〈0038 Lemon Tea & Red Wine〉
“Let’s change the mood. Put some music on.”
Lydia switched on the wireless speaker connected to her phone and started the music.
Cynthia glanced over. Lydia’s playlist was filled with vocal jazz and traditional pop standards—Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Frank Sinatra.
The two women settled back into the sofa.
On the coffee table sat a steaming mug, a glass of red wine, and the bottle, already opened.
Cynthia studied the label with curiosity.
A hummingbird flew among grapevines against a crescent moon. Beneath it was the brand name.
“Satin Crescent…?”
“Yes. It’s from my winery.”
Cynthia’s eyes went round.
“You own a vineyard too?”
“It’s small. A boutique winery, about thirty acres. I think I bought it around the year I got divorced… Of all the things I bought with my own money, rather than my ex-husband’s, it was the most expensive.”
Lydia said this as though it were nothing.
‘No, but—you own a vineyard?! How is a baker’s daughter like me supposed to even imagine that?’
She could not quite bring herself to say it aloud.
She was beginning to understand just how successful Lydia had been as a pop star, and how much wealth she had accumulated.
Lydia gazed at the hummingbird on the bottle and murmured,
“It’s a small operation, but we make reds, rosés, whites, sparkling wines—a little of everything. We supply just a few restaurants, including my brother’s, and I give Kat and Louise a hundred and fifty bottles each every year. Drink some myself, too.”
Cynthia tried to work out the number of bottles in her head, then paused.
“…A hundred and fifty bottles per person, per year?”
“Yes. You’ll get yours when you turn twenty-one. Consider it a Satin Crescent employee benefit.”
“No, that’s not what I mean… How does one person drink a hundred and fifty bottles in a year?”
Still unfamiliar with alcohol, Cynthia did not know that plenty of drinkers thought nothing of emptying a hundred and fifty bottles all by themselves over the course of a year.
“Who said you had to drink them all yourself? Give your friends a bottle each. Earn yourself a little goodwill. Keeping up your contacts is part of being a musician.”
Lydia chuckled and lifted her glass. She took a slow sip before continuing.
“Kat hands them out to musicians she knows around New Orleans. Louise takes hers to social gatherings. She runs out and buys more.”
While Lydia picked up a piece of dark chocolate from the table and put it in her mouth, Cynthia quietly studied her profile.
“Boss. About when I missed the beat at rehearsal…”
“Are you going to apologize again?”
“No. I knew I was tired. I just didn’t think it would happen while I was playing.”
“Your body knew it was tired. You were the one ignoring it.”
Lydia set down her wineglass.
“But you handled what came after the mistake beautifully. Kat and Louise noticed that too. Still, recovering well and being able to keep pushing yourself like that are two different things.”
She looked at Cynthia a little more sternly.
“You don’t have to kill yourself for the band. You’re a student first. Your studies come first. If classes and all this traveling get to be too much, we’ll postpone rehearsal. You do have to tell us ahead of time, of course.”
“No, no! I don’t want to miss class, and I don’t want to miss rehearsal either.”
Cynthia spoke firmly, but Lydia’s eyes narrowed further.
“And if that leaves you barely able to stand, we have a problem. We need a bassist who’s wide awake, not a zombie swaying on her feet.”
“Oh. I’d be joining the walking dead.”
Cynthia giggled.
Lydia gave a small laugh too and took another sip.
“When I was your age, I thought working without sleep was passion. I had my own ambitions. Management and the producers had theirs…”
She paused and sighed.
“Once my ex-husband took over managing me, he started projecting his own ambitions onto me too.”
“Oh.”
Cynthia had heard of Malone Entertainment, the talent management company.
She also remembered reading somewhere online that Lydia had been its first artist.
“A show, a music video, another show. One thing after another, barely sleeping. Then I collapsed backstage. When I opened my eyes, I was in the ER with an oxygen mask on.”
“Mm… Oh…”
“That can’t happen to me again. And it can’t happen to the people around me.”
Lydia looked down at her empty glass. After a moment’s hesitation, she poured just a little more.
Cynthia took a sip of honey-lemon tea, then asked,
“Is that why you take such good care of people, Boss? Because of what happened?”
“The people I’ve decided to look after.”
“…Am I one of those people?”
