Margaret's Voice

What We Refused to Say

Chapter 23: Margaret's Voice

The flyer sat on the refrigerator for nine days before he realized it was not decorative.

COUNTY SUMMER CHORALE

Open to all adult voices. Rehearsals Tuesdays, 7:00 p.m. First Methodist Fellowship Hall. No audition.

The words had been held to the fridge by a magnet shaped like a peach and partly covered by the electric bill. Daniel had seen them three or four times without understanding they implied action.

On the tenth day he watched Margaret tear off the registration strip at the bottom and write her name in blue ink.

"You're doing it," he said.

She looked up from the counter.

"Yes."

"I didn't realize you'd decided."

"I didn't realize I'd need a public declaration."

"That's fair."

She folded the strip in half and set it beside her keys.

"I miss singing," she said. "Not church exactly. Singing."

"I know."

She gave him a look that was not unkind.

"No," she said. "You know I used to sing. That isn't quite the same thing."

He let that stand.

The first rehearsal was the following Tuesday.

Margaret wore black pants, a soft gray sweater, and the expression of someone trying very hard not to look like a person returning to something that had once mattered. She brought a water bottle, a pencil, and the kind of plain black folder people buy when they expect to be given music by strangers.

"Do you want me to drive separately," Daniel asked in the driveway.

"No. I don't know where the building entrance is, and if I circle that parking lot twice I'll decide it's a sign from the Lord or parking design and go home before finding out which."

"All right."

They drove to First Methodist under a low pink evening sky, the air thick with the beginning of summer and the smell of cut grass from lawns all over town making the same seasonal effort at once.

First Methodist sat two blocks off Main in a brick building that had somehow managed to look both older and less self-conscious than Grace Community. A white steeple. A side lawn with a rusted swing set. A signboard with the sermon series title done in black plastic letters and no graphic design assistance.

Margaret looked at the fellowship hall doors and took one breath deeper than the others.

"Do you want me to come in with you," Daniel asked.

"No."

"All right."

"But don't go far. I may come back out in twelve minutes swearing about altos."

"I can work with that."

She took the folder and the water bottle and got out.

Daniel stayed in the parking lot with the windows cracked and the day's last claim notes open on his lap. He made it through seven lines before the first sound drifted out through the fellowship hall doors when somebody opened them from inside.

Piano. Scales. Then voices, scattered and human, not yet music.

He set the pad down.

At 7:18 he was still in the truck.

At 7:24 he got out and went inside.

The fellowship hall smelled like coffee, lemon cleaner, and old varnish. Folding chairs had been arranged in semicircles facing an upright piano and a woman in a red scarf who looked to be in her sixties and entirely uninterested in modesty as a leadership style.

"Again, altos, you're not apologizing for the note," she said, striking a chord with more force than the piano deserved. "You're singing it."

Margaret was in the second row, third chair from the left, eyes on the page. He had not heard her voice clearly by itself in years. Not because she had hidden it. Because church had trained everyone to disappear inside group singing if they wished to. Here the room was smaller, the parts more exposed, and there she was inside it, reading carefully, mouth shaping vowels with the concentration of someone who remembered the work even if she did not yet trust the instrument.

Daniel sat in the back near the coat rack and said nothing.

The director, whose name turned out to be Amelia Kincaid, ran them through warmups, then a folk arrangement Daniel half-recognized from somewhere older than radio, then a hymn harmonized sideways enough that the tune kept disappearing and returning with new edges.

"Tenors, do not drag your private burdens through measure seventeen," Amelia said at one point. "The rest of us already have our own."

The room laughed.

Margaret laughed too.

The sound of that, more than the singing itself at first, altered something in him.

He had heard her laugh before. This one belonged entirely to a room he was not managing and a role he did not occupy.

He stayed through the whole rehearsal.

Once Margaret glanced up and saw him at the back. She did not startle or wave. She just let her eyes rest on him a half-second longer than necessary and then returned to the page.

At 8:41 the choir packed up in the slow shuffling rhythm of middle-aged and older people returning pencils, tucking music into folders, and asking one another where the bathrooms were as if that knowledge could wait no longer.

Margaret came down the aisle toward him with color in her face he had not seen there when they arrived.

"You came inside."

"Yes."

"Why?"

He thought about dressing the answer up and didn't.

"I wanted to hear you."

She held his gaze a moment.

"How was it?"

"You weren't apologizing for the note."

Something warm and surprised moved across her face.

"Amelia would like you."

"I'm afraid of her already."

"Reasonable."

They walked out together into the parking lot. The night had thickened. Crickets had started in the shrubs. Inside the fellowship hall someone was still stacking chairs with the hollow percussion of volunteer labor.

"Do you want pie," Daniel asked.

"At 8:45."

"Yes."

"Obviously."

They drove to the twenty-four-hour bakery off Main that sold pie by the slice and coffee strong enough to flatten sentiment if it started gathering.

Margaret ordered coconut cream. Daniel got pecan.

For a while they ate without talking much. The bakery was nearly empty except for a college-age couple in scrubs sharing fries and one older man in a booth reading a tractor supply catalog with tragic seriousness.

Finally Daniel said, "How was it, really?"

Margaret set down her fork.

"At first," she said, "like I had arrived late to a place that used to belong to me. Then after fifteen minutes, like it had never belonged to me and that might be better."

He listened.

"Nobody there needed me to symbolize anything," she said. "I was not the pastor's wife without the pastor. I was not the injured party. I was not the woman who stayed respectable through a mess." She looked down at the pie and then back at him. "I was an alto who came in flat on one entrance and fixed it by the second pass."

Daniel nodded.

"Good."

"It was."

She drank some coffee.

"Also terrifying."

"Because."

"Because I realized how much I had missed one thing without admitting it even to myself. And when you miss something that long, getting near it again makes you angry in directions that don't organize well."

"At church."

"Partly." She gave a small shake of the head. "Also at myself. For letting one room confiscate the category."

He sat with that.

"You used to sing around the house," he said after a moment.

"I know."

"You don't much now."

"No."

"Why?"

Margaret looked at him a long second.

"Because for years it felt like anything beautiful in me would eventually be recruited for public use."

The bakery's refrigerator unit clicked on behind the counter. The couple in scrubs laughed at something neither of them tried to retell.

Daniel lowered his eyes briefly to the pie plate.

"I don't think I knew that."

"No," she said. "You knew I was tired. You knew Sundays took too much out of me. You knew I said yes with the wrong part of my face. But no, I don't think you knew that sentence."

He nodded.

"I'm glad you said it."

"I know."

They finished the pie. On the way out, Margaret tucked the black folder under her arm with an ease that had not been there in the driveway.

In the truck, before he started the engine, Daniel asked, "Are you going back next week?"

Margaret looked at the fellowship hall across the street, lit now only in the kitchen at the back.

"Yes," she said. "Even if Amelia humiliates the altos again."

"She seems capable."

"Very."

He pulled onto Main.

At the red light by the pharmacy, Margaret looked out the passenger window and then said, almost lightly, "You know what the strange part was."

"What?"

"I wasn't thinking about Grace while I sang."

He glanced at her.

"At all?"

"Not during the songs."

"That sounds like more."

Margaret rested her hand on the folder.

"Yes," she said. "Maybe it does."

When they got home, she left the folder on the kitchen table instead of putting it away immediately.

The gesture was small enough to mean nothing to anyone else.

He noticed it anyway.