Goodbye Without Leaving

Author:Laurie Colwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497673793
Publisher: Open Road Media

37

Although I had nowhere to go and nothing much to do, one afternoon a week a very nice girl from the local design college—a redhead who wore yellow and purple in combination—came to babysit Little Franklin, who also wore yellow and purple in combination. Her name was Mirandy Rubenstein, and when I came back from my outing my dining room table was covered with newspaper, and the newspaper was covered with clay, paint, crayons and glue.

When Johnny asked me what I did on my day out, I said I did errands or went shopping, which was often true, but more often than not I found myself browsing at Huey’s O.P. Records, TCB Enterprises, Inc. (TCB stood for Take Care of Business.) It was too far to Fred Wood’s, and Huey’s was just like Fred Wood’s. In fact, every out-of-print record store I had ever been in was like every other. They smelled of cigarettes and cardboard, and the faint, plastic smell of vinyl. The proprietors were either laconic and depressed, or depressed and hyped up.

You never knew what you might find in these places. If you were patient, you might stumble on an old Howlin’ Wolf cut, or some old sides by Bobby Blue Bland.

One balmy afternoon I pushed my way over to the always crowded rhythm and blues section. I felt awfully low. That morning I had taken Little Franklin to his play group—a bunch of one- and two-year-olds in a pretty room in a church, where I was the lone biological caregiver in a sea of baby-sitters. All the other mothers had gotten their thing together and gone back to being lawyers or graphic designers. At lunchtime Franklin said, “I have no baby-sitter.”

“You have Mirandy,” I said.

“She isn’t,” Little Franklin said.

“But she comes and baby-sits for you,” I said.

He looked at me intently. “She isn’t brown,” he said. “She has red hair.”

As I browsed through the records, reflecting on the fact that I had deprived my child of early independence from me by not having a fulltime Jamaican baby-sitter, I felt an arm press against me. I looked up and there was Donald “Doo-Wah” Banks.”

“Wah!” I said. “How amazing!”

“Well, well, well, well,” said Wah. “What brings you into this neighborhood?”

“Huey’s,” I said.

“Pee-Wee over at WIS says you have a baby.”

“I have a big, huge boy,” I said.

Doo-Wah looked remarkably fine. He was wearing a white sweatshirt and cowboy boots. His hair was short and he had done away with his sinister shades.

“You look great, Wah,” I said.

“I’m an ugly critter,” he said. “You have always been blinded by love.”

He was a sort of ugly critter, blunt and big, but imposing, like a tugboat or a brick wall.

“Let me take you for a drink,” he said. “What’s your boy’s name?”

“Franklin Ross Miller,” I said. “I call him Little Franklin.”

“Great name,” said Wah. “Has he cut any sides yet?”

“He made up a song he says is called ‘Kitty Roll Over,’ but he won’t sing it for me.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.