"Call when Gus finishes Act Three."
"I can hear you," Gus said, "and Act Three is finished enough to be embarrassing."
Plane doors closed. Cities waited. The story, like a tree cut for December, had been severed from one root system only to be carried into another living room, another year, another chance to lean with confidence until someone brave enough took the scissors to the fear and let the whole bright thing stand up.
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There was a Tuesday in the middle of that first December—after the tree stood upright, before the lease notice arrived—that Dez would later think of as the last ordinary Tuesday, though nothing about it had felt ordinary at the time. He opened Vinyl Underground at ten. The owner, a man named Ellis who had survived the seventies with his hearing and his opinions intact, handed him a coffee and said, "Don't put the holiday displays near the jazz. Jazz doesn't do tinsel."
"Jazz does whatever it wants," Dez said.
"That's why we protect it."