House of Dance by Beth Kephart

sensational than Aideen when she was dancing,” he said. I tried to picture this, but it was hard. I pictured the candy-haired dancer on skyscraper heels instead. Pictured a peony on a wrist. Pictured a man, young, and a woman, young, but no matter how hard I strained to imagine, I couldn’t make the man in my imagination look like Granddad, couldn’t imagine my grandmother from the old, fuzzy photographs.
    Outside, two drivers were blowing their horns at each other and a train was sailing into the station. A conversation shuffled by. I waited. “Somewhere in there,” he finally said, looking toward the stacked records,” is the song ‘How High the Moon.’”
    “I’m on it,” I told him, but it took me a while. It took me sifting through and sorting the faded album covers until I found not just Ella but the right Ella, the right track on the right piece of vinyl, though Granddad didn’tmind, he said, listening to “Old Mother Hubbard” first, or “Flying Home” or “Back in Your Own Backyard.” He didn’t mind whatever picture of Ella I found on the covers either, the one with her looking up at someone past the camera, the one with her wearing a white feather hat, the one with some guy looking mesmerized in the background. Anything Ella was good by my granddad. Anything Ella that day.
    Finally I found it—“How High the Moon”—pulled it from its cover, got the Sansui whirling, laid the record on, and put the needle down on the right track. Granddad closed his eyes to listen. Out of respect I closed mine, too. Ella was singing. She sang raspy and demanding, giving the song speed. She held some notes forever and chopped others into bits, turned syllables into a million words. She was hard to keep up with, my granddad’s Ella Fitzgerald, but still his eyes were closed, and he was smiling, andRiot’s tail was going around; the little triangles of her ears were twitching. Then the needle came up, because the record was done, and I could hear the crows outside, as if they had been waiting around for me. I could look into Granddad’s face and know that he was sleeping. I listened for some sound from Teresa in the kitchen, but I heard nothing.
    There are one hundred million different ways of feeling you’re alone, I once wrote in a paper for Mr. Marinari. There’s the alone of no one home but you. There’s the alone of losing friends. There’s the alone of not fitting in with others. There’s the alone of being unfathered. But then there’s also the alone of a summer day, just after noon, when there’s stillness all around and someone you love nearby, asleep. I sat where I was, didn’t budge one inch, and watched my granddad dreaming.
    “What did you do today?” my mom asked me when I got home under the wing wind ofcrows, when the sun was the only color in the sky, after I’d taken my lesson with Max, after I’d found no cool in the tunnel shadows. My sneakers had hissed, but in that hiss I heard the scat of Ella Fitzgerald. There was no sound of Mr. Paul, not coming from the kitchen, not coming from upstairs. My mom was home early, alone.
    “Ella Fitzgerald,” I called to her, because her voice came from her bedroom, and her bedroom door was closed.
    “Ella what?” she called back. She opened the door now, came out to the upstairs landing, and stood looking down at me, a river of navy-blue carpet between us. Her black hair was half up in a ponytail, half streaming messily down. She was wearing an old cotton dress, not overalls, as if she’d never been to work at all. Her face was puffy.
    “Fitzgerald,” I answered, not moving up the stairs, but not moving out of sight either.
    “The singer?”
    “Yeah.”
    A funny expression crossed her face. “He’s got the record player working?”
    “I got the record player working.”
    “Well,” she said after a pause, “you’re really something.”
    I didn’t want her asking more. I didn’t want to have to explain about the bed with the