He looked pointedly at his new girlfriend and announced to the entire choir, “Amelia, you have the lead.”
Just like that, the solo for my father’s memorial service was gone.
The song he hummed in his workshop, the last piece of him I had left to give, was now just a cheap showcase for a soprano the director was sleeping with. I watched the smug satisfaction on his face, the casual cruelty of a man who believed he had all the power, a man who saw me as nothing more than a timid alto he could easily discard.
He thought my voice was the fragile thing in the room, but he failed to account for the secret audio file on my phone, a recording of his own condescending words that would turn his entire congregation of so-called simpletons into a jury for his very public, professional execution.
The Promise and the Poison: The Weight of a Hymn
The first Sunday in May always smells like lilies and grief. They arrive by the bucketful, pristine white trumpets of remembrance, their cloying perfume settling over the pews like a sweet, heavy dust. For most of my forty-six years, that scent was just part of the furniture of faith at St. Jude’s. This year, it was the smell of my father.
Mark squeezed my hand, his thumb rubbing a slow circle over my knuckles. Our daughter, Maya, fifteen and perpetually unimpressed, was actually paying attention, her gaze fixed on the altar where a single, massive arrangement of lilies stood in Dad’s honor. He’d been the church treasurer for thirty years, a quiet pillar who counted the offering with the same reverence he took communion. His heart had just… stopped. One Tuesday afternoon while weeding his petunias.
After the service, in the controlled chaos of the robing room, Corin found me. He moved through the sea of burgundy polyester with the practiced grace of a talk show host, his smile a little too bright, his salt-and-pepper hair artfully tousled. He was new, hired six months ago to “invigorate” the music program. To me, he mostly felt like a beautifully tailored suit with nothing inside.
“Lena, darling,” he began, his voice a low, theatrical hum. He placed a hand on my arm, a gesture that was meant to be comforting but felt proprietary. “That was a beautiful tribute. Your father was a giant in this parish.”
I offered a weak smile. “He loved this place.”
“And it loved him,” Corin said, his eyes glittering with what I was supposed to interpret as sincerity. “Which is why I wanted to talk to you. The memorial service is in three weeks. We’ll be closing with ‘It Is Well with My Soul.’ It was his favorite, wasn’t it?”
A lump formed in my throat. It was. He’d hum it in his workshop, whistle it in the garden. It was the soundtrack of my childhood. “Yes. It was.”
“I want you to sing the solo, Lena.”
The air left my lungs. I’d been an alto in this choir since I was sixteen. I was reliable, I was on-key, but I was never the star. I was the harmony, the foundation. Solos were for the soaring sopranos who could hit notes that made the stained-glass saints weep.
“Corin, I… I don’t know. That’s a soprano piece, traditionally.”
“Nonsense,” he waved a dismissive hand. “We’ll arrange it for your range. Your voice has such a rich, authentic quality. A storyteller’s voice. It’s what the piece needs. It’s what he would have wanted.” He leaned in closer, his cologne a sharp, citrusy counterpoint to the musty robes. “This is for him, Lena. From you.”
Tears pricked my eyes. He was right. It felt right. It felt like the only thing I could do, the only offering I had left to give. “Okay,” I whispered. “Thank you, Corin. Yes.”
He beamed, his job done. “Wonderful! We’ll start working on it next week.”
As he turned, a flash of red at the doorway caught my eye. A woman I didn’t recognize, with hair the color of a fire engine and a tight, black dress, gave Corin a small, knowing smile. He nodded back, a flicker of something private and charged passing between them. A prickle of unease, sharp and unwelcome, ran up my spine. It was a dissonant note in an otherwise perfect, sorrowful chord.
A Different Kind of Harmony
The following Wednesday, the looming issue from the narthex walked right into the choir room.
“Everyone, I’d like to introduce Amelia,” Corin announced, his arm draped possessively around the woman with the fire-engine hair. She was younger than I’d thought, maybe late twenties, with the kind of aggressive confidence that makes you feel dowdy just by proximity. “Amelia is a truly gifted vocalist who has just moved to town, and I’ve convinced her to grace us with her talents.”
A smattering of polite “hellos” rippled through the room. Amelia smiled, a quick, dismissive flash of white teeth. She was a soprano. Of course, she was.
We started with the warmups, and it was immediately clear that Amelia was, as advertised, gifted. Her voice was crystalline, powerful, and technically flawless. It was also, to my ear, completely sterile. It was the voice of someone who sang the notes, not the meaning.
When we moved on to the week’s anthem, Corin stopped us after the first eight bars. “Hold on, hold on. Altos, you’re getting buried. Lena, project more. Let’s not be timid.”
