Velva Jean Learns to Fly by Jennifer Niven Read Free Book Online Page A

people I didn’t recognize, but there was also one of Darlon C. Reynolds smoking a cigar and laughing off into the distance.
    At one end of the room was a desk. The girl behind it was on the telephone, and as I walked over she waved at me not to speak. She said into the receiver, “As soon as he’s in the union . . . No . . . No . . . Yes . . . That’s right . . . No.” And then she hung up. She wrote something down on a pad of paper and then looked up at me. She had a sharp, bad-tempered face, like some sort of animal thrown out into the sun too soon after a winter’s sleep. She said, “Yes?”
    I showed her the little white card. I said, “Mr. Darlon C. Reynolds came to North Carolina a year ago to record songs, and he gave me this card. He said to look him up when I came here, so we could record more.”
    She said, “Mr. Reynolds is in New York City. He spends most of his time at our office there.”
    I said, “I recorded ‘Yellow Truck Coming, Yellow Truck Going’ for him, and the back side was ‘Old Red Ghost.’ My brother Johnny Clay played guitar and sang on ‘Old Red Ghost,’ but he’s not here. It’s just me.”
    She was looking at me like she didn’t have the first idea what I was saying. She said, “Okay.”
    “Mr. Reynolds wanted to record more songs of mine back then, but I had to get on home.”
    “He’s in New York right now.”
    I said, “Do you know when he’ll be in Nashville again?”
    She said, “No.”
    I wasn’t sure what to do, so finally I said, “Please tell him Velva Jean Hart came to see him.”
    She didn’t write it down. She said, “I will.”
    I said, “I’m living in Nashville now.”
    She blinked at me.
    I said, “It sounds like heart but it’s really Hart, without the e . H-a-r-t.”
    She said, “Got it.”
    I stood there wondering if I should tell her to write it down on her pad, for saints’ sake, but then I decided to just leave it alone. I told myself I would come back when someone else was working at the desk. I would come back again and again till Darlon C. Reynolds was in town and could see me himself.
     
    That night Gossie and I went to supper at Mario’s, which was a little Italian place with plastic tablecloths and big red booths. I ordered spaghetti, and Gossie ordered chicken Parmesan, which was fried chicken with cheese and tomato sauce. I wished I’d ordered it myself, because it looked fancy and like the kind of thing you should order when you lived in a city.
    Gossie said, “How did it go today?” She was drinking red wine.
    I said, “Great.” I was drinking sweet tea.
    “Did you find Darlon C. Reynolds?”
    “He’s in New York City right now.”
    “I see.” She took a dainty bite of chicken and then dabbed her mouth with a napkin. I waited for her to say something more but she didn’t.
     
    That night, after Gossie went into her bedroom and shut the door, I picked the newspaper out of the trash bin, and then I searched around until I found the telephone directory at the bottom of a stack of books lying underneath the coffee table. I went into my room and sat at my little desk and spread open the newspaper. I searched through it until I found the names and addresses of every record company in town. And then I searched the telephone directory, doing the same. I pulled out a piece of paper from the little pile I kept for writing my songs and I made a list.
    The next morning I put on my dress with the bolero jacket and took that list and went to each studio, one by one. This time I took my record with me, the one I’d made for Darlon C. Reynolds. I figured I could play it for the record producers, so they could hear how I sounded on a recording and so that they could see what I’d already done.
    At every place, I waited in a long line of people wanting someone to hear their songs. These were people of all ages—young and old and in between. There were men and women and boys and girls and even some children. They carried banjos and