She didn’t believe it for one full breath, one endless inhale where she struggled to reconcile the bright red hair and the drawn, worried face of the woman who stood all alone on the stairs—Jo had never seen her that way.
Then came the exhale, and with it a shout that felt halfway between an accident and a curse.
“Lou!”
The bandstand was raging and the trumpets were going to town, and the call was lost in the noise, but Lou was her sister, and heard it.
There wasn’t time to go around the dance floor, suddenly—Jo drove into the center, avoiding the shining couples, dodging the line of dance, shaving seconds off how long it would take—
Then Lou had met her halfway, and when the music ended and the couples stopped Lou and Jo were stranded on the dance floor, embracing so tightly that the spangles on Jo’s dress dug into her skin.
She didn’t care—nothing mattered but Lou, and her new, strange perfume, and the press of her forehead on Jo’s shoulder, and the hot, painful feeling that Jo was going to burst out of her own skin from joy.
“We came back,” Lou was gasping, “we tried to stay, but I knew something was wrong and we had to come home again—Tom felt it too, neither one of us could sleep, we were so worried—and then we got here and saw that Father had died and the house was empty, and the Kingfisher is so different we didn’t know what to do—we thought you had all vanished, and I got so desperate and Tom said we should come here just in case—God, Jo!”
Jo laughed through a few treacherous tears and held on to her harder, her knuckles getting scraped on the beads of Lou’s bronze dress.
She said into Lou’s hair, “Took you long enough.”
Then Lou was laughing, a sharp, low laugh that hurt Jo all over again (God, how badly she had been missed!).
“I’ll tell my old man you said that,” said Lou, and it was only then that Jo put two pennies together and remembered that if Lou was here, so was Tom.
She pulled back enough to look Lou in the eye.
It was a Charleston already; the conversations had been drowned out by the bright blare of music, and the couples were swinging past to avoid the pair of addled girls who were embracing at the edge of the floor with no regard for the line of dance.
At the edge of Jo’s vision, she saw that the others had gathered to welcome Lou but were waiting for the word. (Old habits died hard.)
She stared at Lou a moment more, still as terrified as when she thought Lou was alone in the world, unable to bring herself to ask any questions with answers she might not like.
“Stop it,” said Lou, and it might as well have been There was no funny business, you dope. “Go say hello.”
When Jo looked up, Tom was standing on the stairs, hat in hand, watching the reunion.
He had a ghost of a smile that got brighter when he caught her eye, and even brighter when she disentangled herself from Lou and slid through the edge of the crowd toward the stairs.
His eyes never moved from her face, and when he saw her coming toward him, he took the stairs down, slowly, to meet her halfway.
Lou must have been good company. He looked a little younger, or night made him younger, or Jo was always going to be young when she met him again. It was hard to tell.
Her heart was a drum by the time she was close enough to touch him.
He didn’t waste time with handshakes; he caught one arm around her waist and embraced her, and for once it felt like a beginning and not like an end.
When they pulled back, he was grinning, and now, now, he looked like the young man she’d met eight years ago.
“What in God’s name have you been doing with this place?” he asked.
“Running it right,” she said with a raised eyebrow, and when he laughed she could feel his shoulders trembling against hers.
(Across the room, Jake was hovering at the edge of the bar, looking at Lou like she was the moon.)
Jo wrapped one arm around Tom and drew him closer, her fist fitting between his shoulders, his eyes bright, smiling like his face would split.
She knew the feeling—her happiness was so sharp it stung—but she was still unsettled, still looking for Lou on the packed dance floor. (Lou hadn’t come so far to get lost in this crowd, not while Jo was watching.)
His hand on her waist tightened for a moment, and she looked over at their table, where Lou was hugging the others one at a time and watching Jo over the heads of the younger girls, her smile a lamp that could light the whole room.
“Save me a foxtrot,” Tom said, and let go.
She grinned at him and gripped his shoulder like it was an answer.
(There were a lot of things she couldn’t yet say, but maybe now, at last, they would have time.)
She took the last few stairs down to the dance floor and up again to the mezzanine, sliding through the crowd to embrace the last of her sisters to come home again.
Then Lou was holding her close enough to hurt, and the others were kissing Jo’s cheek as they passed by, as if they were all home at last, and underneath them the music was shaking the boards as the sisters, one by one, took to the floor to dance.
The Girls at the Kingfisher Club Page 27
