Altar Call

Nikki Danner was fifty-three years old, and she had learned something in the six weeks since Maya moved out. She learned that an apartment can be too quiet. Not quiet like peace, either. Quiet like a hangar with the engines shut down and everybody gone home.

She flies cargo for a living, long-haul runs mostly, and she could handle silence at thirty thousand feet just fine. That was different. That was silence with a job attached. The silence in her apartment was just silence, sitting there on the couch where Maya used to sit, eating the leftovers out of the fridge, hogging the good blanket.

Twelve years, the two of them. She'd met Maya when she was forty-one and Maya was thirty-nine, at a crew hotel bar in Tulsa of all places, and she'd moved her in within a year because it just made sense. Then six weeks ago it stopped making sense, and she carried two suitcases to a cab, and it was over. No yelling. That was the worst part, honestly. Even a fight would have been something to listen to.

So she started walking.

Every evening after her shift or on her days off, she'd put on her jacket and walk the neighborhood like she had a reason. And she did have a reason, though she never said it out loud. Three blocks east of her building sat St. Jude's Community Hall, a big brick thing with a basement, and on Tuesday and Thursday nights the volunteer choir rehearsed there. You could hear them from the sidewalk if the windows were cracked. Thirty-some people singing scales and butchering an anthem, laughing at themselves, shushing each other.

Human voices. That was the entire reason. She just wanted to hear people talking and singing and being alive somewhere near her.

The first week she only stood on the corner and listened. The second week she walked the full loop past the hall twice. By the third week she was standing in the entryway like an idiot, and some man with a clipboard, a deacon type, gave her the once-over through the door glass.

"Ma'am, are you coming in or..." he asked through the crack, and she almost said no.

"Is it open to anybody?" she asked instead.

"It's a community hall," he said, like that answered everything. "Rehearsal's downstairs. I'm Samson Abrams, I keep the place running. You'll want to sign the sheet."

So she signed the sheet and sat in the back row of folding chairs, and nobody made a thing of it, which was exactly what she wanted. A couple of the sopranos nodded at her. A bass player with a bad knee asked if she was new and she said sort of, and that was the end of it. She sat and listened to people breathe together and sing together, and something in her chest unclenched a little each time.

She went Tuesdays and Thursdays for three weeks. She hadn't sung a note.

* * *

The fourth Tuesday of her attendance, she got there early because her rotation flipped and she'd been awake since four. The basement smelled like coffee and old carpet, and the chairs were already out in that loose horseshoe shape choirs love. Nikki took her usual spot in the back row and waited.

And that's when she noticed the woman.

Not a choir member, apparently. She was set up at a long worktable off to the side, surrounded by instrument cases, tuning a violin with the kind of focus people usually reserve for defusing things or painting them. Short gray-streaked hair, sleeves rolled up, hands that looked like they'd done ten thousand repairs. Nikki guessed mid-forties.

Then the choir director called for the breathing warm-up, the one where everybody inhales for four counts and lets it out slow, and the woman at the table looked up.

Their eyes locked. Just like that. Across the whole basement, over the heads of thirty breathing amateurs, this stranger looked straight at Nikki and held it through the entire four-count exhale.

Nikki's first thought was, well, she's caught me staring. Her second thought was that the woman had been staring first. Her third thought was that she didn't mind either one, which surprised her, because six weeks of hollow tends to file that kind of thing right out of you.

"Good, good, from the diaphragm, people," the director was saying. "Miss Koch, you'll play us in?"

Koch. The woman picked up the violin and played a clean rising scale, and her voice, when she counted off, was low and rough in a way that did something to the back of Nikki's neck. Not a choir voice. A workshop voice. A voice that had argued about wood grain with strangers and won.

Nikki watched her the whole rehearsal, more than she watched the choir, if she was honest. The woman fixed a cracked bridge on a student's violin during the break, told a tenor his posture was ruining his sound, drank her coffee like it was a chore she resented. And twice more during the rehearsal, she looked up at Nikki again. Just looked. No smile, no frown. Like she was checking a measurement.

The choir ran the anthem three times and got it wrong in three different places, and everybody laughed about it, and Nikki sat in the back row feeling warmer than she had in six weeks and not examining why.

* * *

Rehearsal ended at nine. People clustered by the stairs saying their goodbyes, asking after somebody's hip surgery, and Nikki hung back the way she always did, planning to slip out with the last of them.

Except the woman with the violin was already in the hallway when Nikki came up the stairs. Standing there. Waiting, it looked like. Arms crossed, instrument case at her feet like luggage.

"So," the woman said. "You've been here four weeks."

"Have I?" Nikki said, which was a dumb answer, and the woman clearly thought so too.

"Counting Tuesdays and Thursdays, yes. Four weeks. You sit in the back row, you never sing, you never talk to the sopranos who keep trying to adopt you, and you leave first." She said it flat, not mean. Like reading off a parts list. "I'm Amina Koch. I fix the instruments. I also build them, upstairs, well, across the alley. My shop's over there. I live above it."

