Sanctuary Secrets

*This one's pure comedy of ego and a couple of show-offs who found a way to keep showing off. Thanks for reading. I hope you laughed at Kurt's face when he cracked that note.*

Ari Tuttlehill was twenty-seven years old and she had a plan, which was rare for her because usually her plans fell apart by Tuesday. This one had survived a whole week. She had picked out her sweater, she had warmed up her voice in the car, and she had told herself three times on the drive over that this was not a big deal.

"Watch this," she said to Tyler as they walked into the fellowship hall at First United Methodist.

Tyler, who was twenty-eight and had learned not to ask questions when his wife used that tone, watched. Ari marched straight past the coffee urn, past the folding table with the donut box that was always half empty by six o'clock, and up to the corkboard by the kitchen window. There was a sign-up sheet pinned there. Easter solo, one slot, written in Blair's neat cursive.

Ari pulled the pen out of her purse and wrote her name in big letters. Ari Tuttlehill. She dotted the i with a little circle, which she never did, and she was already regretting the circle.

"That's my wife," she heard Tyler tell Dennis from the bass section, who had turned around to look. "She sings, apparently."

"I've been in this choir six weeks, Tyler," Ari called back without turning around. "You've heard me sing in the shower a few times."

"The shower has bad acoustics," he said. "I stand by it."

The fellowship hall smelled like coffee and floor wax, the way it always did. It was Wednesday night, choir practice, and the room was filling up the way it did, altos clustered by the window like they always were, the basses pretending they hadn't heard the coffee was ready. Ari took her seat in the second row of sopranos and smoothed her skirt and tried to look like a person who had not just ambushed a corkboard.

Blair Sanford came in at six sharp with her music folder under her arm. Blair was the choir director, forty-two, taught high school music during the day, and she had the specific tired look of a woman who had already broken up two arguments this week and it was only Wednesday. She set her folder on the scuffed piano and looked at the corkboard.

"So I see we have some interest in the solo," she said.

"I called dibs," said Kurt Sampson from the tenor section.

Kurt was fifty-two, a retired mailman, and he had the loudest voice in the room and possibly the county. He sang everything at full power, including the talking parts. He had been in the choir for eleven years and he considered the Easter solo his the way other people consider a parking spot theirs.

"Kurt, there's no dibs," Blair said. "There's a sign-up sheet. There have always been auditions."

"I said dibs three Sundays ago. People heard me."

"Which people?"

"People," Kurt said, and several tenors nodded along with him, which was a thing they did, like geese.

Blair closed her eyes for a second. Ari watched her do the math on her remaining years and then open them again. "Auditions are next week," Blair announced to the room. "Anyone who signed up sings the first sixteen bars of the Easter piece. I pick. My decision is final and I don't want to hear about it in the parking lot, Kurt."

"Fine," said Kurt. "I'll just sing now then. Warm up. Since we're all here."

"That is not how warming up works," Blair started, but Kurt was already standing, and when Kurt stood the whole tenor section braced like sailors.

He launched into the opening phrase of the Easter piece at a volume that made the piano hum. He was not bad, was the thing. He was loud and mostly on pitch and he acted like volume and pitch were the same job. Ari sat with her hands folded and waited. Tyler, two rows back with the other spouses who had wandered in, leaned forward and whispered something to Dennis that made Dennis laugh.

Kurt finished with a big arm gesture, the kind you can't do while holding a hymnal, so he'd set the hymnal down for it.

"Thank you, Kurt," Blair said flatly. "Ari, you signed up? Do you want to, or."

"I would love to," Ari said, and stood up.

Her heart was going, but she'd done thesis defenses in front of professors who hated her, so this was nothing. She was a marriage counselor, for crying out loud. She talked couples down off ledges four days a week. A church solo was not going to kill her.

She found her starting note off the piano and took a breath. The Easter piece had a climb in the sixth bar, a big step up that Kurt always powered through and everybody always winced. Ari had been practicing it in the shower, in the car, into the hairbrush Tyler got her as a joke. She took the phrase easy, let the climb build, and then hit the high note clean, dead center, no wobble, and held it long enough that the room went quiet the way rooms do.

Tyler grinned so wide it looked like it hurt.

Kurt scowled. It was a real scowl, the kind with eyebrows involved.

"Thank you, Ari," Blair said, and something in her voice might have been relief or might have been the first crack of hope. "That was lovely."

"She scooped into it," Kurt said, sitting down.

"I did not scoop."

"Sounded scooped to me. Didn't it sound scooped, Gary?"

"It sounded great, Kurt," said Gary wearily.

"Well. Next week is next week," Kurt said, and stood up again. "And this is a volume business, sweetheart. Church is big. Pews are far back. You need a voice that reaches the back pew." And he took the same phrase again, the climb, the high note, except this time he put his whole chest into it, all two hundred pounds of retired mailman, and the note cracked right down the middle. It came apart like a dropped plate.

The alto section giggled. All of them, together, the way altos do, and one of them snorted.

"That note is past you, Kurt," someone said. "It's been past you since 2019."