The Choir's Secret Ingredient

Luca was twenty-eight years old, recently divorced, and standing in a church basement holding a sheet of hymn numbers like it was a parking ticket.

"This is insane," he told Harriet, who was arranging chairs in a crooked half circle and ignoring him completely. "Harriet. I cook for a living. I stand in a hot kitchen for ten hours a day. Wednesday nights are my only night off and I'm spending them in a fellowship hall that smells like floor wax."

"It smells like community," Harriet said. She was fifty-nine, his late mother's best friend since their college days, and she had the guilt-tripping powers of a woman who had known him since he was in footed pajamas. "Sit down, Luca. Tenor section, third row. Your mother sang alto right there, that exact chair, for nineteen years."

"Great, so I'll be sitting in her ghost. Wonderful."

"Your mother's ghost would like you to stop moping and sing. Now, do you have your folder? The folders are by the coffee urn. Mind the urn, Deacon Al still hasn't fixed the drip and it scalded poor Edna in March."

Luca fetched a folder. It smelled like old paper and someone else's cough drops. The church was First Unity, the same drafty brick building he'd been dragged to every Sunday until he left for culinary school, and nothing in it had changed except the carpet, which had gotten worse. He flipped through the folder while Harriet fussed with the piano bench. The choir trickled in around them, a mix of retirees, a couple of guys from the hardware store, and a woman with a baby on her hip who was already negotiating with the toddler about quiet time.

And then the door at the top of the steps opened and Luca forgot what a hymn was.

A woman came down carrying two boxes of casserole, of course casserole, this was First Unity, and she had dark hair pinned up with a pencil and a laugh that carried across the whole hall. She was maybe thirty-one. She was wearing a green sweater with a stain on the cuff that she clearly didn't care about. She set the boxes down, said something to the baby woman that made her snort, and pushed the pencil back into her hair.

Luca knew her. Mia. Harriet's kid. He hadn't seen her in years, not since before culinary school, back when she'd been quiet and kept to herself and he'd been eighteen with his head in a stockpot and zero business noticing anybody. She'd come out and transitioned at twenty-three, his mother had told him proudly over the phone one Sunday, like it was good news, which it was, and then his mother had passed and everything got scattered and he'd just... lost track.

She was beautiful now. That was the inconvenient part. That was the part his brain kept snagging on while he stood there holding a folder like an idiot.

"Mia!" Harriet called. "Come meet Luca, Ellen's boy, he's back in town!"

"Oh no," Luca said under his breath.

Mia came over. Up close she smelled like dish soap and cold air, and she looked at him with a polite, evaluating expression, the way you look at a substitute teacher. "Hi. Luca, right? Mom's mentioned you. You're a chef?"

"Uh, yeah. Yeah. Line cook at the Alder Street grill now. I used to run a bistro over in Marshfield. You look... you sing, right? I heard you sing?"

"I haven't started yet," she said, and there was a beat where the baby woman started fussing loudly across the room and Mia's mouth twitched like she was fighting something. "Wow. Good save."

"I'm rusty," Luca said, which was true in every possible way.

"Mm." She tucked the pencil deeper into her hair. "Welcome to the tenors. We're desperate. Roger can't hit anything above a G anymore and he refuses to admit it."

"I heard that!" Roger called from the front row.

"Good," Mia called back, and went off to do whatever choir director's daughters do, which apparently involved moving chairs and telling people where to stand, and Luca stood there feeling as if he had just put his hand on a stove and was waiting for the burn to show up.

Practice itself was fine. Mostly. He could carry a tune, his mother had seen to that before he could drive, and the tenors were a low-drama bunch. But the whole hour, his eyes kept drifting across the half circle to where Mia sat with the altos, and twice she caught him and he had to pretend he was reading the hymnal very intently. Hymn 212. Fascinating stuff, hymn 212.

He was so screwed.

* * *

The potluck after practice was where it got worse. There is no faster way to Luca's heart than a potluck table and Mia had made, he learned from the tag, a spinach gratin that was actually good, not church good, real good. He was on his second helping when Harriet materialized beside him with the specific smile she used when she was about to meddle.

"She's single, you know," Harriet said, quiet, over the rim of her coffee cup.

"Harriet."

"I'm just saying. She's thirty-one, she's never brought anyone home, not once, and she's got a good job at the library and that little garden and she's..."

"Harriet, please."

"And you're single, and you two would..." She waved her cup in a circle. "It's just an observation. I'm an observer."

"You're a menace," Luca said. "I met the woman ninety minutes ago and she thinks I'm a dork."

"Well, you are a dork, but you're a dork with a good job and your grandmother's chin." She patted his arm and swept off toward the coffee urn like some kind of meddling bat.

