“But it's going to put everyone else to sleep. Especially at two o'clock in the afternoon when they've been drinking since eleven.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Adele is a good person—one of the best I know. But she overestimates people.” He'd slammed over the remaining selections. “If you can soften up the audience, you can get away with the rest of these songs,” he'd said. Then he'd rolled his eyes. “Although how you're going to get them in a good mood by singing the Panis Angelicus…” he'd trailed off. “Eh, never mind. Every once in a while the crowd just doesn't want you. It happens to everyone.”

But not to me! Lu thought as she stood in front of the microphone in the middle of the little platform in the Villa Veneto restaurant. Audiences always loved her, because she loved them and they could sense that she wanted to make them happy. She had tried to explain it once to Paulie: “If I make them forget for a little while about the boy they've got in the war or the scary things they read in the newspaper, that's like being God.” Then she'd giggled, because that was such a vain thing to say. “It's better than being God because God does things that make them suffer,” she added jokingly. But there was a part of her that meant it.

And now she was going to sing, and while the audience wasn't going to suffer, she wasn't going to make them forget the son who was gone, or all the scary things in the newspaper. And that was going to make her feel bad. Feeling bad was something Lu always tried to avoid. Mama felt bad about a lot of things in her life, Lu could tell, but Mama just accepted it, and Lu couldn't see where that had gotten her.