The last chord floats from his strings, a brightness falling shimmering dissolve, and his fingers lift from the fretboard, the soundbox, but his arms remain curled about that big-bellied guitar, his head hung low, face obscured by a lone long lock dyed blue. There’s no applause, but the stillness all about him breaks as one by they lower hands, or lift them, look to their friend, their neighbor, to him there on the stool by the cold and empty hearth, the crowd of them in that big front room, lit only by dim lamps set in elaborately fronded sconces, and somewhere in the middle of them all she takes a deep and shivering breath, “Oh, my,” she says.

“White boys shouldn’t ought to play the blues,” murmurs the woman beside her, “always ends up something different when they’re done with it.”

“Now, Mother,” she says, but frowns as she looks to her, much too tall, head and shoulders draped in the hood of some loose, brief jacket of pale gold, or brassy silver, high black boots laced up past her knees, but her dark thighs bare between for anyone to see. “Forgive me,” she says, “I had thought – ”

“You keep doing that,” says the woman, not unkindly, moving away through the crowd, leaving her to herself, her long full navy skirt, prim pink sweater, hair neatly tucked in an up-do, folding her arms as the crowd, released, moves about. Up there by the hearth the guitarist speaks quietly with a short man all in black, his beard a whisper of curls to line his jaw.

“I shouldn’t be here,” she whispers, and casts about, the front door there, she sets out toward it, but her first step stumbles, something clatter-thump underfoot, and she kneels, skirt pooling, to take it up, a lone shoe, a loafer with a strap across the softly wrinkled vamp of it, and tucked there the winking copper of a penny.

“Is someone,” she says, looking up, but there is no one, everyone has gone, there’s just the stool there, by the hearth, and otherwise that big front room is empty.