The Last Set

Ollie Metcalf is sixty-two years old and he will tell anybody who stands still long enough that he built The Low Note with his own two hands. Which is mostly true. He didn't pour the foundation or anything, but twenty-three years ago it was a failing dive called Brent's that smelled like carpet and regret, and now it's a karaoke bar with worn red vinyl booths and a stage lit by flickering bulbs that he personally replaced twice.

"You know how many Tuesday nights I worked alone?" he asks Karla, wiping down the bar even though Tracy did it an hour ago. "Just me and a jukebox and two drunks?"

"Eleven?" Karla says. She's heard this one before. She's thirty-five, she's been the vocal coach here since she was twenty-four, and she can recite Ollie's greatest hits in her sleep.

"Nine! Nine Tuesday nights. And now look at it. Full booths on Friday, decent crowd Saturday. It took me twenty years to get here, Karla."

"I know, Ollie."

"And then this." He points out the window, across the strip mall parking lot, at El Grito. The new place. Better sound system, a taco window, and a crowd. His crowd, or what used to be his crowd, every Monday night for the past two months. Two months. Eight Mondays of watching regulars walk across the lot like he doesn't exist.

Karla follows his pointing finger and sighs. "It's a taco window, Ollie. You can't compete with a taco window."

"I can compete with everything," he says.

So that's the mood he's in when he looks through El Grito's front window and sees them. Los Viejos. Four guys, none of them over thirty, doing sound check on El Grito's little stage. The lead singer is a kid named Manuel Rasmussen, twenty-eight years old, and Ollie has never actually spoken to him, but he already hates the smirk. You can see the smirk from across a parking lot, apparently. Manuel is up at the sound booth adjusting something, and the other three are noodling around, and the whole thing looks so smug that Ollie sets his rag down like a man setting down a weapon.

"Oh no," Karla says. She knows that posture. "Ollie. What are you doing?"

"I'm going over there."

"You are not going over there."

"I'm going to sing something," he says, already walking. "Something that'll remind everybody in that room what a Monday night used to sound like. I used to nail this one song back in my forties. Killed it, Karla. The old crowd used to request it."

"Which song?"

"'Bridge Over Troubled Water'!" he calls over his shoulder, and honestly, typing it out now, it sounds even worse than it looked.

Karla catches him at the door of The Low Note, hand on his arm. "Ollie, listen to me. Your voice isn't what it was. You haven't sung lead in front of a crowd in how long?"

"Fifteen years," he admits. "Maybe twenty. I don't remember exactly."

"That's what I thought. Your voice changes, Ollie. That's not an insult, it's physics."

"Physics," he repeats, and shrugs her off gently, because he likes her, he really does, but tonight he's got a point to make. "I'll be fine. Borrow a mic, sing a verse, walk back. Easy."

He borrows a mic. That's a whole story by itself. He walks into El Grito like he owns the place, and the kid on the sound check, one of Manuel's bandmates, just blinks at him.

"Hi! Ollie Metcalf, The Low Note, across the lot. I need to borrow a mic for about three minutes. Consider it good advertising."

The kid, who is either too polite or too confused to stop him, hands one over. And the thing about a real PA system is it does not hide anything. Ollie knows this. He has known this for twenty-three years. He walks up on that stage anyway, taps the mic, gets the room's attention, and launches into the first verse of "Bridge Over Troubled Water."

Here is what happens: the first note comes out flat. Not a little flat. Half a step flat, which at that volume is not a note, it's an announcement. And Ollie, being a professional in his own head, adjusts, and overshoots, and lands sharp, and by the second line he's hunting for the pitch like a guy who dropped his keys in tall grass.

The crowd at El Grito doesn't know what's happening yet. Some of them think it's a bit. There's actual laughter, the friendly kind, and that's somehow worse, because it means they're enjoying it.

He should stop. He knows he should stop. He does not stop, because he is Ollie Metcalf and he built something out of nine empty Tuesdays, and he makes it to the line before the chorus, the one with the climb, the high note he used to nail when he was forty and had something to prove.

His voice cracks. Audibly. Like a teenage boy at a school assembly, except nobody in this story is a teenage boy, it's a sixty-two-year-old man on a borrowed stage in front of a crowd that now includes his whole former Monday night regulars. The laugh goes up big this time, the not-friendly kind, and Ollie stands there frozen, mic still live, and up in the sound booth he can see Manuel Rasmussen smirking down at him with one hand on a fader.

That smirk is the last thing Ollie sees before the universe, apparently deciding the humiliation needs a witness he actually respects, sends Karla Chang through the front door.

Karla doesn't run. She walks, fast, through the crowd, a woman who has pulled drunks off stages before, which she has. Eleven years of coaching at The Low Note teaches you how to move through a room without apologizing.

She gets up on the little stage, takes the mic out of Ollie's hand halfway, keeps half for herself, and comes in on the chorus. Harmony, not rescue, or at least that's the story she tells later. Her voice catches the melody where Ollie's cracked and carries both of them over it, and the crowd, which was sharpening its knives, sits back down.

Ollie is mortified. He is also, and he will never fully explain this, grateful in a way that embarrasses him more than the cracking did. He finds the low part under her line and holds it. It's raw. It's not good, exactly. But it's listenable, and when they finish the chorus the room claps the way rooms clap when they're relieved, and Karla leans into the mic and says, "Ollie Metcalf, everybody. The Low Note, across the parking lot, Monday nights, cold beer, no tacos."

Somebody actually laughs at that. The friendly kind again.

