Lester Pete and the Mockingbirds

Lester Pete made a name for himself locally. He sang bluesy folk and played a mean dobro. He could also carry a tune on harmonica. Angelique Fontaine waitressed at the bar where he had a gig twice a month. She’d sneak him a beer and a shot of the top shelf, when the Boss was in the back office. Angie and Lester soon became a regular thing. Lester hadn’t thought himself the settling kind. His people were rovers and roamers, but his music seemed to be all the roaming he needed. He hawked his second-best guitar and bought Angie a ring. They moved to a second-floor apartment above a secondhand store. He sang to her in the morning, in the shower, at dinner, in bed. He played her skin like the harmonica until she giggled for him to stop.

Angie hadn’t thought herself a one-man woman, but Lester seemed to fill her need to look around. Angie had been an aspiring painter, until the rent came due, and she lost the lease on her studio. Now her paintings, finished or not were in the U-Stor-It at the edge of town. She sketched whenever she had a chance. Lester put her sketches – from paper bags to grocery slips, on the walls. The spaces between the sketches were filled with his music. Lester got a band together – Lester Pete and the Mockingbirds. He thought the name would imply the band could sing anything. Angie quit working at the bar and got a gig at a co-op gallery, didn’t provide tips, but the people were her kind of people. The apartment filled the bandmates, their friends and the co-op artists.

Lester Pete and the Mockingbirds hired a manager. Simon said if Lester Pete cut a demo, he would send it out, get radio coverage. They’d make it into the big leagues. Simon insisted the studio needed money up front, and well, since Lester didn’t have a recognized name, yet…Angie hawked her ring, sold a painting, and the demo was cut. Simon never sent it out. The fifty copies sat and gathered dust in the back room of the office. When Simon was finally picked up for racketeering, the contents were sold at auction. Lester went back to bar gigs and busking. On his way home from a gig at the bar where he and Angie met, Lester was killed in a hit and run accident. Six and a half months later Angie gave birth to Wesley. She sang the baby to sleep every night with the lullaby Lester had written in the event he ever had a son.

Wesley thrived in a household of artists. He had anywhere between one and seventeen parents. He called his mother Angie because everyone else did. Some of the old bandmates joined the artists who were regulars at lavish potlucks where Indian block print fabrics were laid on the floor, and everyone sat on cushions around the food, telling stories, eating, singing, laughing. Wesley always asked for stories about his dad. He heard that his father was kind, and generous, and that his music made you feel things deep in your soul. Wesley heard his father’s songs but sung by the remaining Mockingbirds or by his mother. He grew up knowing his father, but not knowing him.

Angie was over the moon when Wesley graduated from college, a family first. Wesley wanted to help run the co-op, he wanted to promote the local artists and musicians. He’d met Emma in his marketing class, they dated. They fell in love. They married after college. Angie gave them a portrait as a wedding gift. They bought a loft downtown near the gallery district. They planned to start a family in a few years. Emma had an eclectic finesse and liked to decorate with classical styles. They spent weekends foraging the antique malls and vintage shops.

Angie wasn’t phased by her diagnosis. She’d truly loved Lester, and she believed that loves were reunited after death. Treatment couldn’t guarantee a year, so she opted for palliative care. Wesley was grieving even before Angie was gone. He couldn’t imagine life without Angelique Pete.

He was looking for something special, something he could take Angie. Something to make her smile. In a recently opened shop, in a dusty box of LPs, Wesley recognized his father’s face on an album cover. When he played it for Angie, it was the first time he heard his father’s voice, the last voice his mother heard.

— Lkai