.

      Billie stirred, her voice a sleepy question mark. “Mama?”

      “I’m here, baby.” Her daughter curled against her, warm and smelling of sweat and summer and little girl dreams.

      There was another scent in the room, too. Barbecue. Since Christmas it had taken over Queen’s house, seeping into cupboards and behind closet doors and into the dug well behind the house. Every drink they made with the well water had a slight tang of barbecue, even their morning coffee. If Queen noticed, she kept it to herself, and thank God, Billie was too young.

      With clouds gathering right over her head and a killing storm on her coattail, Betty Jewel drew a deep breath. If she didn’t get off the bed now, she might never be able to. Easing up, she tucked the sheet around Billie’s coltish legs. She was going to be tall. Like her daddy.

      Betty Jewel closed her daughter’s door and went straight to the bedroom she’d once shared with her husband. Since the cancer, she’d become a creature of the night, navigating silently through the dark.

      The moon laid down a pale yellow path from the window to the doorway. But it was no hopeful yellow brick road leading to a fix-all wizard. It was an aching road, every step she took uncertain.

      As she followed the sliver of moonlight to turn on a bedside lamp, her room gave off the odor of barbecue mixed with cherries. Since she’d been sick, the only thing that tasted right was Maraschino cherries. Empty jars tattooed her bedside table, the top of her dresser and even the windowsill. She gathered all the empty jars and tossed them in the garbage can.

      For three weeks, Betty Jewel had been systematically cleaning house, filling cardboard boxes with dresses and shoes, hats and purses, labeling them for Merry Lynn and Sudie and the church charity closet. She’d packed her