The Happy Hour Choir (7 page)

I leveled him with a stare.

He cleared his throat. “Sorry, what were you saying?”

“I was saying let's make it quick, and—”

“Ha! That's what
she
said to you,” Greg said as he elbowed his brother.

Now that one hit too close to the mark, so I raised an eyebrow at Pete, who immediately smacked his brother upside the head with a “Shut up, man. I told you to be serious.”

Taking in a deep breath, I forced myself to continue instead of telling them all to go to hell. “I'm going to try this one more time. The next person who interrupts me has to hand me his beer.”

That did the trick.

“We are going to sing number two-thirty-three, “Love Lifted Me.” We're going to sing it in unison, and we're going to like it.”

“Sorry I'm late.”

At the impossibly deep voice, I looked up to see a tall, lanky man who looked like a cross between an older Rick Astley and Grizzly Adams. It took me a minute to recognize him without his trucker hat, but it was Carl Davis, Tiffany's father.

I had never once heard Carl sing along with my songs, but if his speaking voice was any indication, he had the range I was looking for. “Can you sing bass?”

“Only thing I can sing,” he said, his gaze going to Tiffany.

I looked at Tiffany. She shrugged with a weak smile.

“Okay, then. Welcome to the choir, Carl.” Someone helped Carl find the proper page in the hymnal, and I played a gorgeous introduction. My choir gave me a lackluster effort.

“That wasn't half bad,” Bill said, probably as much to smooth my ruffled feathers as anything else.

“You think so?” asked Tiffany, her cheeks pink. Had she taken the test? Was she glowing with relief or motherhood?

“Okay. Let's try that again with harmony. We'll just see how it goes.”

The song's natural tempo picked them up, but they were also gaining confidence. I had them sing a couple more songs before we returned to the harmony on “Love Lifted Me.” First, I played individual parts. Greg took the higher tenor notes with Old Man MacGregor. Pete took the lower notes but couldn't sing quite as low as Carl, whose voice had been ravaged by cigarettes but was otherwise surprisingly in tune. Then we put it all together.

When we finished, we all sat there and let the song linger in silence. They didn't sing perfectly, but they sang well. Moments of pure harmony had jumped out at me, a promise of potential. And by the last verse? As Ginger would say, they all had even put a little heart into it.

“Good job,” I murmured, still amazed that my plan had worked to this point.

All of the components were there but the polish. Of course, I knew Ginger would sing alto with me any time she could. The Gates brothers and Carl needed to practice their line, but the song had spoken to us.

I felt it, deep in my bones. These were people who knew what it was like to sink, constantly bobbing, coughing, and sputtering through life. They weren't bad people; they were people with bad problems. They, like me, wanted to be lifted out of the angry waves just like the song promised.

Unlike Lottie Miller, who sang to hear herself sing, my little ragtag choir sang because they had to or just to help me out. They had bewildered me with how seriously they'd taken practice. The music had reeled them in from those angry waves, and the room was all smiles.

As folks stacked my contraband hymnals and finished their beers, Bill sat somberly in the corner. “I was going to joke and say y'all were just a happy hour choir, but you sang good. Real good.”

“Thank you,” Tiffany said, genuinely smiling for the first time in a week.

“The Happy Hour Choir?” Old Man MacGregor laughed his crazy cackle. “I like it. What do you say there, Beulah? Do we look like a Happy Hour Choir to you? I think we'd need a round of beers for that.”

“You heard the man, Bill, another round of beers on me for the Happy Hour Choir.” I grinned at them, marveling at the puff of pride in my chest. I'd thought making a choir would be like pulling teeth, but I was proud of them, so proud of all of them.

“Hey, Beulah,” Old Man MacGregor asked timidly. “Think we could play ‘In the Sweet By and By' sometime? That was always my mother's favorite.”

“That's a great idea, Mac.” And with that sentence I started a second tradition. Old Man MacGregor was no more. He became Mac. Just that night he started sitting up a little straighter and drinking a little less. “I'll see y'all tomorrow,” I said as I gathered the hymnals.

“Where're you going, Beulah?” Tiffany's wide eyes blinked at me.

“I'm going home,” I said. “I have a date with a lumpy couch and a persnickety old lady.”

