MORE THAN YOU KNOW

Buried secrets divide an African-American couple in debut fiction from Fort Worth Symphony violinist Story (And so I Sing: African American Divas of Opera and Concert, not reviewed).

Sax player L.J. Tillman serenades New York street corners until a kindly singer encourages him to sit in at a Manhattan jazz club. L.J. is superbly talented and gets a gig at the club, which leads to money and an apartment. But when L.J. calls home to Kansas City and tells his wife of many years “it’s me,” Olivia hangs up the phone. A beautician with a beautiful voice, Olivia has just sung in a church service as a way to tell the congregation, and herself, that L.J. is dead. A year ago, he stormed out of the house after Olivia began asking him about her origins. He drove their car off a bridge, letting the police think that he’d died. While L.J. regains his confidence as a musician, Olivia hires a private detective to make sure he’s dead. When L.J. signs on with a jazz band that’s passing near Kansas City, he hopes to visit Olivia and explain why he left. The situation’s origins are far back and complex: when he was just seven, L.J. was given Olivia, a nameless newborn, to leave on the doorstep of the first likely house he could find. Through a series of coincidences and convoluted family and community ties, L.J., who is also an orphan but was raised by a disreputable uncle, eventually marries Olivia. They want to open a jazz club, she opens a beauty shop instead, and he becomes a successful touring musician. L.J.’s knowledge of Olivia’s origins, and of her mother, along with their failure to have a child, separates them—although ironic, occasionally improbable, coincidences reunite them.

Romantic, deeply sentimental redemption story of smoky jazz clubs, beauty salons crackling with gossip, and the intricate, wide-ranging community that holds it all together.