“Yes.”
Lydia answered as though it were obvious.
“Of course you are.”
Cynthia felt her face redden and stared at the lemon slice floating in her mug.
While Lydia firmly closed the bottle and returned it to the wine cellar, Cynthia looked around at the framed pictures in the living room.
She had already seen the ones on the wall behind the sofa. Two platinum records from Lydia’s days as a pop singer more than a decade ago, and the issue of Rolling Stone whose cover she had graced.
Three or four small photo frames stood on the side table beside the sofa.
When Cynthia leaned over to look, Lydia picked one up.
“This is a family photo from after I got divorced and came home.”
The family sat smiling around a round dining table laden with food.
Lydia tilted the photograph toward Cynthia and pointed out each person.
“My mother and father in the middle. My younger brother Andrew on their left, and me on their right.”
Her finger moved behind her parents.
“And the chef standing in the back is Darrell, my oldest brother.”
After studying the photograph for a moment, Lydia chuckled.
“Come to think of it, Darrell’s wife and kids aren’t in this one.”
“Was this taken at Chef Darrell Coleman’s restaurant?”
Lydia nodded.
“Yes. His place is in Metairie. I’ll take you sometime.”
She set down the family portrait and picked up the frame beside it.
The photograph showed Lydia at six or seven, sitting on a wooden floor and playing with Hot Wheels cars.
“My oldest brother probably took this. He was in high school. I’d just started school myself… Must have been around ’97.”
Seven-year-old Lydia looked thoroughly absorbed in pushing the little vintage muscle cars around.
“My parents both worked, and when my brothers were late getting home too, I sometimes spent the evening alone. I’d get bored and play with their cars.”
Cynthia set down her empty mug and smiled.
“Is that why you still like cars so much?”
“Maybe. I used to sit on our front steps waiting for my parents to come home, and V8 muscle cars and trucks would go by on the main road. I’d watch them forever. They were the coolest things in the world to me.”
Lydia pointed to the Panasonic boombox behind her younger self.
“I wonder if my parents still have that. My mother always turned it on when she got home and started making dinner. Ella, Sarah, Nat King Cole… All that old jazz, playing all the time. I thought it was just the sound of our house.”
“Your musical origins.”
“Maybe so.”
The next photograph Lydia picked up showed her in middle school, singing a solo at the front of a church choir.
“I sang in the choir every Sunday. Got plenty of praise. I knew I could sing, but it never occurred to me that I’d make a living at it.”
Cynthia asked cautiously,
“Then how did you get your start?”
Lydia smiled silently for a moment, then looked up at the ceiling and murmured,
“I was in nursing school. A friend told me I might as well send in an audition application, so I did, and I got through… I sang on television, and people started searching for my name online… Then a few producers started calling.”
She continued matter-of-factly, as though she were telling someone else’s story.
“All of a sudden, I’d made my debut. After that, I gradually learned what mainstream show business was like…”
“You were a huge success.”
Cynthia pointed to the Rolling Stone cover and the two platinum records on the wall behind the sofa.
Lydia slowly shook her head.
“At the time, it felt like being caught in a wave and carried along. I got married, got divorced… Ah, the failure of my year-and-a-bit marriage is a story for another day.”
Wine had brought a faint flush to Lydia’s cheeks. She tipped her head back against the sofa.
A faint rose scent drifted from her neck, and Cynthia felt her face grow warm again.
Carrying her empty mug toward the sink, Cynthia stopped in front of another framed photograph on the wall.
“Was this taken at your graduation?”
Lydia and her parents stood side by side on the lawn of a private university in New Orleans, with its white main building behind them. All three were smiling at the camera, looking a little nervous.
Lydia wore a black graduation gown with a blue-and-white stole. Her mortarboard was on her mother’s head.
Lydia turned her head to look.
“Oh. That one.”
A smile spread across her face.
“After I got divorced and came home, I went back to the university. Met with an academic adviser, pulled out my old transcript and all my credit records. Talked with the professors about why I’d left, and why I wanted to come back now.”
“You reenrolled?”
“Yes. I told them I still wanted to graduate, and they let me come back. Quite a few of my old credits counted… I graduated in business administration.”
“But you’d been studying nursing.”
