She Earned The Choir Solo—Then Learned They Still Expected Her To Make The Younger Singer Sound Better

PART 2

They sang badly for twenty minutes.

Not disastrously. Harbor City was too experienced for disaster. But the sound kept leaning.

The first alto entrance arrived a fraction late. Tessa came into the feature with a clear, pretty tone and then tightened on the climb into the upper phrase. Claire heard herself compensate automatically, widening her vowel behind Tessa and placing the lower harmony exactly where Martin wanted it.

Martin stopped them.

“Better. Claire, give Tessa a little more underneath on ‘carry me home.'”

Claire lowered her folder.

“That’s not written.”

“It’s support.”

“Then write it.”

He stared at her.

“If I’m part of the arrangement, put me in the arrangement.”

June’s mouth twitched at the piano.

Martin said, “We’re still shaping it.”

“Good. Shape it honestly.”

Tessa turned around. “I can sing it again without Claire doubling me.”

Martin answered too quickly. “No need.”

Tessa’s eyebrows lifted.

They tried the passage again. This time Claire sang only the printed alto line. Tessa reached the upper phrase, lost the center of one note, recovered, and finished.

Nobody died.

Martin stopped them again.

He walked to the piano, spoke quietly with June, then returned.

“Let’s take ten,” he said.

Claire went to the hallway for water. Tessa followed her.

“I really did think you knew,” she said.

“I believe you.”

“I didn’t ask him to take it from you.”

“I believe that too.”

Tessa leaned against the wall. She was thirty-one, a middle-school music teacher, new to the choir that year, and very clearly wishing adulthood had included fewer rooms where other people’s decisions landed on her face.

“He asked me two weeks ago if I’d be comfortable being more visible for the benefit,” she said. “I said sure. Then he said you’d suggested I take the solo because you wanted to help me settle in.”

Claire twisted the cap back onto her bottle.

“I never suggested that.”

Tessa looked toward the rehearsal room.

“He also asked if you’d coach me on the high phrase.”

“Did he.”

“He said you like doing that.”

Claire almost said, I do.

That was the problem.

She did like helping. She liked hearing a chord lock because she had adjusted half an inch. She liked noticing when a nervous singer needed the starting consonant whispered before an entrance. She liked being dependable.

She did not like discovering that dependability had become an invisible job description.

Tessa said, “I thought the covering was your idea too.”

“What covering?”

“The way he wants you right behind me on the riser. He said the microphones would mostly pick me up in front, but you’d give the phrase body from behind.”

Claire looked through the open door at Martin, who was moving chairs near the front of the room.

“Mostly pick you up,” she repeated.

Tessa winced. “That’s what he said.”

Claire took another drink of water.

For the first time that night, the missing solo felt smaller than what had replaced it.