For a moment I couldn’t speak. The world was spinning backward.
“No problem,” I said. “Where is he?”
“No, I never heard him play,” the old guy said. “But my sister did. Got me a sister more than about ninety years old or thereabouts, may she be spared. Still alive. She did a little singing way back and she sang with old Blind Blake many a time.”
“He wrote my old unit,” I said. “They forward my mail to my bank, where I put my severance pay. They send it on when I wire them for cash.”
“Is that your neighborhood?” I asked him. “All the way over at the highway?”
A southern accent. A confident manner. Accustomed to telephones.