“I had. But by then, show business had taught me a little about managing people, reading contracts, figuring out where the money was leaking away. I thought I might as well study it properly.”
Cynthia looked at the photograph again.
“Why is your mother wearing your cap?”
Lydia laughed softly.
“She graduated from that university’s nursing program. She was so happy when I enrolled. And when I suddenly became a singer and dropped out, she didn’t say a word.”
Lydia gazed at the cap on her mother’s head.
“I’d come back and finally earned my degree. I thought the cap belonged to her.”
When Cynthia had washed her mug and returned to the sofa, Lydia was sitting with her eyes closed, letting out a long breath scented with wine.
Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” played from the wireless speaker.
“Cindy.”
“Yes, Boss?”
“Give it a few months. Until then, we’ll work rehearsal around your classes and how you’re feeling.”
Lydia slowly opened her eyes.
“The band is going to move its base soon. To New York.”
“What?!”
The drowsiness creeping over Cynthia vanished at once.
“Louise and I are looking at properties. Kat’s talking it over with her wife.”
“Um… Is this because you’re trying to accommodate me…?”
“No. Moving to New York was something we were considering before you joined.”
Lydia shook her head.
“Kat, Louise, and I saw what this band could do, and we agreed to take it into the mainstream. If we’re going to move beyond the local scene, reach the rest of the country, and eventually play internationally, New York is the right place to be based.”
“Oh…”
Surprise and exhilaration swept over Cynthia together. All she could do was sit with her mouth open.
Lydia smiled at her, then checked the clock on the wall.
“I have a flight to catch tomorrow morning. Let’s get some sleep.”
〈0039 A Mother’s Promise in a Boy’s Memory〉
Saturday, January 25, 2025. 3:28 p.m.
A prestigious boarding school in Stony Brook, on the North Shore of Long Island, New York.
Patches of snow from a few days earlier remained outside, but the common lounge adjoining the student center’s dining hall was warm and dry.
Students in casual clothes and tracksuits instead of uniforms played board games or chatted and laughed in the warmth from the heaters. Balls clicked together at a pool table on one side of the room. Along the sofas sat students reading books borrowed from the library.
Michelan Malone was there too, dressed in gray chinos and a dark green quarter-zip.
On an ordinary Saturday afternoon, he would have been at winter track practice. Today, however, he had permission to go out and had been excused.
For now, he was playing pool with three close classmates while waiting for his visitor.
Click.
Michelan’s cue ball sent the four ball into a corner pocket. Rebounding off the cushion, it caught the five, which rolled into a pocket on the other side.
His three friends gave low whistles.
Just then, a senior who served as the dorm’s student representative came into the lounge and beckoned to him.
“Malone. Your visitor’s here. The dorm supervisor says to come down to the entrance.”
Michelan put his cue in the rack and picked up the puffer jacket he had left on a chair.
“Mama’s here. I’m heading out.”
“Mickey, we’re not finished. You leave now, you’re last.”
Michelan nodded readily at his classmate’s objection.
“Okay. I’ll bring you each a Vitaminwater.”
“Dragonfruit for me.”
“Lemonade.”
The last boy kept his cue aimed at a ball.
“Anything. Just get me Zero.”
“Okay. See you at roll call.”
Michelan pulled on his jacket and left the lounge.
On his way downstairs, he noticed a small group in the entrance hall.
Lydia was signing an autograph for a young music teacher who had recently joined the school.
Looking a little shy, the teacher held out a teaching binder, and Lydia signed her name on the cover with a permanent marker.
A few students passing through slowed to look at her. They recognized the successful singer from an earlier generation. But with so many children of celebrities at the school, no one approached or made a fuss.
Michelan raised a hand.
“Mama Liddy. I’m ready to go.”
“Mickey.”
Lydia looked up and smiled faintly.
The music teacher thanked her and stepped away. The dorm supervisor approached.
Lydia took her driver’s license from her wallet and handed it over.
The supervisor compared the photograph with Lydia’s face, then checked the tablet.
WEEKEND DAY LEAVE
Student: Michelan Malone
Authorized Adult: Lydia Coleman
Relationship: Former Stepmother
Guardian Approval: Confirmed
Return Time: 9:00 PM
Overnight Authorization: No
Emergency Contact: Secondary
After tapping the screen several times, the supervisor held the tablet out to Lydia.
