“Get lost!”
He did, and when I turned to look at her, the girl was staring back with those deep eyes. “You’re the man who was here this afternoon.”
“Yes, I was.”
“That’s twice you’ve done something nice for me. Thank you.”
“My name’s Andy. What’s yours?”
“Ummm...Olivia.”
“Are you always out here, Olivia?”
“Most days. People in Toronto aren’t as generous as they like to make out they are.”
I laughed. “Don’t I know it.”
She laughed, too, a nice sound, then her expression changed. “I have to go now.”
Without another word, she turned and hurried away. What had I done to spook her?
The episodes with Olivia at Union Station fell out of my mind over the next week. The car wound up costing a lot more than I’d been led to believe, and when I began seriously looking into taking Kate to Disney World, the cost of that little excursion was absolutely staggering.
I knew what Sandra would have told me. “Sell the damn house. You know you need the money.”
Fortunately for me, it was my house – completely. When my parents had both died within a year of each other, it had been left to me as the only child, and by a stroke of good fortune, I had inherited their estate three weeks before my marriage to Sandra.
But she was right; I could get a good price for it in Toronto’s superheated real estate market. Houses like mine in Riverdale often went for upwards of a million bucks, a stunning figure, considering what my dad had paid for it nearly forty years earlier. With that money (pure profit), I could buy a condo and put the rest in a retirement plan. I’d be set for my golden years, right?
But I just couldn’t bear the thought of giving it up. It had a soundproof basement studio where I gave lessons to a few students and where I could also rehearse a pretty decent-sized band if I wanted, but it was more than those obvious needs. The place had become part of my psyche, and in my present circumstances, that was a very important thing. Except for a few months at various times over the years, I’d never lived anywhere else.
With a ton of things weighing on my mind, I headed off to the Sal that fateful Tuesday evening, not even really thinking about the gig, let alone a girl I’d only seen three times and had barely spoken to.
Of course, it was raining. It’s always raining or snowing or doing something miserable when I have to move my drums. With a steady gig, I could leave them in place for a few nights, but once we finished on Thursday night, I had to horse them out again. That’s the lot of a gigging musician, something you put up with, but it can be a drag – especially if you’re a drummer. There are a number of parts to a drum set.
Pulling to the curb in a no-parking zone, I put the blinkers on and opened up the hatchback on my old Honda. Take out the trap case, lay the bass drum on top of it, close the trunk and head for the door to the club. Once inside, take the bass drum off the trap case and take each down the steep stairs. By the time I went back to the car to retrieve the two tom-toms, the rain was really coming down.
Normally I would have parked my heap at the lot down the street and carried the two toms back with me, but I decided to take them in first so I could run from the lot to the club more easily.
I had just stuck my key into the hatchback’s lock when a cab swerved to avoid God knows what. It went right down the centre of a puddle next to the car, totally drenching the left leg of my pants.
Cursing, I stared laser beams at the rapidly disappearing cab. A flash of red in a doorway across King Street caught my eye.
It was her – the girl I’d seen at the Sal and Union Station. A streetlight thirty feet away illuminated her face and that red scarf only for a moment before she stepped back, disappearing into the shadows.
If she was here again to listen to the music, why was she waiting outside on such a miserable night?
I thought about going across to say something, but looking down at the sodden condition of my pant leg, I decided against it.
Reaching into the car, I grabbed the two tom cases and took my second load into the club. When I came out again, the doorway opposite was empty.
Ronald was in fine form that night, mainly because a couple of local pianists were in the house. He felt that interlopers (as he referred to them) were always after his gigs. So we defended our turf with a couple of fast opening numbers courtesy of Duke Ellington’s fertile imagination. That got the evening’s festivities off to a good start.
The way the open mike thing had evolved was that interested singers would speak with Ronald before each set. When he found out what they wanted to perform, he’d arrange the song choices in such a way that we didn’t wind up with five ballads in a row, or two people singing the same tune back to back.
The first sets each week were generally the best for two reasons: the people who had come specifically to sing most often wanted to sing early. The third set featured more of the sort of performances that relied on “Dutch courage”, the half-drunken person saying, “I can sing better than that clown!” followed by his or her equally drunk acquaintances goading the poor soul on. Those were our “train wrecks” – frightening, pathetic and comical all at the same time.
The girl must have slid in sometime during the first set while my attention was occupied elsewhere. In the second-to-last tune, an older gentleman who’d sung a few times in recent weeks was in the middle of a competent rendition of “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” when I looked over at that dark corner of the club, and there she was. She had on the same worn blue duffel coat and the black toque jammed down on her head. Her face had a small frown of concentration as she mouthed the lyrics with the singer.
I again thought of going over to speak with her but got corralled into a conversation with two of the club regulars. By the time that broke up, we had to start the second set.
As the evening progressed, we had some surprisingly good performances and only a few disasters, none of them too excruciating. Dom, Ronald and I were playing well, and in a few tunes we stretched things out a bit, which left the poor vocalists standing around with nothing to do, but hell, we were feeling good. I forgot about the waif at the back of the club.
We were getting ready to finish off the final set with a couple of nonvocal numbers when the girl appeared next to Ronald’s grand piano, staring at us with huge, frightened eyes.
“What is it?” he asked testily. “Do you have a request?”
The girl shook her head. “I want to sing,” she said in a tiny voice. “The open mike night is over. If you want to sing, you’ll have to come back next week.”
She didn’t move. Even with the duffel coat on, it was easy to see she was absolutely quaking in her boots. Coming up to the bandstand had taken a lot of courage on her part.
“I want to sing,” she said softly but defiantly.
Dom, perhaps sensing that this might be a good bit of sport, said, “Aw, let her, Ronny,” then turned to the girl. “What song, darling?”
She mumbled something indistinguishable.
Ronald decided to remain obnoxious – not much of a stretch for him. “If that’s how loud you sing, you’re not going to make much of an impression on the audience.”
As he stretched out his hand to indicate the sixty or so people still in the club, the poor girl’s eyes got wider, and I felt certain she’d bolt. I suddenly remembered she’d told me her name.
“Olivia,” I said loudly to attract her attention, “tell us the song you’d like to sing.”
She