Tiger Rag by Nicholas Christopher Read Free Book Online Page A

were gone, her white hair neatly coiffed.
    By email Ruby had placed the same obituary in the
Miami Herald
and the New Orleans
Times-Picayune
. “That was her hometown,” she explained, then read the obituary aloud from her laptop:
    Camille Broussard, age 75, died December 11, 2010, at the Saint Francis of Assisi Hospice in Fort Lauderdale. She is survived by her daughter, Dr. Ruby Cardillo, and granddaughter, Devon Sheresky. “When ye hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout.”
    “What’s that quote?” Devon asked.
    “Book of Joshua, 6:5. Her favorite. After her conversion, she spouted it all the time.”
    “Because your father was a trumpeter?”
    “Who knows?”
    Devon didn’t know much about Ruby’s father except that he was a trumpeter. That had intrigued her, especially since her mother had no apparent musical talent and did not even listen to music very often. Devon wondered if her own musical inclinations had been passed down from her grandfather. His name was Valentine Owen, and according to Ruby, whose only source was her own mother, he claimed he was originally from New Jersey. That his father was a drummer. That his mother named him after Saint Valentine, patron saint of musicians. His father ran out on them. His mother took a job as cashier inthe gift shop at the Dorset Hotel. They moved into a railroad flat in Hell’s Kitchen. Owen took up the trumpet and became good enough to make money as a sideman. He dropped out of school, and for a long time, he lived out of a suitcase. It all sounded tough and romantic to Devon, but Ruby felt otherwise. “He was a guy who always watched out for Number One, and the hell with everyone else. The details don’t matter.”
    Sitting before the casket, glancing sidelong at her mother, Devon couldn’t read her thoughts, nor even venture that they had anything to do with the present circumstances. A high window allowed a thin shaft of sunlight to penetrate the room. Ruby seemed to be observing the motes of dust tumbling within it. The windowpane was stained red and blue and the dust was colored accordingly. Her face looked relaxed. Only her eyes, intensely bright and unblinking, betrayed the fact that she was getting very little sleep. That and the blurring of her lip gloss in the heat.
    Befitting her profession, Ruby had always worn minimal makeup, but that, too, had changed of late: she took care each morning applying eyeliner and mascara, blow-drying her hair, and touching up her nails. “Devon, my grandmother used to say: worry about your brains first, your looks second. But you don’t have to be a bimbo to get dolled up. Of course, some bimbos don’t even bother. Take the new Mrs. Sheresky. No matter the occasion, she dresses as if she’s going to a yoga class. I used to see her waiting outside the courthouse wearing a tank top and running shoes.”
    Devon had encountered her father’s new wife only once, by chance, emerging from his office building, and didn’t think she possessed anything like Ruby’s natural beauty. Atop the drop-deadbody, honed in hundreds of Pilates classes, and beneath the cascade of red hair, was an unformed face. There was nothing going on behind the eyes: not intelligence or mystery, not a modicum of her mother’s allure. Her father’s blindness infuriated Devon as much as his infidelity.
    As the minutes ticked by, it struck Devon that Ruby was capable of sitting there in a daze for hours. Devon signaled the funeral director hovering in the doorway. On cue, four attendants in black suits entered, lifted the casket, and carried it off.
    Later, in the director’s office, Ruby was handed a bronze urn engraved with a pair of herons. Devon wondered at its symbolic significance until she discovered it was a stock item, one of a dozen in a nearby cabinet. The silver hair, the clawlike hands were a moot point now, Devon thought. That urn contained all that was left of her grandmother: roughly five pounds of powdered