Free Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips Page B

transport and high-class call girls, but at the time I thought, fine, he can play piano for Lola. Soon enough his headliner was hospitalized after her hoodlum boyfriend broke her jaw, and Lola stepped in. She stopped singing backup and rehearsed afternoons like a regular career girl. She loved Atlanta, she bought clothes, she wanted Charlie and me to move to a bigger apartment with her, and I was thinking it over. I’d finish a dinner shift at Lowman’s and get to the club by ten, sitting there in a cream silk sheath dress and pearls while Charlie worked the door. Billy Onslow would come by and sit with me before Lola’s set, always very polite, courtly, like he was making sure the staff knew I was his guest and men knew not to approach me. He was almost thirty years older than Lola, but very different from my middle-aged ex-husband—Billy Onslow had certainly never sold insurance. I tried to give the impression I was watching over Lola. He’d listen, but one night he looked at me dead on. “I don’t usually meddle with the talent,” he told me, “but let’s not kid ourselves about your sister.”
    Just then there was some commotion—you could say Onslow’s catered to a flamboyant clientele—and he got up and left. He could have meant any number of things, I told myself. That he was her lover, or had been. Or he was her lover and she had other lovers. Or worse, she was dabbling in entertainments the musicians enjoyed, coke or goofballs or junk. Onslow overlooked recreational use, Charlie had told me, he could hardly prevent it and was known to indulge himself, but he wouldn’t employ anyone who was strung out. Maybe he’d just meant no one could watch over Lola, that the whole idea was ridiculous, that I was ridiculous, a Lowman’s waitress in pearls. Yes, that was it. I was ridiculous.
    It was 1941. We’d been living together six months, Lola in her makeshift room, Charlie and me in ours, coming and going together or separately, the little family Lola had finally made. We never referred to Winfield or Gladdy or the restaurant, we were together, and I suddenly wondered why Charlie had never mentioned getting married. Why I’d never mentioned it, why it had never even occurred to me. Why Lola slept so soundly on that couch behind the French screen she’d set up, the closet in the one bedroom overflowing with her dresses and lingerie. She’d bought me a big new bottle of my perfume with her first paycheck because she’d used so much of it. We sat at the same vanity at different times of day, combing our hair, putting on makeup, touching a crystal stopper from the same perfume bottle to our throats and ears and shoulders. Charlie smelled of both of us. So did the sheets of the bed. Here at the club there was a bed in Lola’s dressing room, and a chiffonier and a little sink. Charlie and she shared the same hours, like it was part of Charlie’s job, while at home she was just the little sister.
    I sat at the bar, seeing Lola’s younger face in the dark bedroom of our house she’d burned down in Winfield, her eyes as close as the edge of the bed, Charlie actually inside me as we worked our way to the swooning novena we’d perfected. Good, I’d thought then, watch us, I won’t stop, I won’t let you take this from me. I’d closed my eyes against her then, just as I’d closed them now. It was midnight in Atlanta. Billy Onslow stood leaning against the wall on the opposite side of the big room, watching me. I knew he was in it with me, with us. He’d always deferred to me, shown me courtesies: he thought I was respectable and hardworking. He thought the same of himself, strange as that seems, despite his discreet alcoholism and other habits. He’d delivered his news on purpose, to pull me in with him and to change the lay of the cards. Billy was a master at reading everyone’s hand before they could. He knew exactly what I was realizing and how fast it would fall into place, and he waited for me to