The Solo Mom Sang From My Tailgate

Mom’s voice carried on, up toward the verse that had broken her the year before. I could feel what was coming. I could feel the whole crowd feel it, a hundred and fifty breaths drawn in at the same moment and held.

“Truly He taught us to love one another.”

The shoes stood where they were. Then I heard her breathe in.

And under my mother’s line, low and plain, a voice came in that I had heard every Christmas of my life from the second row of a high school gym, a voice that had learned its alto part at our mother’s elbow in the kitchen, standing on a stool, forty-five years ago.

It slid up beside Mom’s like it had never been anywhere else.

I closed my eyes. When I opened them, Marcia was standing next to me.

She did not look at me. She was dressed for the program in her good coat, her hair done, her program folded in one hand, and she was looking at our mother with a face I had not seen on her since the day we carried Dad’s bed back out of the front room.

“His law is love,” Marcia sang, “and His gospel is peace.”

Mom still did not look at her. She did not need to. I watched my mother’s folded hands come apart, slowly, and I watched her right hand reach out sideways, the way you would reach for a railing, and find my sister’s.

They stood there like that. Two voices in the cold air, and the whole lot of them listening.

Then came the high note.

I’d been bracing for it for a whole year. I think everyone had.

“Fall on your knees.”

Mom went up for it. She went up the way she’d gone up for it forty-one times before. And at the top, a hair short of where the note belonged, her voice broke. A tiny, dry crack, right in the middle of the word “knees.”

I felt my whole body go cold.

Nobody in that lot made a sound. Nobody looked away, either. I saw the girl with the wheelchair take a step closer. I saw Fred Wiley’s chin come up. I saw Mrs. Tate lift one hand off her purse and press it flat to her chest.

And Marcia sang through it.

She did not rush. She did not cover. She simply took the note Mom had dropped and held it for her, held it right there in the air, and Mom found it again and stepped onto it like a stair.

“Oh hear the angel voices.”

They finished the verse together. Both of them were shaking by the last line. Neither of them stopped.

“O night divine. O night, O night divine.”

The final note faded off into the bare maples. There was a silence in that lot so complete that I could hear a flag rope clinking against the pole across the street.

And then somebody started to clap. I think it was the old man in the wheelchair. His hands came out from under the blanket, and they were big and spotted and slow, and the sound was like somebody knocking on a door.

The whole lot joined him. It rolled across the pavement and echoed off the brick. People were wiping their faces and not hiding it. Fred Wiley was saying “Well, I’ll be” over and over to nobody.

Mom stood in the middle of it with her hand still locked in my sister’s.

“Dorothy Ames!” somebody called from the back, and then a dozen people were calling it, and she tried to wave them off and could not, because her hand was full.