Getting It Wrong

 For International Jazz Day, a bit of fiction...

Clara studied her only daughter’s face.

Emma was lit up from the inside, delicate features a dynamic play of barely-contained emotion. It was like watching a still pool of pure, clear water breaking into soft ripples of movement. Unconstrained and uncontainable. Like the only thing keeping her together was her rose-tinted skin.

Her girl was in love.

Clara’s eyes turned to the young man seated at her daughter’s right. This stiff and stalwart-looking individual with his mortician’s hands and his thin, aesthetic face. Could her daughter – hers and Reggie’s – possibly have made this colossal a . . . mistake?

She turned toward the stage, where Reggie and his troupe were just finishing up their 9:00 set. What would her husband’s reaction be? Would he treat this proposed addition to their little family with courtesy? Or, more probably, would he rear back at the unintentioned insult and explode in artistically unsuppressed emotion. Then drag what could have been their future son-in-law out to the blacktop and toss him into the first available taxi bound for Timbuktu?

She sighed again as her daughter chattered endlessly, ceaselessly, enthusiastically on. Should she say something? Try to turn this particular ship before it hit the great reef looming before them? Should she interfere?

She tuned in to what Emma was saying. “. . . and I was so excited when I met Alphonse.” She linked hands with the sober young man beside her. “He loves jazz! Why he listens to it every day in the mortuary! He is exactly what Daddy told me to look for in a husband!”

Clara put out a hand and touched her daughter’s shoulder gently. “Oh, honey,” she said. She glanced down at the musicians on the stage. Heard the smooth, perfect notes of ‘Take Five’ pouring from Reggie’s Sax and sighed. Then she turned back to her daughter. “Honey, what your father told you to bring home was a Jazz MUSICIAN!”