The trouble with writing a short speech was how much could still be concealed inside it.
At six on Tuesday, Annelise had eighty-three words on her phone and a bowl of soup losing heat beside her. She had successfully removed every claim about the kind of sisters they had always been. In their place she had written three sentences about how much she loved Cecily, all true, none of which sounded like something she would say while looking at Cecily.
She tried them aloud. Halfway through the second sentence she ran out of breath.
“Good,” she told the empty kitchen, and deleted it.
There was a particular photograph she kept thinking of, although she had no photograph of it: Cecily and Hugo at the café, both listening to someone else, his hand resting on the back of her chair. But she could not base an entire speech on a man having a hand. She needed something about their life which belonged to them, something she knew instead of something she could make sound pretty.
She called her sister.
“Please tell me you haven’t remembered another person we have to feed,” Cecily said.
“No. Have you got five minutes?”
“I’ve got four. Hugo’s making me go outside.”
“Making?”
“He asked if I wanted a walk, and I said yes, and now I’m pretending he’s interrupting important work. What?”
Annelise smiled at her soup. “I wanted to ask you something for the speech.”
The pause was not long, but she heard it.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m not going to read it at you. I wanted one thing about you and Hugo that you wouldn’t mind seventy people hearing.”
“He leaves the cupboard doors open.”
“Something you like.”
“I like telling him.”
Behind Cecily, Hugo said something Annelise couldn’t distinguish.
“He says I enjoy it too much.” Her sister’s voice moved away from the phone. “I’m being interviewed. You can have a right of reply.”
“I could choose something myself,” Annelise said. “But I don’t want to invent a version of you because it makes a better paragraph.”
“Thank you.” Cecily sounded less brisk now. “All right. The shelf.”
“What shelf?”
“Exactly. The completely uninteresting shelf. In the hall at ours. We argued about where it should go for nearly a week.”
Annelise shifted the soup away from her elbow. “Why?”
“I wanted it opposite the door because the wall was empty. Hugo wanted it beside the door because that’s where we drop things. Every evening we moved the shoes and held the shelf up in a different place. We even put tape on the wall.”
“Who won?”
“Nobody. We put it somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“In the kitchen. We didn’t need a shelf in the hall. We needed to stop leaving our bags on the floor. So we got hooks.”
Annelise laughed, and Cecily laughed with her, sounding pleased with the memory rather than its usefulness.
“That’s not a wedding story,” Cecily said.
“I like it.”
“It doesn’t mean we’re secretly wonderful at compromise. We were extremely annoying. I kept saying I could see it in my mind, which is a horrible thing to say to somebody who can’t.”
“I won’t give you a certificate.”
“Good. And the shelf’s slightly crooked.”
“May I tell that?”
“Yes. But don’t make a joke about Hugo doing it. We both held the level, and apparently neither of us can read.”
Annelise made a note. “Both responsible. Crooked shelf. I’ll leave out the level.”
“I need to put shoes on.”
“Go. Thank you.”
“Annelise?”
“Yes?”
“You can just say you love us. That can be enough of it.”
After they hung up, Annelise ate three spoonfuls of lukewarm soup without tasting much. She had imagined her sister waiting to see what she would get wrong, a critic carrying a history large enough to fill the hall. Instead Cecily had given her a crooked shelf and permission to be brief.
She wrote the new speech standing at the counter. It helped to have her body doing something less official than composing. At the end she read it once, then again with the places for breaths left in.
“Cecily told me about a shelf she and Hugo couldn’t agree where to put.”
She read the rest to the empty kitchen, stumbling once over the sentence about changing their minds. The toast was easier; she could picture them both looking up at her.
It took less than a minute. She considered adding something about the girl Cecily had been, then left the phone alone.
She would send Cecily the shelf portion so she could object if she wanted to. She did that now, before she could become protective of a sentence.
Her sister replied while Annelise was washing the bowl.
Accurate. Hugo says the hooks are level.
Annelise sent back a heart, put her score in her bag, and left for rehearsal.
The rehearsal room smelled of damp coats and the faint, warm dust of radiators switched on for the first cool evenings. Someone had opened the high window, letting in a narrow blade of air. Annelise chose a chair beside the alto she had shared pencil marks with two weeks earlier and took off her scarf, still murmuring the first line of the speech.
“Shelf?” the woman beside her asked.
“Sorry?”
“I thought you said shelf. It isn’t in the song.”
“Wedding speech.”
“Yours?”
“My sister’s. I’m not giving a speech at my own wedding by accident.”
The woman grinned and held out a pencil. “You looked as if you were searching.”
Annelise had been searching for her pencil. She had also been thinking about hooks, a whole room staring at her, and whether she ought to bring a second pair of shoes on Saturday. She accepted the pencil, found her own beneath the folder, and gave the borrowed one back before they could both forget who owned it.
“Are you doing November?” the woman asked.
“The concert? Yes.”
“Definitely? I’m trying to work out whether I’m going to be the end person. I can’t hear properly from the end.”
Annelise glanced down the row. There was no application form in the question, no opportunity to qualify her answer with how recently she had joined or how poorly she might do.
“Definitely. I’ll be here.”
“Excellent. You can be the end person.”
“I see how this works.”
“You learn quickly.”
