Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans by Rosalyn Story Read Free Book Online Page B

the reason, he believed, he was where he was, was who he was. Long after it was over, every now and then at night, some old memory intruded, kept him awake, disturbed his peace. And even on his best days before the accident, it would crimp his good mood into a throbbing knot of frustration and remind him of how he had been, when there was more to his life than playing the trumpet.
    But that was history, she was history. He had moved on, long ago.
    He let out a resigned sigh, shrugged.
    “Yeah.” Julian’s composure slipped back intact. “No big deal.”
    Casey put the card with Julian’s number in his shirt pocket. “Look here, bruh. Cindy and me got us a gig at the Embassy Suites in Baton Rouge over by the river. Ain’t much, but it pays the bills, you know what I’m saying? You know you got to come on by and check us out.”
    “You working this week?”
    “Got to, man. Life don’t stop just because of no storm.”
    Julian looked away at a sapling tree bowing in the breeze, and a baby cardinal taking flight from the lowest branch. It didn’t? No, of course not. Life did not stop. No matter how much you wanted it to. No matter what happened to you, no matter how much you lost and how much you hurt about what you’d lost, you still had to get up in the morning, go out there, and do it again.
    No, life did not stop. Except when it did .
    He tried to banish Simon’s face to the edge of his mind.
    “Every night through the weekend, in the lounge.” Casey looked over at his car and the attendant, busy under the hood, then back at Julian as he opened the door to the Neon.
    “And bring your horn.”
    Julian’s eyes glazed over. He hadn’t played any place as smalltimey as The Embassy Suites lounge since he had left Louisiana. But he would have given anything to be able to do it now. Even if he’d wanted to, there was just no way.
    Julian reached up a hand to touch his jaw, a reflex now whenever he thought of playing the horn, then placed it on the steering wheel. Maybe he should just tell him.
    The station attendant yelled something across the distance, signaling Casey to come and look at the meter.
    “Think about it, man.” Casey took off his shades. “And I’m sorry about your daddy. Hope you find him.”
    Julian looked at Casey’s eyes. As boys, their lives together had been one long spitting contest, competition lighting the spark that gave them life, oxygen to the fire of two blazing young egos. But somewhere over the growing-up years, his rival’s eyes had become soulful, generous even. Or maybe it had only happened since the storm. They were all in this madness together.
    Julian looked away. Not now, later maybe .
    He reached out the car window and shook his old friend’s hand.
    “Thanks, man,” he nodded, started his car, and drove toward the high sun and New Orleans.

4
    O n St. Charles Avenue in the Garden District, the grand houses still shone in the metallic wash of the sun like prim, white-haired matrons, as if nothing had happened. Sweeping turfs of green fronted the century-old, wrought-iron-gated mansions, their spines erect, their clapboard unstained, the giant bathtub ring that roped most of the lowlying city having faded with the rising, higher ground. But the St. Charles trees remembered. The nightmare music of the killing winds had stunned them, and the panicked trunks of the cypresses and live oaks still leaned against the memory, the way children flinch away from the hand of pain.
    Julian steered the Neon down the avenue, cutting a slalom path around severed limbs and trash. Along the neutral ground of the town’s wealthiest street, where the untraveled streetcar tracks lay rusting in the shadows of overgrow grass, the signs of chaos were few; a spotted hound loped along the rails in search of food, and from further down the street an electric saw hacked away at the broken limbs of a battered oak. Spanish-speaking workmen tossed damaged shingles from rooftops while a utilities