The Happy Hour Choir

by Sally Kilpatrick

  He ran a hand through his closely cropped hair. “What the hell? Why would you go around telling everyone about us and—”

  “Whoa.” I shook my head. “What kind of person do you think I am? I was going to tell everybody how you really chipped your tooth over there in the parking lot that night you got drunk and fell.”

  “Aw, Beulah.”

  I smiled. Pete scraped together a living with his Walmart job, a smattering of farming, and a pet project: his animal removal business. His business had finally taken off when he spun the tale of how he got kicked in the mouth by one of his horses after a nest of copperheads hatched outside the barn. I was the only person who’d witnessed what really happened with his tooth.

  He cursed under his breath, knowing he was had. “What am I supposed to tell my brother?”

  “I’m sure you’ll think of something,” I said.

  He swore loudly and profusely. “Why would you do a thing like that?”

  “I need a choir. You can sing. It won’t be that bad. Promise.”

  He turned to face me and grinned, giving me a hint of his chipped front tooth. “You could have asked nicely.”

  “I could have,” I answered sweetly, “but that’s not my style, and you would’ve said no.”

  “Dammit, Beulah!”

  “If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that.”

  “I mean dammit.”

  Greg leaned out the door. “It’s your shot, dumbass.”

  That was my cue. “Wednesday at seven. Don’t forget your brother.”

  A few minutes later, I took my seat behind the piano, relieved by my progress but less than happy about how I’d achieved it. One go-through of Jimmy Buffett’s “Why Don’t We Get Drunk,” and Pete Gates was shooting daggers at me from the other side of the pool table. Just when I thought I’d overplayed my hand, he turned to Greg and whispered something in his ear. Based on Greg’s expression, I was back in the game.

  My mind whirled with possibilities. Ginger would have to be in the choir because she’d gotten me into this mess, but a soprano would be hard to find. Romy was an old karaoke regular, but I hadn’t seen her in forever. I also might have ticked her off the last time I saw her. I could sing soprano sometimes, but I was really more of an alto.

  Tiffany had a pretty voice and could even hold it steady while she walked, but for some reason it felt worse to ask her for help than to blackmail either of the guys.

  Because you don’t like to be beholden to anyone. With them, you’ll be square.

  Be that as it may, it was time to swallow my pride and ask a favor.

  I motioned for Tiffany to come over. She leaned forward, her cleavage almost meeting mine in a way that stopped several conversations. “Tiff, can you send a couple of Bud Lights over to the Gates brothers, compliments of me?”

  “Sure,” she said, but she was looking at me like I’d lost my mind.

  And maybe I had. I’d recruited a flasher and two barroom brawlers, one of whom was gay, to sing in a church choir that objected to me on the grounds of an unwed teen pregnancy and generally loose behavior.

  Speaking of a teen pregnancy . . .

  As I watched Tiffany hand a beer to each of the bewildered Gates brothers, I knew I had to ask her. We would bring misfit to a whole new level. Pete looked at me quizzically, and I nodded my compliments. Then he raised his longneck in mock salute.

  I hadn’t been forgiven, but I might be on the path.

  That night at closing, I caught Tiffany as she was going out the door. “Hey, Tiffany, how would you like to maybe sing in a church choir?”

  She looked me up and down, her features suddenly cynical. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “No, I wish it were. Ginger’s got me playing piano across the street—”

  “I’d heard that.”

  “And I kinda ran off the choir and need a new one. Something about Luke getting a visit from his boss and—”

  “Reverend Daniels who lives across the parking lot?”

  Well, that certainly perked her up. “Yes. One and the same.”

  “I’d be singing where he could hear me?” Her cheeks brightened.

  “Yes,” I said slowly. “He does preach there.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  That was easy. Too easy.

  Now I only needed a bass. Maybe I should put Luke and Ginger up to praying for one since I couldn’t remember hearing a good bass in The Fountain in years.

  Wednesday afternoon rolled around, and I still didn’t have a bass. I surveyed the little group of people sitting at the foot of the risers. Ginger wasn’t there, but she would be my alto. Tiffany was going to sing soprano—as long as she didn’t toss her cookies trying. Old Man MacGregor sang a high, thin tenor, but he sang surprisingly on key . . . when sober. Both of the Gates boys sang in the middle range—they just couldn’t read notes well enough to pick tenor or bass . . . yet.

  “Well, I wanted to thank you for coming out here.”

  Most of the gang grumbled. They weren’t there because they wanted to be.

  “And thanks to Bill for letting us use The Fountain on his night off.” The crowd, most of whom held a drink courtesy of yours truly, cheered for Bill, who held his own beer up in salute.

  “All right, we’re going to get in and get out—”

  “That’s what she said,” snickered Pete Gates.

  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.”

  Was that a compliment?

  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 ye
ars. 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

  That 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.