Free Velva Jean Learns to Fly by Jennifer Niven Page A

truck.”
    Well, that wasn’t right. “Hope” didn’t rhyme with “truck,” and then I realized I’d switched them around. It was supposed to be “out of fun, out of hope, out of luck.”
    Dammit. While I was thinking about what I’d got wrong, I forgot to sing the next lines. Oh hell, I thought. And then I just started in on the chorus, even though it wasn’t due for nine more verses.
Yellow truck coming,
bringing me home again.
Yellow truck going,
I’m on my way—
on my way to tomorrow
and dreams come true,
leaving my yesterday.
    Like hell you are, I told myself. You’re on your way home because you can’t even remember the words to your own song. You should just go back to the Lovelorn and pack up your bag and let that yellow truck take you on your way all the way home to Fair Mountain.
    My one chance, the chance I’d been waiting for ever since Darlon C. Reynolds handed me his card and told me he wanted to make more records with me, and I was acting like someone who’d never sung a note.
    I kind of fizzled to an end then, somehow getting through a few more verses, two in the wrong order, and one more round of the chorus before I stopped.
    Darlon C. Reynolds didn’t ask me for another song. Instead he came out of the glass booth and pulled up a stool so that he was sitting across from me, the microphone in between us.
    “You got one hell of a pretty voice, Velva Jean. Can I call you Velva Jean?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “One hell of a pretty voice. And you know I love that song or I never would have recorded it.”
    I was trying to think of a Cherokee witch spell that I could put on myself so I might disappear. I said, “Sir, I butchered that song like I was working for the grocer down in Hamlet’s Mill. That’s not even the song I meant to sing you.”
    He smiled at this, and then he folded his arms across his chest. “I’m guessing you got more songs just like that one and like the other one we recorded in Waynesville.”
    “Yes, sir. Lots of them.”
    “Good, good. Here’s the thing.” By his tone, I thought, uh-oh. “It’s important to have a style of your own and be really good at it. I mean, with Roy Acuff, Eddy Arnold, Bill Monroe—any of the greats—you know what you’re going to get from them. You know the kind of thing you’re going to hear. People want that. It’s reliable. It makes them feel good. But before you find that style and settle on it, I always recommend getting as much musical experience as you can get. All different kinds. Try them all or at least hear them all. You ever been to a juke joint?”
    “No, sir.” I didn’t know what a juke joint was, but it sounded like a dark and dangerous sort of place.
    “You should go. Go to a honky-tonk. Go to an opera. Let yourself feel and experience different kinds of music, and then come back to me and sing me that same song. You may not change a note, but I guarantee there’ll be something else about it, something deeper, something in the background that will make you stand out even more. That’s what I’m looking for.”
    I suddenly felt my limbs growing heavy. It was the feeling of being tired and worn out and burdened. I thought, I did my very best. I can’t sing much better than I just did, so what am I supposed to do if that isn’t good enough? Why can’t I just be happy waiting tables at the Lovelorn? Why on earth do I want to do something so hard?
    I said, “Mr. Reynolds, I want to sing more than anything I’ve ever wanted to do in this world. But I’m beginning to see that it’s not as easy as just wanting to sing and being good at it. Is there anything else I can do to be better?” I heard Gossie’s words: “wanting it and getting it are two different things.”
    He cupped his chin, his arms still folded, and then he said, “I’d join the musicians’ union if you can. If you want folks here to take you seriously, that’s the first step.”

    The office of the musicians’ union was on the sixth