Across the hall, Mia was refilling the gratin's spot with a fresh pan, and Luca watched Harriet intercept her, and watched Mia's whole posture change, shoulders going up, that particular long-suffering daughter stance, and he didn't have to hear a word to know what was being said. Mia looked over at him. He looked away at the potato salad like it owed him money.

Oh no, he thought. Oh no, this was going to be a thing.

* * *

It was a thing. Every Wednesday, Harriet found a new way. "Luca, help Mia carry the hymnals."

"Mia, Luca doesn't know where the good coffee is, show him."

"You two should carpool. You're practically neighbors." They were not practically neighbors. Mia lived nine minutes away. Luca timed it.

By the second week, Mia cornered him by the coat rack while the room emptied out around them.

"Okay," she said. "We need to talk about my mother."

"Your mother is a war criminal," Luca agreed.

"She's got the whole choir in on it. Dottie asked me yesterday if I thought you were handsome. Dottie. Dottie has never once in her life cared whether anyone is handsome." Mia yanked her coat off the hook with a little more force than the coat deserved. "And she keeps telling me you make this thing with pork, this braised thing, and how a man who can cook..."

"Shh, don't sell me. I have a divorce and a drinking-adjacent relationship with instant coffee."

"You're not helping," Mia said, but she was fighting the smile again, the one from the first night, and it did something bad to Luca's chest. "Look. I love my mom. But I am thirty-one years old and she has never once been this invested in my love life and I don't need it, I don't want it, and every Wednesday I have to..."

"Perform," Luca said. "I know. I get the whole speech about your gratin too."

"My gratin is objectively excellent, that's different." She pulled her coat on. Down the hall, Harriet was unmistakably pretending to fix the coffee urn while looking directly at them. "See? She's doing it right now. She thinks she's subtle."

Luca watched Harriet knock the urn's lid crooked and swear at it, and an idea arrived in his head, a bad idea, an idea with a little bow on it, and his mouth started moving before his brain could file an objection.

"Okay, so hear me out," he said. "What if we just... date?"

Mia stopped with one arm in her sleeve. "What?"

"Fake. Fake date. Obviously. What if we tell your mom, and tell the choir, that we've been seeing each other. Quietly. For a few weeks. Then Harriet gets off your back, she gets off my back, everybody's happy, and in like two months we have a very mature, very amicable..." he waved a hand, "...thing. It ran its course. No harm, no foul."

Mia stared at him. Somewhere behind her, Dottie dropped a hymnal and nobody went to pick it up.

"That is the dumbest plan I have ever heard," Mia said slowly. "And you're proposing it to get out of dating. By dating."

"It's a decoy relationship. It's a firewall."

"It's insane."

"It's two months of peace," Luca said. "Think about it. No more spying at the coffee urn. No more Dottie. Your mom stops building shrines to my braised pork shoulder."

Mia looked at her mother, who was now openly watching them with zero shame, and then back at Luca, and he could see her doing the math, the same exhausted math he'd been doing for a month.

"If we do this," she said, "there are rules."

"Sure, rules, love rules."

"And you have to be convincing. My mom can smell a lie at forty feet. She raised me on lies, she has a nose for them." She pointed a finger at him. "And you stop staring at me during practice. People noticed."

"Nobody noticed."

"Roger noticed."

"Roger can't hit a G, what does Roger know?" Luca said, and Mia laughed, a real one, loud enough that Harriet's head came up like a bird dog's, and Luca thought, distantly, that this plan was going to go so badly wrong in ways he could not yet imagine.

"So?" Mia said. She zipped her coat up to her chin like armor. "Are you actually serious or are you doing a bit?"

"Dead serious. Ask me anything about the plan."

"How long?"

"Six weeks. Feels real, doesn't end dramatically, no big scenes."

"Where do we go on dates?"

"I don't know, here? The diner? Does this town have a diner?"

"One," she said. "It has one, and my mom eats lunch there every Thursday, which is exactly the kind of thing you'd know if you'd thought about this for more than nine seconds." Luca had not thought about it for more than nine seconds. "Okay, so not the diner. Fine. Dates at your place. You cook, I judge." Mia chewed on that, looking past him at Harriet, who had given up all pretense and was just standing there beaming at them like her own braised pork shoulder had come true. "Rules," Mia said. "Number one. No real feelings. This is a business arrangement. We're coworkers. Coworkers who hold hands."

"Agreed. Number one, no real feelings."

"Number two. Nothing in public. No kissing where anybody can see. Not in the fellowship hall, not in the parking lot, not at a potluck. One hand-hold at choir practice, maximum, and we discuss hand-holds in advance."

"What if the hand-hold needs to happen spontaneously for dramatic authenticity?"

"It won't," she said. "We discuss it. Number three, nobody finds out it's fake. Ever. Not Dottie, not Roger, not anybody, because if Dottie finds out she will tell my mother and my mother will never let me hear the end of it until one of us dies."