Colleen Nelson - Spin

Copyright Colleen Nelson, 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Cover image: istock.com/Cofeee
Printer: Webcom, a division of Marquis Printing Inc.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Spin / Colleen Nelson.
Names: Nelson, Colleen, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190045264 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190045760 | ISBN 9781459744967 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459744974 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459744981 (epub)
Classification: LCC PS8627.E555 S65 2019 | DDC jC813/.6dc23

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For Rory Charles and Kate Georgia

I slid the record out of the sleeve. The pressed plastic flashed like an oil slick. Id been around records my whole fifteen and a half years, but I still loved the satiny shine of them. I held the unmarked record up when Dad came into the office. Do you know who this is? I asked him. Our record store, The Vinyl Trap, was slow for a Saturday. Id retreated to the office at the back of the store looking for something to listen to.

Dad shrugged and nodded at the turntable on his desk. Put it on. Lets find out. The couch springs creaked when he sat down and propped his black motorcycle boots up on the coffee table. I dropped the record over the pin in the centre of the turntable. With the flick of a switch, it started to spin and I dropped the needle. Seconds later, a sultry powerhouse of a voice filled the room. I peeked at Dad. His eyes were closed and his head swayed with the emotion of the song. It was bare bones, just a piano and the singer.

The voice was familiar. It would have been to anyone who heard it. Georgia Waters, the worlds most famous singer.

And my mother.

The huskiness of her voice was like sandpaper and honey, every note filled with emotion. I watched Dad lose himself in the song. She didnt need any accompaniment. She had one of those voices that hit, right in your gut, and made you ache along with her.

Man, that woman can sing. Dad sighed when the song ended.

Yeah, I agreed quietly and lifted the needle off the record.

I think she was pregnant with you when she recorded that song.

Whyd you hide it away? I stood up and dug through his desk drawer until I found a marker. In block letters, I wrote GEORGIA WATERS on the sleeve.

Wasnt hiding it, just forgot I had it. Dads gravelly voice sounded like his mind was somewhere else. With greying hair, left long and shaggy, and the chunky silver rings that covered his fingers, it was obvious he wasnt the khaki-button-down-briefcase kind of dad other kids had. One arm was covered in tattoos: a saxophone, some music notes, my brothers name and mine swirled up his ropy-veined forearm, just above a stack of braided leather bracelets. Georgias name had been there, too, once upon a time. Now it was covered with a band of music notes.

I looked at him reproachfully. I was never sure where his feelings for her lay. He probably wasnt, either. The bell over the door chimed, announcing a customer, and Dad stood up. He looked relieved at the interruption. Hey there, he called out. Can I help you?

I heard the customer tell Dad that he was looking for a specific record but couldnt remember the name of the artist or the title of the album. I rolled my eyes at the impossibility of the request, but Dad loved the needle-in-a-haystack hunts: I heard it in a New York City jazz bar in 1996 and have been looking for it ever since. My brother, Lou, and I didnt have the patience to work with a customer for two hours until the exact record was identified, but Dad did.

I held Georgias record in my hand and glanced at the shelves. Were more of them hidden in Dads private collection? Since we were kids, Dad had sworn us to secrecy about who our mom was. Hed explained that if anyone found out, wed get hounded, like other celebrities children. Photographers would hide in bushes and kids at school would want to be our friends just because we were related to Georgia Waters. Keeping it a secret was easy; it wasnt like Georgia came around very often. Id only seen her once in the last fourteen years. Shed visited when I was six, and even though Dad told us not to say anything, Id blurted it out at recess the next day. The girls had laughed at me and called me a liar. I remember getting red in the face and stamping my feet, insisting that it was the truth. Theyd started calling me Deliar, instead of Delilah.

By the time I got to middle school, everyone had forgotten my claim on Georgia. Now that I was in high school, I was just a kid with no mom. Always had been. Id stopped trying to explain it.

The ironic part of being abandoned by a famous singer is that she never really went away. All it took was a Google search of her name and I got two million hits. I knew where shed had dinner last night, who she had it with, and what time she left the restaurant because the photographs were plastered all over the internet. I could follow her vacationing on a yacht and see pictures in magazines of her arriving at late-night talk shows. She might have escaped us, but we couldnt escape her.

I put the record back and made a mental note of its location on the shelf in case I wanted to listen to it again.