“Ms. Coleman, you’re registered as an authorized adult for Michelan’s off-campus leave. Please sign here.”
Identity Verified
Lydia signed with her finger, and the supervisor took the tablet back.
“Please bring him to the dorm desk by nine tonight. Michelan will need to sign himself back in.”
“Of course.”
As Michelan followed Lydia toward the parking lot, a cool westerly breeze slipped past their collars. Their breath rose white and distinct, then quickly dispersed.
The trees had shed all their leaves. The road and sidewalks were dry. Beneath shrubs and on shaded lawns, last week’s snow remained in hard, dirty patches.
It was not yet four, but the winter sun was already low and yellow. In its light, a silver four-door Jeep Wrangler stood on one side of the parking lot. After hearing about the snow in the East the previous week, Lydia had requested a four-wheel-drive SUV from the rental company.
She stopped beside the car and turned to Michelan.
Then she realized she no longer needed to look down at him.
More precisely, their eyes were almost level.
The Michelan in Lydia’s memory was a child nodding off in the corner of a sofa with a picture book clutched in his hands. A child holding a bag of medicine in a pediatrician’s waiting room. A child caught trying to push a piece of broccoli from his soup out of his mouth with his tongue.
Now, his eyes were almost level with hers.
“Mama Liddy? Why do you look so surprised?”
Michelan smiled a little awkwardly.
“You’ve shot up again in just a few months. You’re nearly as tall as I am.”
“Am I?”
“Soon you’ll be taller than me. A handsome young man.”
Opening the passenger door, Lydia asked,
“So. Where shall we go to talk?”
“Anywhere’s fine, as long as I’m with you.”
Lydia looked at him for a moment, then asked,
“Do you have enough clothes for going out on weekends?”
“I’m fine. I have everything I need.”
“Still, let’s stop at a mall nearby.”
“I really am okay.”
“Are you? Well, then…”
Michelan would readily go wherever she took him. Lydia set the subject of clothes aside for the moment and changed the topic.
“…What would you like for dinner?”
Michelan thought briefly.
“Your clam chowder.”
Lydia’s hand paused on the car door.
Whenever they met and she asked what he wanted to eat, that was always his answer. And every time, it made her heart ache.
“I’m afraid I can’t make it for you here. Let’s find a seafood restaurant instead. There must be a good one nearby.”
“Okay, Mama.”
Once Michelan was seated, Lydia closed his door and walked around to the driver’s side.
Forty minutes later, they had ended up in the menswear department of Macy’s at Smith Haven.
Lydia took a dark charcoal quarter-zip from the rack and had Michelan try it on.
He pushed the price tag at his neck aside and looked in the mirror.
“It’s almost exactly like the one I’m wearing. Just a different color.”
“Then it’ll suit you.”
As Lydia smoothed the shoulders to check the fit, Michelan began speaking to his reflection.
“I understand that Dad’s busy. It isn’t his fault that he’s away all the time. And your divorce was between the two of you. I don’t think you should have stayed together because of me.”
Lydia’s hand paused.
“I’ve always felt sorry about that.”
“I’m not blaming you. Dad’s the one who was wrong.”
Michelan zipped the quarter-zip up to his chin, then lowered it a little.
“My mother died after she and Dad divorced. I’d already been through that once. Then Dad made me go through losing a second mother.”
“I’m still sorry. I was part of making you feel you’d been abandoned a second time.”
Michelan turned from the mirror to look at her.
“Again, Mama Liddy. It wasn’t your fault.”
Lydia could not meet his eyes. She slowly lowered the garment in her hands and made a halfhearted attempt to fold it.
“The real problem is that after you, Dad got married and divorced two more times. And I don’t understand why he couldn’t even tell me properly about the fourth divorce.”
“…I’m not going to start defending my ex-husband now. But perhaps he felt too ashamed as a father to bring himself to tell you.”
“Maybe. But that doesn’t make it okay to keep putting me through getting a new mother and then losing her again.”
Lydia could only nod weakly.
She draped a large over her arm in place of the medium.
“Let’s get this one.”
“It’s too big.”
“You’ll need to wear it next year too. You’re still growing.”
Michelan did not argue further.
