Page 45 of Passion’s Song

She started walking west, but then stopped at a bus stop.

“What are we doing here?” Damien asked.

“It’s too far to walk,” April answered. She looked over at him with a grin. “What, are you too good for the city bus?”

It was a trap. If he answered the way he honestly felt, he’d never hear the end of it. Yet, before he could come up with another alternative, like calling a cab, one of the city’s RTA buses pulled up to the curb.

Damien had to admit that they’d undergone a huge improvement since the days back when these buses were his only mode of transportation. He actually enjoyed the short ride to the St. Roch neighborhood, which bordered the Upper Ninth Ward.

“Whoa,” Damien said as they alighted from the bus in front of the large structure. “What happened here?”

“A massive restoration project,” April said. “They returned it to its former glory, and now it’s one of the highlights of this neighborhood.”

They entered the white building with its huge windows and beautiful woodwork. The inside of the vast space hummed with the voices of patrons traveling from one vendor stall to the other.

Dozens of huge columns stretched to the ceiling, their bright white paint contrasting sharply with the dark wooden counters and stools that occupied the space between each set of columns. He and April both opted for Korean tacos, then took a seat at the tables set up toward the rear of the building.

“I have to admit, this is pretty nice,” Damien said, his eyes continually roaming around the beautiful, airy marketplace.

“It’s a lot better than the run-down place it used to be,” April said. “We used to think the old building was haunted, remember?”

“Oh, yeah. It looked it.”

April grinned. “Speaking of haunted, do you remember Halloween?”

“Mr. Johnson’s haunted house,” Damien said with a laugh. “How could I forget? That man was spooky as hell when it came to Halloween. I never got through the entire thing. I’d always bail halfway through.”

“I never even tried,” April said with a laugh. “The candy just wasn’t worth it.”

“You remember his house at Christmas, though? He used to go all out with the decorations then, too. It was beautiful.”

“I think his wife was behind the Christmas decorations,” April said. She sobered. “He stopped doing all of it after she died.”

“What ever happened to him?”

She hunched her shoulders. “I think his daughter took him to live with her in Atlanta after Katrina.”

Damien shook his head and huffed out a humorless laugh. “It’s amazing how life can change in an instant, isn’t it? I still remember that Friday before the storm hit.”

“You were at Alcorn, weren’t you?”

He nodded. “The semester hadn’t even started yet, but football players had to report early. Kurt called to say that he and my mom were heading up to Hattiesburg. I called him a pu— A not so nice word,” Damien said with a sheepish grin. “We’d never evacuated before. And the storm wasn’t supposed to be all that bad, remember? But my mom said she had a funny feeling about this one, so the two of them left.”

“It’s a good thing they did.”

“They would have both drowned in that house,” Damien said.

April remembered the first time she toured the neighborhood following the storm. It had been months after they’d finally cleared it to allow residents back in. She’d stopped in front of Damien’s old clapboard house and her knees had nearly given out on her. She could still recall the waterline, only a couple of inches from the eaves of the house.

“It’s hard to see that so many of these houses remain the way they looked just after the storm,” Damien commented.

“But that’s what we’re trying to change,” April said. She reached across the table and captured his hand. “The Ninth Ward was all but written off by most of this city. But the people who live here refused to count themselves out, and they’re no longer waiting for city leaders to take the lead. We’re doing it ourselves, and when we’re done, the Ninth Ward is going to be better than it ever was.” She gave his hand a fervent squeeze. “Tell me that you can see what we’re doing here, Damien.”

“I see it now,” he said.

And he did. Finally, he did.

Damien shook his head. “But I still believe in this project, April. I don’t want it to die.”