Ollie sets the borrowed mic back in the stand and walks off without looking at the sound booth, because he does not want to know if Manuel Rasmussen is still smirking. Karla follows him out into the parking lot, and the night air smells like fryer grease and asphalt, and neither of them says a word until they're through The Low Note's door.

"Thank you," he says finally.

"You're welcome. That was the worst thing I have ever seen, Ollie. And I've seen you try to fix a toilet live on a Saturday."

"That toilet was a different issue."

Closing takes an hour. Tracy Bower, who heard the whole thing secondhand from a regular who filmed it on his phone, pours Ollie a whiskey at the bar without being asked and puts it down hard enough to make a point.

"You went over there and did that," she says. "At sixty-two. On a Monday. To prove what, exactly?"

"That I still have it," Ollie says, into the whiskey.

"You don't have it. You have a bar. It's better." She goes back to the taps, because Tracy's whole job is pouring drinks and staying out of it, and that's what she does.

Karla sits down on the next stool, close, elbow on the bar. "You're not a bad singer," she says. "You're a stubborn one. There's a difference. Bad singers don't get flat and then fix it sharp, that takes training. You just haven't done the work in twenty years and you expected the voice to wait for you."

"It should've waited."

"It's not a dog, Ollie."

He laughs at that, actually laughs, and something in his chest comes loose. "Fine. Teach me, then. One lesson. Real one."

"Behind the booth. Now. While I still feel sorry for you."

She takes him back to the worn couch in the office area behind the booths and makes him stand with his hand flat on his belly. "Breathe from here. Not the chest. You've been singing from your shoulders your whole life, I've watched you do karaoke intros for eleven years. In through the nose. Out slow, like a sigh."

He does it, badly, twice. The third time she puts her palm flat against his chest to feel the breath, and then she just doesn't take it away.

Ollie looks down at her hand. He is sixty-two and his heart is doing something unprofessional.

"Karla."

"Shh. Again. Breathe."

"Is this still the lesson?"

"Do you want it to be?"

"I don't know what I want it to be," he says, and that's the truest thing he's said all night, maybe all year.

Karla slides her hand up to the side of his neck, slow, giving him every chance in the world to step back. "Then let's find out. Tell me to stop and I stop, and Tuesday we pretend this never happened. Or tell me yes."

He thinks about it for maybe two seconds. "Yes," he says. "Yes."

She kisses him then, and it's not a performance either. It's careful and a little clumsy and it goes on long enough that his hand finds her hip without asking permission from his brain first. When they break apart she's grinning.

"Okay," she says. "You breathe better already."

"How?"

"You finally exhaled."

Somehow they end up on the worn couch, and then on the worn office floor, because the couch has a spring in it that has opinions and neither of them is in a mood for commentary. Karla pulls her shirt over her head and Ollie hesitates, one hand hovering.

"Last chance to be sensible," he says.

"Sensible closed two hours ago." She reaches behind her and, God bless her, has a condom in her wallet, because she's a professional and he is clearly not. "Here. Unless you've got a better plan."

"I haven't had a plan since Tuesday," he says, and takes it.

He is hesitant at first, fumbling, out of practice in ways that sting his pride, and Karla puts a hand on his cheek and says, "Stop keeping score, Ollie. There's no crowd. Nobody's clapping. Just pay attention to me."

So he does. He lets go of the whole stupid night, the smirk, the PA system, the taco window, and he focuses on her, her skin under his hands, the way she makes a low sound when he gets something right, and he does get things right, eventually, with her talking him through it the way she talks him through breathing. Her bra comes off and he takes his time with her nipples, which she seems to like, and her jeans, and then there is a long stretch where he is between her legs with his mouth and she is saying his name in a tone he has never heard from a vocal coach, and that does more for his confidence than eleven years of Friday crowds.

"Ollie," she says, pulling him up. "Now. Please."

He rolls the condom on, hands not entirely steady, and then he's inside her, slow at first, her heels digging into the back of his thighs, and they find a rhythm that has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with just the two of them and the sticky floor and the hum of the cooler. She's wet and warm and she moves with him instead of for him, and somewhere in the middle of it Ollie stops being the manager and stops being humiliated and stops being sixty-two in his own head, and he's just a man with his face in a woman's neck, and when she comes it's quiet, a long exhale like the breathing exercise, and he follows her over maybe ten seconds later, saying her name into her hair.

They lie there afterward on the floor, both of them half dressed and sticky, under the spill of the stage lights from the main room, the bulbs Ollie has replaced twice himself. Karla starts laughing first, the kind that shakes her whole ribcage against his side.

"What?" he asks.

"The plan. Your big plan. You were going to humiliate a twenty-eight-year-old and instead you got humiliated and then I took you to the floor of your own office."

"It was a revenge plan that developed complications."

"Complications. I like that. So the whole thing, the mic, the song, the crack, it turned into this." She props up on an elbow, and her hair is a wreck and she looks great.

Ollie looks up at the ceiling he's stared at for twenty-three years and thinks about it honestly, which is not his usual style.

"Maybe it turned into something better," he says.

"Maybe?"

"Okay, definitely. Don't make me say it twice, I'm sixty-two."

"Thirty-five," she says, tapping her own chest. "Just so the record's straight. And Ollie?"

"Yeah?"

"Monday, you're taking a real lesson. And you're never singing that song in public again unless I'm standing next to you. Those are the terms."

"That's extortion."

"That's coaching," Karla says, and kisses him again, and out in the main room the stage lights flicker the way they always do, and Ollie decides that can wait until morning.