I felt a flush of heat creep up my neck. I’d been singing this part for a decade. I wasn’t being timid. But I took a deeper breath and sang out, my voice joining the others.
He stopped us again. “Better. But it’s still a bit… heavy. The texture is too dense.” His eyes scanned the choir, then landed, predictably, on his new prize. “Amelia, would you mind? Just for a moment, float a harmony line over the altos. Something ethereal.”
Amelia stepped forward, a picture of obliging talent. As we sang the section again, her voice soared effortlessly above ours, a silvery thread embroidering our sturdy wool. It was beautiful, I couldn’t deny it. But it wasn’t the written part. It wasn’t our harmony. It was a performance.
“See?” Corin exclaimed, clapping his hands together. “That’s it! It lifts the whole piece. It gives it a modern brightness.”
Eleanor, a retired music teacher who had been the choir’s anchor since the Nixon administration, leaned over and whispered to me, her voice dry as old parchment. “Modern brightness? It sounds like a car commercial.”
I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling.
We finally got to my solo. I stood, sheet music trembling slightly in my hand. The familiar piano intro began, and I took a breath, ready to pour every ounce of my grief and love for my father into the notes.
“When peace like a river, attendeth my way…”
My voice was clear, if a little shaky. It felt honest. Raw.
Corin let me sing the entire first verse before cutting me off with a raised hand. “Good, good. A very heartfelt start, Lena.” He tapped his chin thoughtfully. “But I’m wondering if we’re missing an opportunity. The tone is very… somber.”
“It’s a song about finding peace in sorrow,” I said, my voice tighter than I intended. “It’s supposed to be somber.”
“Of course, of course,” he said placatingly. “But it’s also about triumph. About grace. It needs a little more… shimmer.” He looked at Amelia again. That little electric current passed between them. “Amelia, what do you think? Do you hear that brighter tone I’m talking about?”
She nodded, her expression a careful mask of professional consideration. “I do. It needs to ascend. To really capture the ‘well with my soul’ idea, it needs to feel like it’s reaching for heaven.”
I felt like I was being workshopped out of my own grief. My father’s hymn was being turned into a vocal showcase. Corin was no longer looking at me; he was looking at Amelia, the two of them speaking a language of musical ambition I didn’t understand and didn’t want to. My solo, the one solid thing I could do for my dad, was suddenly feeling fragile, breakable.
Whispers in the Robing Room
The following week, the chill in the choir room had little to do with the ancient air conditioner rattling in the window. Corin’s focus was now lasered in on Amelia. He’d position her in the front, praise her diction, and invent new, floating descants for her to sing over perfectly good arrangements. The rest of us were becoming a backup band for the Amelia and Corin show.
“Lena, from the top of page three,” he’d call out, his tone already laced with impatience.
I’d sing my part.
“Again,” he’d command. “You’re dragging the tempo. This isn’t a funeral dirge.”
The irony was so thick I could have choked on it. My hands would clench the hymnal, my knuckles white. I was a landscape architect; I spent my days creating order and beauty from dirt and chaos, designing spaces for quiet growth. I knew about patience. I knew about foundations. And I knew that what Corin was doing was pulling up a healthy, established garden to plant a single, flashy orchid.
After rehearsal, while shedding our robes, the whispers started.
“Can you believe that?” Susan, a tenor with a sharp wit, muttered as she hung up her burgundy garment. “He had her sing half of my line in the intro. Said it needed more ‘punch.’ I’ve been singing that intro since his precious Amelia was in diapers.”
Eleanor patted my arm, her touch a small, steady comfort. “Don’t you mind him, dear. He’s got new-toy syndrome. Your solo is going to be beautiful.”
“If he lets me sing it,” I said, my voice low. I folded my robe, the worn polyester cool beneath my fingers. “Last week it was too somber. Today, he told me my phrasing was ‘too traditional.’”
“What does that even mean?” Bill, our most reliable bass, grumbled from the men’s side of the room. “It’s a nineteenth-century hymn. Is she supposed to rap it?”
A few nervous titters went around the room. We were church folk. We weren’t built for confrontation. We were built for quiet resentment and potluck casseroles. But the simmering discontent was palpable. Corin wasn’t just “invigorating” the music; he was erasing us. He was taking the familiar, comforting thing we had built together over years and was trying to make it all about him, and by extension, his new girlfriend.
I saw Amelia by the water fountain, scrolling through her phone, completely oblivious—or indifferent—to the atmosphere she’d helped create. She wasn’t part of the post-rehearsal commiseration. She wasn’t one of us. She was a guest star, and we were the aging cast members being written out of the show.
