Audiobook - Fiction
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
four nights a week. Angela O'Meara played the piano in the cocktail lounge at the Warehouse Bar and Grill. The cocktail lounge come odious and comfortable with its sprawl of couches. Plump leather chairs and low tables was right there. As soon as you walk through the heavy doors of the old establishment, the dining room was farther back, with windows overlooking the water. Early in the week, the lounge tended to be rather empty. But by Wednesday night and continuing a straight through Saturday, the place was filled with people. When you stepped from the sidewalk through the thick oak doors, there was the sound of piano notes, tingling and constant. And the talk of the people who were slung back on their couches or sitting forward in their chairs or leaning over the bar seemed to accommodate itself to this. So the piano was not so much background music as it was a character in the room. In other words, the townspeople of Crosby Main had for many years now taken into their lives. The cocktail music and presence of NGO Mira Angie, in her youth, had been a lovely woman to look at with her wavy red hair and perfect skin, and in many ways this was still the case. But now she was into her fifties and her hair pinned back loosely with Combs, was died, a color you might consider just a little too red. And her figure, while still graceful, had a thickening of its middle. The more noticeable, perhaps because she was otherwise quite thin. But she was long waisted, and when she sat at the piano bench, she did so with the ease of a ballet dancer, albeit past her prime. Her jawline had gone soft and uneven, and the wrinkles near her eyes were quite pronounced. But they were kind wrinkles. Nothing harsh, it seemed, had happened to this face. If anything, her face revealed itself to clearly in a kind of simple expectancy no longer appropriate for a woman of her age. There was, in the tilt of her head, the slight messiness of the very bright hair, the open gaze of her blue eyes Ah, quality that could, in other circumstances, make people uncomfortable. Strangers, for example, who passed her in the Cook's corner shopping mall, were tempted to sneak an extra peek or two as it waas Angie was a familiar figure to those who lived in town. She was just NGO Mira, the piano player, and she had been playing at the warehouse for many years. She had been in love with the town's first selectman, Malcolm Moody, for a number of years as well. Some people knew this. Others did not. On this particular Friday night, Christmas was a week away, and not far from the baby grand piano stood a large fir tree heavily decorated by the restaurant staff. Its silver tinsel swung slightly every time the door to the outside was opened and different colored lights the size of eggs shown amidst the various balls and strings of popcorn and cranberries that adorned the slightly bent downward branches of the tree. Angie was wearing a black skirt and a pink nylon top that parted at her collarbone, and there was something about the tiny string of pearls she wore and the pink top and the bright red of her hair that seemed to glow along with the Christmas tree, as if she were some extension of its festivities. She had arrived, as she always did at precisely six oclock, smiling her vague, childlike smile chewing on mints, saying hello to the bartender, Joe, and to Betty the waitress, then tucking her handbag and coat near the end of the bar. Joe, a thickset man who had tended that bar for many years and had the watchful eye of any good bartender, had come to the private conclusion that NGO Miro was really very frightened when she showed up at work each night. This would account for the whiff of booze on her minty breath, if you happen to be close enough to smell it. And it accounted for the fact that she never took her 20 minute break, although she was allowed to buy the music union and encouraged to buy the warehouse owner. I hate to get started again, she said to Joe one night, and that's when he put it together. That Angie must have suffered from a stage fright