I couldn't make it out the door, because Tiffany blocked my way. I stepped to the side, still weighed down by my stack of books. “Beulah, you were right. What am I going to do?”

“Why in the hell are you asking me?” I whispered.

“Because, you know . . .” She shifted from one foot to the other, her hands in her back pockets. We both knew she was asking me because I was one of the most famous unwed teen mothers in Yessum County history. “Baptist Preacher's Daughter Falls Spectacularly from Grace. Father Dies of a Broken Heart.” Those weren't actual newspaper headings, but they might as well have been.

My throat closed up. “I can't. I—”

“Please, Beulah. I can't tell Daddy.” She looked at Carl, the only person who'd willingly agreed to join the choir. “He's gonna blow a gasket because I'm sure to lose my scholarship when I tell the university.”

I closed my eyes and inhaled in search of an answer. Tiffany's softball scholarship. She had been poised to be the first Davis in the family to make it to college. Until now. I wanted to rant and rail and call her stupid, but I had walked at least half a mile in her shoes and couldn't toss stones at that particular glass house.

“What about your momma?” I asked, as if having a mother somehow made the situation better instead of worse. It hadn't for me.

“I don't know where she is,” Tiffany said softly. “South Carolina with some truck driver, last I heard.”

“Well, you don't have to keep the baby,” I said. On paper it seemed the logical choice, but I hadn't been able to do it.

She shook her head no. “I don't think I can do that.”

I wanted to brush past Tiffany, but she blocked my path.

“Tiffany, I don't know what to tell you. I wish I did.” I knew I should help her, but I couldn't. I certainly didn't know how to do teen pregnancy right.

I turned to go before she could stop me, and I ran smack into Luke just outside the door. The screen door slapped shut, and I almost came out of my shoes trying not to bowl him over.

Luke's hands landed on either side of my waist, their heat burning through my jeans. “Whoa, Beulah, what's the rush?”

Then I made the mistake of looking up into those blue eyes of his, eyes the color of the crashing, angry waves we had been singing about earlier. Not only was I especially susceptible to those eyes, but the grim set of his mouth suggested he had seen and/or heard the exchange between me and Tiffany.

“I've got to pick up supper for Ginger, and I'm already running late.”

“That's fine. It was a rhetorical question, so no need to explain.” He moved his hands to my shoulders and backed me up to take a look at what had been poking him in the chest. “Were you planning to sell those on the black market?”

I shifted the stack of hymnals to one hip. “No, just putting together your choir.”

“My choir, huh?” He stroked his chin, and I could hear rather than see the hint of stubble. “Let me help you with those.”

When he reached for the books, I flinched. He gently took them from me anyway.

“So why are you here, Preacher Man? If you keep crossing the parking lot, tongues are going to wag sure enough.”

“I'm going to see if any of your choir members are interested in starting a Bible study.”

I laughed out loud. “You're kidding me, right? I had to bribe and blackmail almost every one of those folks to do some singing, and you think you're going to walk in there and start a Bible study.”

He tossed the books in the car and slammed the door. “Not a joke. Quite a few unconventional Bible studies have cropped up all over the country in bars and taverns.”

“And you think this is going to work?”

“Maybe.”

That had to be one of his favorite words:
maybe
.

“So, you're going straight to the sinners to tell them about the saints? Sip some beer with tax collectors? Maybe hang out with the social lepers for a while?”

He folded his arms and leaned back against the car. The old junker had never looked so good. “You put together the choir. Maybe I'm taking a page from the Book of Beulah.”

I crammed my hands in my pockets because they needed something to do other than test the feel of the stubble on his chin. “What are you going to call this Bible study? Suds and Scripture? Longneck Theology? No, wait. I like what I said before.” I cleared my throat for dramatic effect. “You can call it the Sinners to Saints Bible Study: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Bible but Were Afraid to Ask.”

His eyes flashed. “Jesus didn't just preach in the synagogues, you know.”

“And you're not Jesus.”

The words came out before I could stop them, and they hung in the air, killing the moment. There'd been something sizzling between us, and I'd ruined it with my big mouth.

“Never claimed I was,” he said with a sad smile as he pushed away from my car. “You could join us, you know.”

Bible study was taking this whole thing too far. It was one thing for me to walk into the church each Sunday. I didn't need the church following me into my bar every Wednesday.

