Free Velva Jean Learns to Fly by Jennifer Niven

for back in North Carolina?”
    “Yes.” I was fidgeting like Hink Lowe at Sunday meeting. I wanted to dance all over the living room.
    “Look at you, Mary Lou.” I could tell she was impressed. “You don’t mess around, do you?”
    “Of course not,” I said. “This is why I came here.”
    That night I hung out the window and practiced my songs because I didn’t want to wake up Gossie by singing in the living room or inside my bedroom. I just leaned right out into the cold, dark air. I was going to sing a brand-new song, one I wrote about coming to Nashville. I called it “On My Way to Now.” If Darlon C. Reynolds wanted to hear another song after that, I could sing him the one I’d written about a girl with no parents, who went to live on the moon.
     
    Darlon C. Reynolds looked just like I remembered him—he was short and round, with glasses and thin brown hair that barely covered a head so shiny it could have been rubbed with a cloth. He shook my hand and said, “Velva Jean Hart. I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you again.”
    I said, “I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you again either.”
    He laughed, and then he led me back into the studio itself, into a room with a microphone on one side of a glass wall and controls on the other. There was a stool in front of the microphone, and he said, “Why don’t you take a seat, and I’ll see you on the other side.”
    I wasn’t sure what he meant by this, but I sat down on the stool and watched as he walked into the glass booth and shut the door. He sat down behind all those controls, and while he got himself settled I looked around at the walls of the studio. There were pictures of some people I recognized and some I didn’t.
    His voice came into the room, over the speaker, and he said, “Anytime you’re ready.”
    I wished I had a Hawaiian steel guitar instead of my daddy’s old mandolin. I decided right then and there that as soon as I made money from a record I was going to buy myself one.
    “Miss Hart?”
    I thought, Boy wouldn’t Harley die if he could see this! Then I wondered what Harley Bright was doing right then. He was probably writing a sermon or yelling at some sinner or trying to save someone’s soul. I wondered if he’d forgiven me, if he ever would, or if he would hate me forever. I thanked Jesus, for about the thousandth time since I’d left home, that I was here and not there, trapped in Li’l Dean’s house up in Devil’s Kitchen.
    “Miss Hart? Any time you’re ready.”
    I looked at the other side of the glass, and there was Darlon C. Reynolds, sitting there staring at me. I thought: How long have I been sitting here thinking things to myself?
    I started to play “On My Way to Now,” strumming my mandolin. I was so grateful and relieved it was in tune that I forgot to sing, and then I forgot the melody—it just walked right out of my head. I pretended the intro was longer and started playing “Yellow Truck Coming, Yellow Truck Going” because it was the song I knew the best, even though Darlon C. Reynolds had already heard it before.
    Only, I couldn’t remember how the song started, so I jumped right in to the second verse.
Over in Asheville
there lived a man
struck down by the Mean Devil Blues . . .
    Oh damn. The Mean Devil Blues. That’s what I forgot. The first verse was all about the Mean Devil Blues being the worst kind of blues, the kind that won’t leave you alone.
    There was nothing to do at this point but keep going.
He drove a dark truck
and dressed all in black
from his hat down to his shoes.
    What came next? Something about the Mean Devil Blues again. Where had I even got that phrase to begin with? Daddy Hoyt, I guessed. He had names for all sorts of blues. The Gentle and Wholesome Blues. The Sacrifice Blues. The Peculiar Blues.
The Mean Devil Blues
had him down on his knees
out of fun, out of luck, out of hope.
“I’ve gotta change something
or die,” he said,
“I’ll just start with this old