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look hot, but this cut shows off your eyes, and how exotic-looking you are. Don't tell me all this is for that guy last night."
    "Casanova Jones?" Dominique crossed her arms, waiting for the bleach Maggie applied to her eyebrows to work. "So tell us how he looked, Jack."
    "Nothing great. Not as beautiful as Georgia."
    "Get off it, Jack," I muttered.
    "I'm not. He just looked like any average on-the-make guy. In a penguin suit."
    "I'm not listening to this. I've got to go. I have a date."
    "Not with that guy, I hope." Jack's brotherly protective side took over.
    "A certain piano player. Ta-ta, gang," I said, brushing my shirt. "I'm off to get depressed or drunk enough to sing the blues."
    "Tell Red I said hi." Dominique waved.
    "I will." I left the house and headed down the street. Whatever weather Cammie's father had paid for the previous day was gone. New Orleans humidity hung as thick as Spanish moss. I tried to soak in the Crescent City's native moodiness. If I was ever to become a blues goddess, it had to happen here, in the city I called home.
----
Chapter 5

     
    Red Watson
is
the blues. We found each other a couple of years ago when I kept returning to Mississippi Mudslide to hear him play the piano and sing. He won't tell me how old he is—well, he does, but the number often changes—but I would say he is pushing eighty.
    When I first heard him play, I felt a strange sense of déjà vu, as if all my life I'd had a tune in my head I hadn't been able to quite remember, to give voice to. And then I heard his song, and it was as if it was already a part of me. As if the blues were in my blood. As if the song was mine.
    I had finally grown the nerve to ask him to teach me the blues, to work with me. I'd been listening to jazz since I was born. Before that even, in my mother's womb. But Red wasn't interested. Not only wasn't he interested, he brushed me off like a buzzing fly. So Tony, the band's sometime-bass player and my partner in scouting out jazz music, and I went back to the Mudslide again and again. And again. We were tireless. Tony and I had always stayed through the last set to talk to Red, no matter how late it got.
    "Now, you two here
again
?" Red had asked us.
    Tony had just smiled and lifted his beer in salute.
    "The Irishman and the lady." Red sat down at our table. It was almost three in the morning.
    "Incredible second set," Tony said, his brogue made thicker by the beers he'd had.
    "Now how'd a man from clear across the ocean—you told me you're from Dublin—come to know so much about the Delta blues is what I want to know." Red smiled.
    Tony shrugged, always somewhat taciturn until you got to know him.
    "Come on, now, how come you're here most every night I play… when you two ain't playing?" By now he knew we were in a band. Albeit one that played ABBA.
    "I may be an Irishman, but in another life I must have been a Delta bluesman. Since I was this high—" Tony stuck out his hand "—they're all I've wanted to play." Tony's black eyes had a faraway look.
    "Another life? You a Buddhist, man?" Red asked.
    Tony laughed, his smile always having the ability to change his face from incredibly serious and tough-looking to something childlike. He shook his head. "Maybe I am… maybe I am."
    "And you?" Red turned his head to me. "You still got some fool idea you want to sing the blues?"
    I nodded.
    Red just laughed. More like a hoot. "Child, now singin' the blues isn't like singing wedding songs. You gots to feel it, here." He tapped by his collarbone. "Inside."
    "You ought to let her sing you one," Tony said almost inaudibly, staring into his beer bottle, the little vein on his forehead throbbing.
    Red looked at me. "But do you have it? Inside. See… I used to travel this country in a bus with ten other stinkin', sweatin' men and a blues goddess or two. We'd play in club after club until we was so worn-out. Hungry sometimes. Laughing and good times, too. But half the guys, they're into reefer and sometimes