Drumsticks by Charlotte Carter Read Free Book Online Page B

mail in the wicker trash basket. I shook my head. Should I throw them away now, once and for all?
    I reached for them, but then withdrew my hand. Might as well wait until the basket was full. Then I’d just toss everything, including those traitors, into a garbage bag and consign it to the big can downstairs.
    I dressed in the gender-neutral downtown uniform: black jeans, black shirt, black ankle boots, long leather jacket. I was going for hyper low profile. I met my father for lunch once dressed like this and he had asked me in all earnestness what had happened in my life to make me want to look like Johnny Cash. I gave a minute’s thought to wearing a tie, but then decided against it; it would probably just call more attention to those natural resources on my chest.
    Sure, I wanted to make a few dollars, but that wasn’t the chief reason for hitting the street that day. I planned to set up shop at 15th and Broadway, Ida’s old corner—just hang over there and talk to some of the other street vendors. I figured one of them must have at least known where she lived. It also occurred to me that if her fellow buskers were as out of touch with the news as I tend to be, they might not even be aware that she was dead.
    It was a market day, so there were hundreds of people about. Before opening my case, I wandered from one vendor’s table to the other, looking lazily over their wares and chatting with any of them who felt like it. Even the Nigerian fellow with the musk.
    I played a couple of numbers, starting with “Blue Gardenia,” which was one of my solos with Hank and Roamer. A few customers leaving the nearby electronics store stopped to listen and dropped a couple of dollars into my case. I did “Gone With the Wind” and “Street of Dreams,” then knocked off for a few minutes to drink a cup of hot cider I purchased in the market.
    There was an older white guy who sold sunglasses, decent-looking but flimsy knockoffs of the designer brands.
    An Asian guy who was displaying silver bracelets and rings.
    An attractive black woman in her forties with a stack of hand-knitted wool hats.
    I talked to them all during the morning and afternoon. None of them had had more than a nodding acquaintance with Ida.
    The day wore on and I continued to play periodically. “What’s New,” “Just Friends,” “Prelude to a Kiss,” and a few requests, including one from a white lady with infant twins in a double stroller, who asked for “On the Street Where You Live” and then didn’t give me penny one.
    Around four o’clock, however, there was a kind of shift change and a new group of vendors replaced most of the earlier ones.
    Two college-age boys hawking the paperbound screenplays for old and new movies.
    A gregarious old Irishman with ropes of fake pearls, three for five dollars—I indulged in a trio of those.
    A tall, well-built brother about thirty-five, who sold coffee table art books at wildly discounted prices. Upon arrival, he pulled out a boom box and began loading it with a Clifford Brown tape. I’d seen the guy before, I realized, plying his trade a little further uptown. It was summertime, if I remember right, and I’d looked his way twice owing to that torso of his, in a white fishnet undershirt.
    It was not until I tipped an imaginary hat to him that he noticed I was standing there, set up to provide live entertainment. He smiled and punched the machine off. I played “Imagination” while he waited on a couple of people, and after I did “Out of this World” he applauded.
    â€œYou’re not bad,” he said, walking up close. From his slow appraisal of me, boots to eyebrows, I gathered he was referring both to the sounds and the girl making them.
    I gave him that appreciative look right back.
    â€œYou come around here a lot?”
    â€œNo,” I said. “What about you?”
    â€œTwo, three days a