The organizer came through with a clipboard before warmups. When she asked for final confirmations, Annelise gave her name and watched the tick go beside it. November 3, seven in the evening, black clothes, arrive early enough to warm up. The details made a small shape in her calendar. She would need to get herself fed, get herself there, and bring her own music.
Then they sang, and there was no room to give a speech inside the song.
For the first ten minutes she kept arriving at the difficult passage braced for difficulty. The note she anticipated was not the note she sang. Her neighbor leaned close and pointed at the rest before their entry. Annelise nodded too vigorously, missed the next instruction, and had to ask which bar they were starting from.
“Thirty-two,” the woman whispered. “Don’t start with them. Let them go.”
The tenors began. Annelise waited, pencil poised uselessly above the page. The altos came in together, and this time she heard how the part fit beneath the other voices. It wasn’t the tune she had been humming in the car. It was less obvious and more satisfying, something she would never have found by singing alone in her kitchen.
At the break she marked the rest, then went to get water. She was halfway to the little table when a singer asked whether anyone had a spare clip for a loose page. Annelise had one on the back of her folder, keeping a receipt she no longer needed. She handed it over and watched the woman rescue the page from the draft.
“You’ll want it back.”
“At the end. Or I’ll spend next week accusing my washing machine.”
They stood together drinking water, talking about how difficult it was to get home from work and leave again. The other singer had almost stayed on her sofa. Annelise admitted she had considered eating soup over the sink and pretending it was a schedule conflict.
“And now?” the woman asked.
Through the open door they could hear somebody attempting the bass part with a theatrical depth nobody had requested.
“Now I’m glad I came.”
“Me too.”
It was pleasant not to need a more impressive answer.
After rehearsal, Annelise retrieved her clip and stayed long enough to help stack three chairs. Outside, the cold found the damp place at the back of her neck. She sat in the car for a moment with the heater running, letting the song continue at its own pace in her head.
Malcolm called while she was still parked.
“Can you talk?”
“Yes. I’m in the choir parking lot. I have been formally confirmed as the woman at the end.”
“Congratulations. Is there a sash?”
“Black clothing. My own.”
“Severe.”
She smiled at the steering wheel. “How was your day?”
“Better after lunch. Tobin and I actually sat down with the job list.”
She waited. It was tempting to say good immediately, like someone awarding a mark.
“We’re keeping the completion dates we can manage between us,” he said. “And if one of us wants to promise something sooner, we ask the other before we say it. He had a few opinions about my idea of a small extra job.”
“Did he agree it was small?”
“Not in language suitable for choir.”
“Choir may surprise you.”
He laughed. “Tomorrow’s still seven. At mine, if that suits?”
“It does. Shall I bring anything?”
“Yourself. You can help me decide whether the chilies are dead or just very disappointing.”
“I don’t have qualifications.”
“Neither do they.”
She could picture him at the kitchen window, frowning at the stubborn little plants. The desire to see him was uncomplicated for a moment, bright and physical. She wanted the back of his neck beneath her fingers. She wanted to sit at his table and hear the rest of his day.
“I’ll be there,” she said.
“I know. Drive carefully.”
At home she put the music on the table and checked the short speech once more on her phone. Her mother called while Annelise was looking for something else to eat.
“Nothing’s wrong,” Maribel said immediately. “I thought I should start with that.”
“All right.”
“Have you eaten?”
“Yes. Some time ago.”
“I won’t keep you.”
Annelise opened the cupboard. “Was there something you needed for Friday? I could collect—”
“No, darling. I don’t need anything collected.”
She closed the cupboard again.
“What is it?”
“I tried the dress on again. The blue one. I like it, I think. I just felt rather odd standing here all dressed up with nowhere to go.”
Annelise moved a stack of unopened mail off the kitchen chair and sat down.
“Tell me about the dress.”
“I’ve told you about it.”
“Tell me again. Does it have pockets?”
Her mother let out a little breath that was almost a laugh.
“One. Which seems unnecessarily mean.”
“What are you planning to put in it?”
“A tissue. Perhaps two. My phone won’t fit.”
“You’ll have your bag.”
“Yes. I know.”
Annelise took a cracker from the packet on the table and waited. From her mother’s end came the soft creak of a chair.
“I nearly called your father,” Maribel said. “For half a second. Not because I’d forgotten. Just because I was standing there, and I always asked whether things looked all right.”
Annelise looked down at the crumbs on the table. Her father had been dead for six years. She could remember his answers about clothes, which had generally involved asking whether the person wearing them liked them. At the time she had considered that evidence that he wasn’t paying attention.
“He’d have asked if you could sit down in it,” she said.
Her mother laughed, a little shakily. “He would. I can, incidentally.”
“Excellent.”
“I’m not trying to make you sad.”
“You aren’t making me anything. You can tell me.”
There was another pause. Annelise felt the impulse to make the moment larger, to say something about Saturday holding room for everyone they missed. But her mother was sitting alone in a dress, and perhaps what she needed was a daughter willing to remain on the phone while the feeling passed.
“Will you wear the silver earrings?” Annelise asked.
“I thought so. Do you think they’re too much?”
“I think you like them.”
Maribel was quiet, then gave a small, warm laugh. “Listen to you.”
Annelise reached for another cracker and settled more comfortably into the chair.