The first mistake arrived in bar thirty-one. Zora opened her mouth for the note she had sung every November for twenty-six years, and nothing useful came out.
She tried to climb to it anyway. The sound bent, thinned, and disappeared beneath the piano. Across the room, twelve people kept their eyes on the conductor's hand. Only Nila turned around.
“Again from twenty-eight,” said Mina.
After the furniture showroom closed, the choir rehearsed between display sofas. They moved the lamps to the walls and borrowed dining chairs from a table set for a family of six. Someone always forgot to turn off the little electric fireplace. Tonight its orange imitation flames moved behind the basses.
Zora sat on the arm of a sofa to drink water. She was seventy-four. She had started the choir in a church vestry, before anyone in town knew that strangers might pay to hear them sing. Their winter concert was in nine days. She knew the piece so well that she had once sung it while counting change at the grocery.
“I'll get it,” she said.
“You don't need to prove that,” Mina replied.
Zora put down the cup. “I said I'll get it.”
They began again. She entered a fraction late, pushed too hard, and finished coughing into the sleeve of her good coat. Mina stopped the piano. Zora hated that more than she hated the missed note.
At break, the others went down to the vending machine. Nila stayed by the keyboard, turning pages of a score with softened corners.
“I can take the top,” she said.
“Of course you can. You sang it at last year's concert.”
“I meant with you.”
Zora looked at the pencilled date on the cover: 2001. Several singers who had used this copy had retired or moved away. One had become a plumber in a town that no longer had a choir. Her own name was written on the first page, in handwriting much firmer than the one she used now.
“They'll expect me on the last phrase,” Zora said.
“Who will?”
“People who have come before.”
Nila took a moment. “Most of them won't know who's singing which note.”
That was meant kindly. Zora could hear it. She also knew the people who came every year: the man who recorded the concerts on a tablet, the woman who brought her father in a wheelchair and sat by the exit, the old choir members who mouthed the words. Some would recognize her. The others would hear the difference without knowing its name.
When Mina returned, Zora asked her to lower the whole song. Mina tried it at the piano, two steps down from the opening key. The new ending sat comfortably in Zora's chest. Then the basses came back and sang their first line. One of them shook his head.
“If we put the opening there, I might as well hum under the floor,” he said.
Mina tried moving only the last verse. The change sounded like someone had opened a second song by mistake. They tried an octave, then an extra breath before the ending. Each fix left another singer stranded.
“We could use the old recording,” said Pete, who ran the sound for concerts. “Just for that part. You'd still be onstage.”
He produced a phone. On it, Zora's voice from fourteen years ago rose clear and bright over an audience rustling programs. She remembered that performance. Her husband had been late because the car would not start. She had watched the rear door all evening, furious with him, and had sung splendidly anyway.
“No,” she said.
Pete lowered the phone. “I wasn't suggesting you pretend it was live.”
“I know what you meant.” She nearly said that the woman on his phone had not yet learned how long a note could feel. Instead she asked him to turn the recording off.
Mina packed her metronome away without closing the score. “You can sing the lower line. Nila can take the upper.”
“Then it becomes her solo,” Zora said.
“Possibly,” said Mina. “If we arrange it badly.”
Nobody spoke for a while. Outside, a delivery van reversed across the loading bay, beeping as though it were counting out their silence.
Nila sat at the piano and played the four final measures with one hand. “What if you start it?” she asked Zora. “Where the altos come in now. I'll wait until the last word.”
“That's not how it was written.”
“No. But listen.”
She played the phrase. The lower part moved first, carrying the tune through the place where Zora had been straining. The high note entered later, quieter than before, as a continuation rather than a rescue. It was not fully convincing. The middle two chords clashed, and Nila lost her place trying to fix them.
Mina took the pencil and marked the troublesome bars. “We'd need a new accompaniment. And the altos would have to learn this by Thursday.”
“They'll complain,” Pete said.
“They've complained about every arrangement since we met,” Zora said. “In 2003 we nearly lost a tenor over a dotted rest.”
At the next rehearsal, the altos did complain. One had worked a double shift. Another asked why the change had to happen nine days before the concert. Zora did not give a speech about aging or courage. She said that she couldn't sing the ending as it stood and that the group could choose to do it differently or let someone else sing it.
“I can do the old one,” Nila said from the back.
“I know,” Zora said. “It's a good ending. I used to love singing it.”
That answer made the decision harder. The singers voted to try the new arrangement twice and keep the original ready in case it fell apart. Mina wrote both options on the rehearsal board. Nobody called the trial a triumph.
The first run sounded like wet laundry being pulled through a narrow door. The second was better. The basses found where the pulse had gone, Nila stopped attacking the high note, and Zora heard her own voice arrive without needing to force it upward.
Afterward, the others argued about whether to keep the ending. Zora went over to the score and erased the note she could no longer reach. She left a pale indentation in the paper. Under it she wrote three lower notes, then handed the pencil to the alto beside her so she could mark her own part.