"Nikki Danner," Nikki said. "I fly cargo. Long-haul."

"Good for you. So here's my question, Nikki Danner." Amina uncrossed her arms and then crossed them again, like she couldn't decide what her hands were for. "Are you here to sing, or are you here to watch?"

The question hit like a checklist item. No sympathy in it, no soft landing. Nikki found she respected that more than she could say.

"Watch," she said. "Definitely watch. I can't carry a tune in a suitcase."

"That's not a requirement. Half of them can't either, that's not the point of a community choir." Amina picked up her case. "But fine. Watch. That's allowed. What I want to know is why."

"Why what?"

"Why watch here. You could sit in any coffee shop in this neighborhood and hear people. You picked a church basement choir you don't sing in, every week, for a month." She tilted her head. "That's not nothing. That's a person missing something."

Nikki laughed, and it came out rougher than she meant. "That obvious, huh?"

"I build instruments. I notice what things are for." Amina shouldered the case. "Look, I'm not going to pry, it's none of my business. But I'm heading down to my shop in the sub-basement before I lock up, the old boiler room under this one. You want to see something actually interesting instead of watching the tenors miss their mark again, come on down. If not, no harm, good night, the door's behind you."

She turned and headed for the stairwell before Nikki answered, which Nikki figured was the whole trick of it. No pressure. You could walk out the front door and that would be the end of it, and nobody would ever bring it up.

Nikki stood in the hallway for about four seconds.

Then she followed.

The stairwell down was narrow and lit by one of those bulbs that hums, and Amina took the steps like she'd taken them ten thousand times, which she probably had. At the bottom was a big room that looked half like storage and half like a workshop somebody had lost an argument to. Folding tables stacked against one wall. Boxes marked HYMNALS 1998. And in the middle of it, a proper workbench under a good lamp, wood shavings in a bin, clamps hanging in ranks, and three unfinished violin bodies laid out on felt like patients.

"Okay," Nikki said, looking around. "This is not what I expected under a church."

"What did you expect? Folding chairs and God?" Amina set her case down and snapped the latches. "St. Jude's rents me the corner of it. Cheapest workshop in the neighborhood, and the only complaint I ever get from Samson Abrams upstairs is 'is that a drill or thunder.' I've been down here eleven years."

"Eleven years," Nikki said. "You build all these?"

"I build what people need. Repairs mostly, keeps the lights on. Builds when there's time." Amina pulled the lamp cord and the workbench lit up warm and yellow, and she looked at Nikki across it with that same flat measuring stare from the warm-up. "So. You came down. You want the tour, or do you want to tell me what a cargo pilot who never sings is doing at choir rehearsal every Tuesday and Thursday?"

Nikki leaned against the doorframe of the stairwell, because her legs were suddenly unsure about the rest of the room.

"Both, maybe," she said. "Is that allowed?"

"Everything's allowed down here," Amina said, and reached for the nearest unfinished violin. "Start with the why. I'll show you the spruce while you talk."

Nikki pushed off the doorframe and came over to the bench. "The why is boring. Six weeks ago my partner moved out. Twelve years, gone in an afternoon. And I couldn't stand my apartment, so I started walking, and this place was three blocks east, and now it's a habit."

Amina didn't say oh, I'm sorry, or any of the other things people said. She picked up a curl of spruce shaving and turned it in her fingers.

"Twelve years," she said. "That's not boring, that's arithmetic. So now you sit in a back row once or twice a week and watch strangers breathe together. Makes sense to me. Sound fills a room even when you don't make any."

"You really talk like that all the time?"

"Like what?"

"Like everything's an instrument."

"Everything is an instrument," Amina said, and smiled for the first time all night, and it changed her whole face. "Now hold this. Feel the grain!"

Nikki held the unfinished body of the violin. It was lighter than she expected, almost nothing, and warm from the lamp.

"So what's the why of you, then?" she asked. "You fix everybody's junk and live alone over a guitar shop. What's that arithmetic?"

"Forty-seven years of doing exactly what I want, mostly," Amina said. "Never married. Never wanted the whole package deal. One affair, four years ago, a cellist, it ran its course and we were both fine. People act like that's a tragedy. It's not a tragedy. It's a Tuesday."

"And you notice people in the back row."

"I notice everything down here. It's my basement." Amina took the violin body back and set it down. "Okay, Nikki Danner. Honest answer. I've watched you for four weeks too. You walk in like you're reporting for a shift and you leave like you're escaping one. And I've been thinking, that woman should come down to my shop sometime, and then I kept not asking, and tonight I asked. So."

"So what?"

"So nothing. That's it. Tour's over unless you want more tour."

Nikki laughed again, that rough one. "You are the strangest flirt I've ever met."

"Is that what I'm doing?"

"I don't know, is it? Because I genuinely can't tell."

Amina set down the plane she was holding. She wiped her hands on her apron, slowly, and looked at