The Solo Her Grandmother Tried to Stop

Eleven years old in a red dress

Nora did not say a word for the first three blocks. She stared out her window at the houses going by.

Then at the first four-way stop she bent over and started working her feet into those sneakers.

Her hands were shaking so badly she could not get the strap through the buckle.

I reached over and did it for her while the truck idled, and the man behind us waited without honking, bless him.

“What if Grandma’s right?” she said. Her voice was very small. “What if I get up there and I forget the second verse? It’s the hard one. I always mess up the part about the land office.”

I thought about that for a whole block before I answered her.

I wanted to tell her the truth, not just the thing that would make her feel better for the next ten minutes.

“Then you’ll freeze in front of a gym full of people who love you,” I said.

“And Mr. Ahlberg will play the line again, and you’ll start over. That’s all that happens. Nobody in that gym wants you to fail.”

She looked at me sideways. “Grandma said they’d laugh.”

“Some little brother in the third row might,” I said. “Little brothers laugh at everything. You’ve heard your cousins. That’s not the same as the town laughing at you.”

That got the smallest smile out of her. She pulled down the visor mirror and tried to fix her hair, and I told her to leave it, that Mr. Ahlberg would have a mom backstage with bobby pins.

“Did you leave work?” she asked me then. “Are you going to get in trouble?”

“Abe is running my scale,” I said. “He told me to go. He’s raised four girls. He understands about solos.”