“He just wants to impress her,” Susan added, zipping her purse with a vicious tug. “It’s pathetic.”
The word hung in the air. Pathetic. It was the right word. All this disruption, all this casual cruelty, all for the sake of a shiny new romance. And my tribute to my father was caught in the crossfire. The memorial was less than two weeks away, and the simple, sacred act of singing his favorite hymn was becoming a source of deep, grinding anxiety. I felt a knot of anger tightening in my chest, a feeling so foreign in this space that it felt like a sacrilege.
The Seed of Doubt
The tension finally came to a head in a brief, brutal exchange a few days later. I’d arrived early for a one-on-one session with Corin to work on the solo, my stomach in a tight, acidic knot. I found him and Amelia in the empty sanctuary, heads bent close together over the grand piano, laughing at something on her phone. They didn’t notice me for a full minute.
“Oh, Lena,” Corin said, looking up, his smile not quite reaching his eyes. “You’re here.” It sounded like an accusation.
“We have a rehearsal,” I stated, keeping my voice level.
“Right, right. The solo.” He gestured vaguely toward the piano. Amelia slid off the bench but didn’t leave. She stood nearby, arms crossed, watching. An audience of one.
I put my sheet music on the stand. My hands were clammy.
“Let’s just run the second verse,” Corin said, his fingers dancing over the keys in a needlessly complex flourish. “Try to give it that lift we discussed. Think… inspiration, not introspection.”
I sang. I focused on my dad, on the memory of him humming this tune, covered in sawdust in his workshop. I tried to pour that love, that ache, into the music. When I finished, the silence in the vast, empty church was deafening.
Corin sighed, a long, dramatic exhalation of artistic suffering. “It’s just not landing, is it?” He didn’t look at me. He looked at Amelia. “What do you hear, Ams?”
Ams?
“The emotional core is there,” she said, her tone that of a surgeon diagnosing a terminal patient. “But the vessel is… fragile. The voice just doesn’t have the power to carry the theological weight of the lyrics. Especially on ‘my sin, oh the bliss of this glorious thought.’ It needs to soar there. Hers is more… grounded.”
Grounded. She said it like it was a disease. Fragile. My voice, my grief, my tribute.
Something cold and hard settled in my stomach. This wasn’t about the music anymore. This was a calculated dismantling.
“Corin,” I said, my voice dangerously quiet. “You asked me to sing this. You told me my voice was what it needed.”
“And I thought it was,” he said, finally turning to face me, his expression a mask of strained patience. “But a director has to evolve, Lena. We have to serve the music first. We have to be willing to make difficult choices for the sake of the overall sound.”
The sanctimonious jargon was a smokescreen, and we all knew it. He was laying the groundwork to replace me. He was going to steal my father’s song and give it to her.
Walking to my car, my mind was racing. My husband, Mark, always says I’m too trusting. That I assume the best in people long after they’ve shown me their worst. For the first time, I saw the wisdom in his gentle cynicism. This wasn’t a misunderstanding. This was a hostile takeover.
I got in the car and sat there, the engine off, the quiet buzzing in my ears. I pulled out my phone. My finger hovered over the voice memo app. It felt sneaky. It felt underhanded. It felt distinctly un-Christian. But then I pictured Corin’s smug face, Amelia’s clinical assessment of my voice. The vessel is fragile.
My grief wasn’t fragile. It was the strongest thing I owned.
I pressed the red button. I wouldn’t use it unless I had to. It was insurance. A small, secret seed of doubt planted in the face of his overwhelming certainty. It was a way to protect the one thing I had left of my dad: his song.
The Unraveling: The Recorded Word
“Just one more time, Corin, for my own peace of mind,” I said, standing by the piano two days later, my phone tucked into the side pocket of my purse, the recording app active. My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. “We’re still set? For the memorial? Me, singing the solo?”
He was sorting through a stack of sheet music, the picture of a busy, important man. He didn’t look up. “Lena, we’ve discussed this. My focus right now is on getting the blend right for this Sunday’s anthem. The memorial is still over a week away. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
It was the perfect non-answer. A politician’s pivot.
“I’m not trying to get ahead of myself,” I pushed, my voice steadier than I felt. “This is… it’s important to my family. To me. You promised me.”
That got his attention. He finally looked at me, a flicker of annoyance in his eyes. He lowered his voice, leaning in conspiratorially. “And you’ll get your moment. Of course. But you have to trust my process. This congregation, bless their hearts, they have a very… unsophisticated ear.”
I held my breath. He was saying it. He was actually saying it.
About the Author