“No thanks. You have fun making saints out of those sinners.” With at least two self-avowed delinquents, a soon-to-be unwed mother, and an assortment of old men drinking beer, it was sure to be a barrel of laughs. He turned at the door and gave me a wry smile. “It'd be more fun if you were with me, but I'll see what I can do.”

“You don't need me for entertainment.”

“Come in if you change your mind,” he said before the door slapped behind him.

I stood in the parking lot, arms crossed, with a smug grin. They'd run him out of there on a rail. He wouldn't last ten minutes with that crowd. Fountain patrons had been proudly scaring off ministers for years. Those unsuspecting souls would be lured in by the promise of a tidy parsonage but ready to leave after the first truly rowdy Friday night.

Laughter floated through the screen door. I uncrossed my arms and leaned against the hood of my old Toyota. They had him on the ropes now. Any minute and he'd bust out of that door.

Any minute now . . .

More laughter, and this time I could've sworn he had joined in. They were traitors, and, even worse, Luke had managed to win them over in a quarter of the time it had taken me. Surely, he hadn't managed a truce between The Fountain and the church when no one had been able to do so in thirty years or more.

Sudden and eerie silence.

Praying? Really?

I crept to the screen door. Sure enough, each person had bowed his or her head except Carl. He stared at Tiffany in a way that made me uneasy. I backed away from the door slowly.

If Preacher Man had people praying in a bar, then I didn't want to hear any whining over choir practice. Next he'd have church members in The Fountain drinking beer.

Yeah, right.

Chapter 8

T
hat Sunday, the superintendent had the gall to show up a week early, a surprise visit no doubt moved up thanks to Miss Lottie's letters. Luke appeared quite calm on the outside, but he also wasn't looking at me. I knew I'd been out of line on Wednesday, but it was better for him to be mad at me. I'd felt sparks between us more than once, so I needed to pour a bucket of water on that fire before it started. Nothing good ever came of getting involved with me.

The Happy Hour Choir sat to the right of the piano in the choir loft. Tiffany's ample cleavage spilled forward, and Ginger frowned beside her as she toyed with the fringe on her shawl. If Ginger made it through the whole service without draping her shawl over Tiffany's chest, it was going to be heralded as a modern-day miracle.

The Gates brothers had shaved for the occasion, but they were wearing Western shirts and jeans—another source of contention with Ginger. She stood beside Mac, whose gray hair was still wet and plastered to his head even though his bushy beard stuck out. On the other side of Mac, Carl Davis stood tall. His hair and beard were both trimmed close to his face and head, but he wore his usual mournful expression complete with dark circles under his eyes. In his dress shirt with crumpled tie he reminded me of one of the presidents whose picture used to grace the American History classroom at Ellery High. Bill slouched in the corner and leaned against the unused organ, his red suspenders spanning his bloated belly. He wasn't singing but he had declared himself an unofficial mascot.

Superintendent Dartmouth, a short, wrinkled man with beady black eyes, stared through my ragtag singers as though they reflected poorly on the minister he had come to see. Luke pulled at his tie again, and his eyes darted to Lottie Miller. Her handbells hadn't arrived yet, and I'd heard she was having more trouble coming up with enough people to play them than I had had filling the choir loft. She sat on the second row, puffed up like an angry hen because she had missed her chance to show off.

“Our opening hymn is ‘Love Lifted Me,' ” Jason Utley managed. I turned around to face the piano and almost said a silent prayer before I caught myself. My hands had a mind of their own, playing a jazzy introduction before I could rein them in. I tended to get ornamental when nervous, which, based on the holes in my back, was something I should have warned Luke about.

Then the Happy Hour Choir started to sing.

They sang as I had instructed, braving the new harmonies I'd taught them. We breezed through the first verse and were halfway through the second when the last part of the verse grabbed me:
“Love so mighty and so true merits my soul's best songs. . . .”

Half-exhilarated and half-terrified, I realized I was giving my soul's best songs. My fingers guided the Happy Hour Choir through the rest of the song as my mind worked over words that promised love.

God's love. Romantic love. Love for neighbors.

Love. Love. Love. “All You Need Is Love.”

