He didn’t know them well, so he feigned disappointment as he walked through the apartment. I wondered if she could tell that he wasn’t really sad, and if she saw the spark that lit up behind his eyes as they settled on the Victrola credenza. A smile played in the corners of his mouth and then disappeared, as if he remembered he was supposed to be grieving. “I just don’t know what I’m gonna do with all this stuff,” my neighbor said.

Newly widowed and relocating to a smaller apartment, my neighbor was donating her husband’s effects so as to not rattle the lethargic aura of her sons on moving day. Daddy held my hand tightly as we moved around the crowded apartment littered with yellowing newspapers, tattered doilies and ceramic rooster cookie jars. Casually waving his hand in the direction of the credenza, he said, “How much for this here?” I knew he wanted it badly, because I know my father. Beads of sweat had begun to form on his top lip, and that only happens when he’s feeling emotional. My neighbor laughed and replied that he could have it for free. “I have been trying to get Walter to get rid of that thing for years! Take it!”

Daddy nodded, mumbled something about being right back, and swept me up into his arms so that he could quickly get out of the maze of knick-knacks. Outside the apartment, set me down and grinned at me, his open-faced gold tooth gleaming in the Atlanta sunlight. I didn’t know what all the excitement was for. But it was contagious, and I walked behind him with anticipation burning in my belly.

Once we had the credenza in our apartment, Daddy wiped the thick dust off of it with a damp rag. He went and got the Pledge, pointed the spray nozzle at the credenza’s top and then furrowed his brow. “I don’t know what this stuff will do to this wood, Nic. This thing is at least 30 years old! You weren’t even a gleam in your Daddy’s eye when this was produced, girl! Come here and let’s open it together.” He made such a big show of it, the opening. He blew imaginary dust off of it. Got down on eye level with it and smoothed his hand across the wood. Waggling his eyebrows at me, he lifted the top.

A record player?, I said to myself. What is the big deal? He pushed it closer to the wall and plugged it in. He’s had this silly grin on his face for an hour over a record player? He rapped his knuckles on the wood top, told me he’d be right back, and skipped off to our storage closet. Sitting down on the floor beside it, I still didn’t understand why he was excited for this huge, old, dusty record player that smelled like old people in its crevices.

“Your granddaddy let them hooligans break into my house and they stole a lotta my shit,” Daddy yelled from behind two crates he was carrying into the room. “But I still got some of the good ones.” Sitting the crates beside me with a grunt, he told me to choose one, and then disappeared into the kitchen.

I chose a cover that had a naked woman, holding a honey jar in one hand, the other dripping honey into her mouth with a honey dipper. He gave an embarrassed chuckle as I handed him the record, and smirked into his lowball glass as he sipped. Kneeling down and placing the glass on the floor, he showed me how to line up the needle with the record’s grooves, and how to put a nickel on the needle if it wouldn’t stay down on the vinyl.

Daddy danced and sang and played records all night. His mood grew somber as he put on Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life. He’d only played a song here and a song there of the other albums; this one we listened straight through. As Stevie crooned, Daddy swayed his head back and forth, eyes closed. When “Another Star” came on, he looked at me with wet eyes, brimming at the corners.

…FOR YOU, THERE MIGHT BE ANOTHER STAR, BUT THROUGH MY EYES, THE LIGHT OF YOU IS ALL I SEE…

“You hear that, lil girl? Stevie writes these beautiful damn songs and he caint eem see the shit he be writin’ bout. And us, we can see everything and caint write half as good as Stevie. Ain’t that some shit?” He was slurring his words by now, but he knew every single lyric to all of the songs by heart. He danced with me on the fast songs and sang to me on the slow songs.

There would be so many times like this in coming years. Daddy would cook our dinner while dancing and singing. I would find out that he would bawl when he heard Marvin Gaye songs, saying “That boy there, his daddy snuffed his life out…damn shame cause he was so ahead of his time. God takes them gifted ones early like that. I don’t know why He do that.”

That first evening, however, the neighbors decided they’d had enough of Daddy’s caterwauling and called the police. Daddy turned it off, and decided it was time for us to retire. After he’d tucked me in, I lay on my back trying to remember the Stevie Wonder lyrics, but I’d only retained the melodies. I knew I wanted to write a song that made people cry too, in that good way. I wanted Daddy to look at me with the same pride with which he looked at the Victrola credenza, that pride that welled up and burst out into a smile and a shake of his hips.