Josie and Jack Read Online Free PDF

movies?”
    “Sometimes,” I said, although I’d only been a few times. The smile on my face was beginning to feel strained. “Not really.”
    “Me neither,” he said, too quickly for me to believe him, and we stood in silence for another minute before he asked, “Do you ice-skate? Because the rink is open year-round now.”
    I was a good skater. Jack and I went every winter, as soon as the pond froze. The ice was always thin but we went anyway. The town rink, though—I’d seen the crowds outside the town rink on Friday nights. “I’m not very good,” I told him.
    “Neither am I,” Kevin said.
    I was confused. “So why did you ask?”
    He shrugged and looked depressed. “People do it,” he said. “What about music?”
    I finally figured out what he was trying to do, and thought: coffee, ice cream, a bottle of rum in the alley—anything, but ask me something I know. Then I heard the bell over the door jingle and Jack was there to save me.
    “What’s taking so long, Jo?” he asked, but his voice was friendly. He looked at Kevin. “Hey.”
    “Hey,” Kevin answered, and they introduced themselves. I stuck my hands in my pockets, fast, before anyone noticed that I’d been wringing them. Jack’s grin was just enough, not too much. Someone who didn’t know him would never have seen how intent and calculating his eyes were.
    “We were talking about music,” I said.
    “Oh, yeah?” Jack said easily. “What kind?”
    Kevin coughed and looked embarrassed. “We hadn’t gotten that far yet. But I’m into jazz, mostly, right now. The old stuff.”
    “Like Coltrane?” Jack said.
    “I don’t know much about Coltrane.” Kevin looked as relieved as I felt to have something to talk about. “But what I know, I like.”
    Jack grinned. “I just picked up Blue Train down at Eide’s. Great stuff.”
    “Eide’s is awesome,” Kevin said. “They’ve got everything down there.”
    The rest cascaded into place; my brother was a master. Before Kevin could figure out right from left, he had accepted an invitation to come up to the Hill on the following Monday night to listen to Jack’s new Coltrane album. All I had to do was stand there, smiling at Kevin and nodding enthusiastically when it seemed appropriate. I didn’t know who Coltrane was, or what Eide’s was, or what was going on, but Kevin’s eyes kept drifting toward me and that despairing look was gone. By the time we’d said our farewells, he had begun to look hopeful, even excited.
    I was surprised to find that Jack actually had the album they had talked about. He dug it out from under his bed when we got home. There was a black-and-white photograph of a dark-skinned man with a saxophone on the cover. The plastic sleeve had a price tag stuck to it that said “Eide’s.”
    “What’s Eide’s?” I asked Jack.
    “Big record store in Pittsburgh. It’s where all the cool kids go to buy their vinyl.”
    I stared at him. “How do you know these things?”
    Jack shrugged. He was looking at the back of the album cover. “That ratty green sweater he was wearing, it had ‘dumb white jazz fan’ written all over it.” He glanced up at me. “White boy jazz fans tend to be heartbreakingly sensitive. Maybe he’ll write you a love poem or two.”
    I pointed to the album. “But how do you know about Eide’s? When were you in Pittsburgh buying records?”
    “Not records,” he corrected. “Vinyl. When was I in Pittsburgh buying vinyl.”
    “When?” I repeated. “When was it?”
    “Drove down there one day when I was supposed to be getting the truck tuned up.”
    “You randomly drove down there,” I said, “and happened to find the cool kid record store. Randomly.”
    “I had that job there for a while. You remember. I told you about that.”
    “That was in Pittsburgh?” I said, disconcerted.
    He nodded.
    I didn’t know what to say. “Well, what if the truck breaks down?”
    He threw the album down on his bed and took a cigarette from