I narrowly stopped myself from segueing into the Beatles just as the Happy Hour Choir took the last time through the chorus a cappella. I turned to see their profiles, this motley crew of haggard faces with angelic voices. Sure, someone missed a note every now and again—especially the Gates brothers, who were trying to navigate the middle harmony—but their rough edges lent credence to the song.

Silence swallowed the memory of the last note. I turned to see the congregation, and the creak of the piano stool brought everyone to life. Miss Lola dabbed at the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief, but Miss Lottie looked away rather than meet my gaze.

Luke cleared his throat to stop the buzz and hiss of whispered voices then smoothly transitioned into joys and concerns, neither of which were very popular with a stranger present. I played a jazzy version of “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” as the ushers took the plate around the sanctuary. In for a penny, in for a pound, I figured. No doubt Luke was getting the urge to have one of his little chats with me. Maybe he would say the word
maybe
at least ten more times.

Only the knowledge that Superintendent Dartmouth was watching me kept me from groaning when Luke started reading the story of the prodigal son. He started with the older brother's perspective. The congregation nodded with his points; they followed all of the rules, after all. Lottie Miller's head lolled steadily over her double chin. She would never do something as stupid as taking her inheritance and blowing it on wild living. Thomas Dartmouth nodded, but his eyes fluttered. He wasn't much younger than Ginger and probably shared her opinion on how it wouldn't matter much to miss a sermon or two on the back end of his life.

I shifted in my little seat by the piano. I had been trying to daydream about something other than the sermon, but I couldn't help but think of that younger son. Maybe he hadn't meant to go live a life of dissolution. Maybe he'd planned to start his own business to make his daddy proud. Maybe he'd fallen into the party lifestyle completely by accident because his mother was entirely too strict with him and he was searching for meaning somewhere. Oh, wait, that was me.

I shivered. I knew what it was like to have disapproval weigh heavily on you. You wanted to shake it off, to be free. Sometimes in the process of breaking free, you accidentally broke something else, and more disapproval landed heavy.

“Beulah?” Jason Utley's hissed whisper brought me back to reality where the entire church, the Happy Hour Choir, and the superintendent all looked to me to start the last hymn. I jumped to the piano so quickly I turned over the stool. A collective gasp went up from the crowd, and my embarrassment burned hot on my cheeks.
Inhale and exhale,
Ginger had taught me.
Close your eyes and feel the music.

I righted the seat and dug deep for some belated grace before sitting. Then I nodded to the Happy Hour Choir. They turned to the page for the invitation, a page I had marked for each and every one of them ahead of time with a tiny hot-pink sticky note.

“Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling.”
Tiffany's delicate soprano wafted over the sanctuary alone for the entire first verse, then the harmony of the Happy Hour Choir bowled over even me.

No one in the sanctuary moved. Thomas Dartmouth started to clap. Everyone looked at him as if he'd lost his ever-loving mind because County Line Methodist didn't do anything as rowdy as applaud. After a moment's hesitation, one person joined his applause. Then another and another.

I looked at my choir, and they all blushed. Every last one of them had a hint of color in his or her cheeks, including Bill, who hadn't done any singing. Then I looked behind me at the attendance board. Only thirty-two people had been in church for that beautiful moment, nowhere near enough to keep County Line open.

But it was ten more than the week before.

 

I was still humming while gathering up my contraband hymnals when Tiffany snuck up on me.

“Beulah, I really need to talk to you,” she whispered.

I turned around to see a trickle of blood coming from one corner of her lip and a pink puffiness around her left eye that was going to become quite the shiner.

“What in the blue hell happened to you?”

Tiffany started blubbering before I could get the story out of her. “Daddy was in such a good mood, and we were standing behind the church. So I told him about, you know.”

As if not calling a pregnancy a pregnancy would somehow undo it.

“And he hit me upside the head. He told me smart girls were more careful about that sort of thing and what were the neighbors going to think and—”

I wrapped my arms around her, tamping down panic. I needed to get away from her because she reminded me of my own panic the day I finally admitted I wasn't suffering from food poisoning after all. I gently pushed her out to arm's length. “Okay. You're going to call the police—”

“No!”

“What do you mean, no?”

“Please, I can't call them. I can't. I don't have any girlfriends. All my aunts are in Texas, and Momma is who knows where. What am I going to do?”