At a café near the department store, a paper shopping bag sat on the chair beside Lydia.
Inside was the dark gray quarter-zip she had bought him.
Michelan had not touched the matcha latte in front of him.
The pale green foam had already sunk by half.
“I hope Dad doesn’t get married a fifth time.”
Lydia set down her tea.
“You mean you don’t want him getting divorced a fifth time.”
“Well, whatever. I don’t care anymore.”
Michelan said it casually. His face said otherwise.
At that moment, Lydia could think of any number of things to say about Anthony Malone.
A man who could not bear loneliness, yet had never learned how to live with another person.
A man who often confused love with ownership.
A man who believed, every time he married, that his outlook had changed—when it never actually did.
But she could not say those things carelessly in front of Michelan. Whatever sides of himself Malone had shown her, he was this boy’s father. She had to choose her words.
After a long moment, Lydia spoke.
“I think your father is attracted to women who are striving for success. Women with clear goals, who take their work seriously. Like he does. I suppose I was one of them.”
“The two women he married after you, too?”
“Probably.”
Michelan looked down at the sunken matcha foam.
“If he kept marrying them because he liked that kind of person, why did he keep getting divorced?”
“Being drawn to someone and knowing how to live happily with them are different things.”
“Four times?”
Lydia almost laughed.
Not because it was funny. Because she had no answer for a fourteen-year-old boy, and the helplessness of it left her breathless.
“I think you’ll have to ask your father that. It isn’t something I can answer for him.”
“He won’t tell me even if I ask.”
This time, Lydia did not disagree.
After a moment, she pointed lightly at his cup.
“It’ll get cold.”
“It already is.”
“Then drink it.”
Reluctantly, Michelan picked up the cup. After a sip, he wiped the pale green foam from his mouth with the back of his hand.
Lydia pulled out a napkin and offered it to him.
“Use this. Not your hand.”
Just then, the elderly woman who owned the café came over and placed a small butter cookie in front of each of them.
“Mind your mother, young man.”
She smiled teasingly.
Michelan hunched his shoulders and silently accepted the napkin.
The clever boy who had been methodically questioning his father’s fourth divorce was gone. In his place was a fourteen-year-old being teased by an unfamiliar adult.
“Thank you.”
Lydia accepted the cookie plate with a smile.
Michelan’s thoughts drifted.
‘I’ve thought this for a long time, but I don’t think Mama Liddy understands why I think of her as my mother. She still keeps apologizing to me.’
But Michelan remembered clearly the day that had made him certain Lydia was his mother.
‘My first day of elementary school.’
That day, Anthony Malone had simply said he was busy with a taping. Michelan had expected to ride to school in the car driven by his father’s butler, then walk through the gates alone.
But that morning, Lydia had been standing outside the school.
By then, she was no longer legally his stepmother. Nearly six months had passed since she had divorced Malone and returned to New Orleans.
In front of the wide-eyed little boy, Lydia had bent down and held him.
“I promised I’d go with you on your first day of school, remember?”
Lydia had already left the Malone family. But she had not left her promise behind.
That day, the person who took Michelan’s hand and walked through the school gates with him was Lydia.
Afterward, she kept answering when Michelan called, and never brushed aside his wish to see her. When she was too busy or too far away to come, she told him herself that she was sorry and promised another day. And on the day she promised, she always came.
That was why Michelan could trust her.
Lydia was someone who always came back.
‘I’m not an abandoned child. I have a mother too. She just lives far away. When I call for her, she always turns toward me.’
“Mickey. Mickey? What are you thinking about?”
“Oh.”
Lydia was gathering the shopping bag and getting to her feet.
“I said, shall we go get dinner?”
“Oh, yes… But I need to buy some Vitaminwater for my friends.”
“Vitaminwater? Where did that come from?”
“It’s popular at school these days.”
“Why is Vitaminwater suddenly popular?”
“Simple. They changed suppliers, and the school store doesn’t carry it anymore.”
For a moment, Lydia stared at him, speechless.
“So now that you can’t buy it, it’s scarce, and that makes it popular?”
“Exactly. Supply and demand.”
Michelan nodded with complete seriousness.
“So that’s another way middle schoolers learn economics.”
Lydia murmured it as she handed the café owner the check and her card.