Free No Dark Valley by Jamie Langston Turner Page B

had turned into when they closed it up. Celia could barely remember the store as it had been before that. She had been only four or five at the time her grandfather died. She did recall the cold bottles of pop in the big cooler with the sliding top, the little packages of peanuts clipped to a red wire rack, and the freezer where the Popsicles and ice cream sandwiches were kept. She also remembered the old coal heater and the tin can that sat beside it on the floor, into which her grandfather, with deadeye aim, had spit tobacco juice while he whittled little objects out of sticks.
    â€œWhat’s that you got there?” Al asked, nodding toward the package in her lap. “A book?”
    Celia tossed it into the backseat. “Yep, that’s my inheritance.” She sighed and looked at her watch. Four o’clock already, which meant they wouldn’t get home until almost eight, probably closer to nine if Al stopped to eat, which no doubt he would. She knew this would be a good time to thank him for taking the day off work to drive her here, but she couldn’t force the words out of her mouth. More than anything she wished she were already home right now, that she didn’t have to endure several hours of riding in a car. She hoped Al didn’t plan to keep talking.
    To give him a hint, she closed her eyes and adjusted the back of her seat until she was reclining. Al turned on the radio and finally found a station playing jazz. This was another thing that irritated Celia about Al. He thought he was a terrific jazz saxophonist, which he wasn’t. He was a decent enough saxophonist, but he didn’t have the keenness and security and creativity of a jazz player. As with any art, you had to know the rules before you could break them, and Al didn’t know the rules. Besides that, anybody could play the saxophone. Everybody knew it was the easiest wind instrument to play.
    She listened to him hum along with a trumpet rendition of “Tuxedo Junction,” followed by a jazz arrangement of Bach’s “Musette,” of all the unlikely things. It was actually quite cleverly conceived, however, with some trading off between passages of vocalization and clarinet improvisation. She wondered if she could have ever gotten that good on her clarinet if she’d kept at it. Maybe she should get it back out and start practicing again. Maybe the community orchestra in Greenville or Anderson needed a clarinet. At least she could start getting in shape for the summer band that gave park concerts in Spartanburg.
    ----
    Right before she fell asleep, she was in the process of remembering the concerto she had played as a high school junior, the one she had memorized for the state competition, the winner of which was invited to perform with the Georgia All-State Orchestra in the spring. It was a difficult piece, but she had played it flawlessly that day in Atlanta when her music teacher had driven her down for the final runoffs. Carl von Weber’s Concerto no. 1 in F Minor for Clarinet and Orchestra—it was the pinnacle of her clarinet studies.
    She had placed first and had played with the All-State Orchestra that year. She was something of a local celebrity for a while, since students from Dunmore didn’t usually win statewide competitions. Her clarinet teacher had cried as she sat on the front row of the auditorium listening to her performance at the final concert in Atlanta. Later, during her senior year, her clarinet teacher had cried again when Celia stopped practicing and dropped out of band. Oh, the disappointed, droopy-faced looks she had suffered from adults that year! She hadn’t quit the tennis team, though. For some reason she had hung on to that, maybe because she liked the feeling of pounding something as hard as she could.
    Celia had ridden down two days before the All-State concert in a school van, along with two twelfth-grade violinists and a tenth-grade cellist from nearby Rome,