Page 7 of Never Flinch

“Yes! That and gospel.”

“Okay, I do know,” Holly says. “Didn’t she cover a song by Al Green? ‘Let’s Stay Together’?”

“Yes! It washuge! I karaoke that one! Sang it live at the Spring Hop when I was a senior.”

“I grew up listening to Q102,” Holly says. “Lots of Ohio rockers like Devo and Chrissie Hynde and Michael Stanley, but they were white. There wasn’t much Black music on the Q, but that version… I remember that one.”

“Sista Bessie’s kicking off her comeback tour here! At the Mingo Auditorium! Two shows, both sold out, but I have two tickets…and backstage passes! Come with me, Holly, please say you will.” Wheedling now: “She does some gospel, too, and I know you like that.”

Holly certainly does. She’s a big fan of the Blind Boys of Alabama, and the Staple Singers, especially Mavis Staples, and although she barely remembers Sista Bessie, or most of the music from the twentieth century’s last decade, she loves that good old solid-gold soul from the 60s, people like Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson. Wilson Pickett, too. She tried to go to one of the Wicked Pickett’s shows once, but her mother forbade it. And now that Mavis Staples has crossed her mind…

“She called herself Little Sister Bessie in the eighties. I used to listen to WGRI back then. Tiny AM station, went off the air at sundown. They played gospel music.” Holly only listened to GRI when her mother wasn’t home, though, because many of those groups, like BeBe & CeCe Winans, were Black. “I remember Little Sister Bessie doing ‘Sit Down, Servant.’?”

“That was probably her, before she got like totally famous. The only record she made since retiring was all gospel.Lord, Take My Hand. My mother plays that one a lot, but I like the other stuff. Say you’ll come with me, Holly. Please. It’s the very first show, and we’ll have an awesome time.”

Mingo Auditorium has bad associations for Holly, ones having to do with a monster named Brady Hartsfield. Barbara was there, but she wasn’t the one who clobbered Brady; that was Holly herself. Bad associations or not, she can’t refuse Barbara anything. Or Jerome, for that matter. If Barb said she had two tickets to see YoungBoy NBA, she would have said yes. (Probably.)

“When is it?”

“Next month. May thirty-first. Plenty of time to clear your calendar.”

“Will it be late?” Holly hates late evenings.

“No, not late at all!” Barbara is still bubbling, full of happiness, which cheers Holly’s day up considerably. “Starts at seven, it’ll be over by nine, nine-thirty, at the very latest. Sista probably doesn’t want to stay up late, she’s old, got to be pushing sixty-five by now.”

Holly, who no longer thinks of sixty-five as particularly old, offers no comment.

“Will you come?”

“Will you learn ‘Sit Down, Servant’ and sing it to me?”

“Yes. Yes, absolutely! And she’s got a great soul band.” Barbara’s voice drops to what’s almost a whisper. “Some of them are fromMuscle Shoals!”

Holly doesn’t know Muscle Shoals from a muscle strain, but that’s okay. And she still wants to make Barbara work for it a little. “Will you also sing ‘Let’s Stay Together’?”

“Yes! If it gets you to come, I’ll karaoke the hell out of it!”

“Then okay. It’s a date.”

“Hooray! I’ll pick you up. I’ve got a new car, bought it with my Penley Prize money. A Prius, like yours!”

They talk a little longer. Barbara tells her she hardly sees Jerome since he came back from his tour. He’s either doing research for his new book or hanging around the Finders Keepers office.

“I haven’t seen him the last few days, either,” Holly says, “and when I did, he was kind of mopey.”

Before ending the call, Barbara says (with undisguised satisfaction), “He’ll be mopier than ever when he finds out we’re going to see Sista Bessie. Thanks, Holly! Really! We’re going to have an awesome time!”

“I hope so,” Holly says. She adds, “Don’t forget you promised to sing for me. You’ve got a very good v—”

But Barbara is gone.

4

Izzy and Tom Atta take the elevator to the fourth floor of Kiner Memorial. When they get out, arrows on the wall offer them either Cardiology (right) or Oncology (left). They turn left. At the nurses’station, they flash their badges and ask for Cary Tolliver’s room. Izzy is interested to see the momentary flash of distaste on the duty nurse’s face—a pulling-down at the corners of the mouth, there and then gone.

“He’s in 419, but you’ll probably find him in the solarium, soaking up the sun and reading one of his mystery novels.”

Tom doesn’t mince words. “I’ve heard pancreatic is one of the bad ones. How long has he got, would you say?”

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