“You're going to come home with us. That's what you're going to do.”

Both Tiffany's head and mine snapped to where Ginger stood at the foot of the stairs that led to the choir loft.

“And I guess we're going to need someone else to sing bass,” she muttered under her breath as she hobbled toward the front door.

I scrambled out of the loft and ran after Ginger, not caring much that I'd left Tiffany alone in the loft. “You can't mean that.”

By this time we were outside in the empty gravel parking lot, so she shielded her eyes to answer me. “Well, I'm sure not going to let a guy who hits pregnant women, let alone his own daughter, sing in
my
choir.”

My breath came out in a whoosh. “No, I mean the part about Tiffany.”

“What are you trying to say, Beulah Gertrude Land?”

I gritted my teeth at the sound of the name my mother gave me. “I can't live with Tiffany. She's going to be, you know, and—”

Ginger held up one hand and looked out at the cemetery but closed her eyes as she did. “And where would you be if I had said I didn't want to be reminded of my miscarriage?”

My mouth hung open, and the world spun around me. She'd never told me about wanting children or about losing children. She hadn't mentioned being married, either, so . . .

“So, you too?” I took a seat on the last few steps and Ginger joined me. Up in the choir loft Tiffany stood frozen, waiting.

Ginger heaved a ragged sigh. “We went down to Corinth for a quickie wedding before he shipped off to the Pacific. He didn't come home.”

How could I have lived with her for all this time and not known this story?
Because you were so busy keeping Ginger out of your business that you didn't think to ask about hers.

“After I lost the baby I was sad, but I told myself John and I could try again.” Here she grabbed my hand. “We didn't get that chance.”

I couldn't find the words to tell her how sorry I was for being a hateful little brat all those weeks before our New Orleans trip and then again after I lost my little Hunter.

“It was hard for me to watch you get bigger every day then deliver your child, all pink and rosy. It was even harder to lose him when I'd already told myself we'd made it through the hard part, the part I hadn't been able to make it through.”

Goose bumps covered every square inch of my flesh despite the hot June sun. She'd hidden all of these feelings from me. She had tamped down her panic while I carried Hunter to term. She'd squashed down her own grief to make sure I came out of mine alive.

I looked at Tiffany. She stood at the altar, wanting to come to us but no doubt worrying about what we were saying about her. And of the three of us, I was the coward. Ginger had endured her miscarriage and lost husband with grace. Tiffany followed me doggedly, doing what she felt she needed to do to keep her baby safe, even though that baby had cost her more than one dream.

The time had come to quit wallowing in self-pity and pay it forward. There was only one question left to ask:

“But are you sure
you
want to go through all of this again?”

Ginger shrugged. “Third time's a charm? Besides, I'm due to kick the bucket either way.”

I cringed at her words, but I didn't have it in me to have that discussion, not when my knees still wobbled from her earlier bombshell.

“C'mon, Tiffany, let's get some lunch,” I called over the pews.

She stood taller with hope and trotted over to join us. Just as she reached me, Luke appeared from the back of the church. “Headed out to lunch? I thought we might celebrate our little bump in attendance.”

Tiffany froze in place, keeping the back of her head to Luke. Her eyes widened in fear that he would come over and see what had happened. Now that she was directly in front of me I could see how much more her left eye had swollen. Her lip pouted unnaturally, too.

“I'm thinking this may be a day to eat in,” I said.

“Oh. In that case, you ladies have fun.”

I winced.
It's for the best. You need to be at least five hundred feet from that man at all times.

Besides, Tiffany clearly didn't need to be out in public at the moment.

“Come on, let's get you some lunch,” I said as I led her outside.

When we got to the Caddy, I had the weirdest sense of déjà vu as she slid into the backseat. From the driver's seat, Ginger took a look at her through the rearview mirror, and her eyes widened at the sight of both swollen eye and swollen lip. “Why don't we call for a pizza today?”

“Pizza going to work for you, Tiffany?”

She nodded yes, but her complexion turned gray and her hand went to her mouth.

“Don't worry,” I heard myself say. “We can find you something else if that turns your stomach.”

She nodded, closed her eyes, and laid her head back against the seat. I knew what she was thinking, praying, even:
Please don't let me throw up on this leather upholstery.

After all, I had been there once before.