Chapter 4 #2
This was the girl she had met thirty years ago, nervous and quiet, and doing something with her hands to keep herself from running screaming out the door.
A man sang “Friends in Low Places” and brought the house down.
Then a couple sang “You’re the One That I Want” and forgot half the words.
A woman sang Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” so beautifully that the whole bar went quiet, and Claire thought, What is she doing in Walterboro, and why is she not on stage somewhere?
Then she thought, What am I doing in Walterboro?
And then she thought, I’m about to stand on a stage and sing Shania Twain, and I can’t carry a tune in a bucket, and this was a very, very terrible idea.
“Claire, Harper, and Nina,” Hank called on the microphone. “Y’all are up.”
None of them moved.
“We have to go up there now,” Claire said in a loud whisper. Her legs felt like they were made of lead.
“Yes, I’m aware,” Harper said, also not moving.
“That man said our names.”
“I heard him.”
Nina stood up. She said nothing, but she stood and began walking toward the stage.
Her back was straight. Her hands were shaking. She didn’t even look behind to see if they were following her. She just went.
Claire and Harper looked at each other.
The woman who had not felt anything for the last year and a half was walking toward the stage, doing it first, and she was going to do it alone if she had to. So they followed her.
The stage was smaller than it looked from the table, and the lights were way brighter.
The microphone was warm from the last singer’s hand. Claire took one mic. Harper took another. And Nina stood between them.
For a moment, the three of them just looked out at the bar. It was very full now, at least forty people, and most of them already had drinks.
All of them stared at the stage, waiting to be entertained, but knowing they would have to accept whatever they got. That was the magic of karaoke. Nobody expected Celine Dion. They expected Bubba from the mechanic shop down the road, drunk on too much beer and a misconception of his talents.
The opening guitar riff started, and the words appeared on the screen in blue, and Claire’s mind went completely blank.
But then Nina started singing.
She was awful.
Her voice was thin and slightly flat, and she was at least half a beat behind the music, but it didn’t matter. It did not matter one bit because she was singing.
Nina Vargas, who had spent eighteen months standing behind a glass wall watching the world go by, the woman who couldn’t feel a thing, who sat in parking lots gathering herself before she could walk into a room, was now standing on a stage in a dive bar singing Shania Twain.
Her voice cracked on the first verse, but she kept going. Claire jumped in. Her voice was better than she remembered, or maybe it was just louder, which, at Hank’s, amounted to about the same thing.
She found the melody, held onto it, and leaned into Nina. She sang the words they had been singing since they were way younger, words about feeling alive and wanting to go out and wanting a night to be wild and free.
The lyrics had meant something different when she was younger. Back then, they were an anthem. At fifty, they were a prayer.
Harper was last to start singing. She stood rigid for about four bars, clutching the microphone like a life preserver. And then something shifted. Claire saw it happen in real time.
There was a loosening in Harper’s shoulders, an unclenching of her jaw. There was a moment where the woman who controlled everything decided she was in control of absolutely nothing.
Harper opened her mouth and sang loudly. She was off-key and way too loud, but she didn’t care. She was performing. She was pointing at the audience. She was doing dance breaks.
Harper Ellis, vice president of a $200 million division, was doing Shania Twain’s dance break in a bar with peanut shells on the floor.
And she was magnificent.
The bar was right there with them. Claire did not know when it happened, but somewhere between the first and second choruses, the room had decided these women were their people.
They were clapping. Somebody was whistling. The couple who sang You’re the One That I Want were on their feet dancing.
Hank was nodding from behind the soundboard with a satisfied expression.
By the final chorus, they were shouting more than singing, arms around each other, completely out of tune and out of sync.
Claire felt something bubbling up in her body that she didn’t know was there.
She felt joy. She felt stupid, reckless joy.
She had not felt this since she was young enough to believe that dancing in the kitchen with a wooden spoon was all the purpose her life needed.
The song ended. The bar erupted in applause and cheers. It was full-throated, slightly drunk, and very genuine.
These people had just watched three women do something brave and beautiful.
Claire stood on that stage with Nina on one side and Harper on the other and thought, I forgot about this. I forgot what it feels like to do something that has absolutely no purpose but to just feel alive.
They walked off the stage on their shaky legs. Harper’s hands were trembling. Nina’s eyes were wet, and Claire could not stop smiling.
The man in the trucker hat bought them a round. The Patsy Cline woman raised her glass from across the bar, and the waitress with the ponytail said, “Well, y’all were the best kind of bad,” which Claire decided must have been a compliment.
They didn’t leave the bar for another two hours. They sat at their high-top table, drinking, talking, and laughing in the way only friends can after they’ve done something scary or crazy and actually survived it.
They replayed the performance moment by moment.
Harper’s dance break.
Nina’s voice cracking on the high note.
Claire forgetting the words to the bridge even though she had sung the song about four hundred times in her life.
“I forgot the words,” Claire said, “to a song I’ve been singing for decades. How is that possible? Should I get checked by a doctor?”
“Stage fright erases everything,” Nina said. “I forgot my own name up there for a minute.”
“I didn’t forget anything,” Harper said, smiling. “I was perfect.”
“You pointed at a man in the front row and winked at him. It was very cringey,” Claire said.
“It felt right in the moment. That man and I will always have that,” she said, playfully putting her hand over her heart.
“He blushed, Harper. A grown man blushed.”
“You’re welcome.”
Nina had her phone out.
She had recorded a shaky ten seconds of the performance.
They could barely see anything through the poor lighting and the crowd, but she texted it to Lucia with the caption, “proof.”