Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

October, November. As the holidays approached, Jonathan brought to their home a child’s understanding of time. Pumpkins for Halloween. Turkeys for Thanksgiving. In the countdown to Christmas, rehearsals intensified and she had to take Mo-Sae to the church on certain weeknights. The days grew short and full. She rarely had time for her own errands now, busy as she was with the various tasks Mrs. Lim assigned her for the choir. She rescheduled her doctor’s follow-up, and then rescheduled again. She hardly saw Mr. Sorenson, although once, as she was unloading dozens of binders in boxes from the elevator, he emerged from his unit. He did not offer to help. In fact, he did not even seem to notice the boxes, or her struggle to move them. Instead, he waited for a moment in her attention to present her with another cutting in a plastic bag, its roots swaddled in a wet paper towel.

The Christmas cactus, he began in his lecturing way, would bloom in late December with a biological sleight of hand. Every twelve hours, she was to take it out of a dark closet and give it full sun.

She nodded. But what she realized was that Mr. Sorenson’s gifts were not free but finicky, and came with a burden of care. Indeed, when she remembered the cutting, days later, it had completely wilted.

As for Mo-Sae, no one complained of his behavior in the choir. If anything, they said that his voice was as youthful as ever.

Then it was December. The sanctuary was decorated for Christmas. The tree, the wreaths, the needlework banners of shepherds and trumpeting angels. The pulpit had been removed to make room for the risers, giving the sanctuary the look of a stage.

Earlier, Young-Ja had dropped off Mo-Sae in the choir room. She had helped him with his robe and positioned him beside Elder Lim. Now, as she sat in her pew and looked around at the Christmas decorations, she thought that she would lay her worries down. She saw her son, Timothy, come up the aisle with his wife. With his glasses and slightly irritated look, he reminded her strongly of a young Mo-Sae. And yet Timothy was now a father with children old enough to be left at home alone.

Then Christina entered the pew. Jonathan was at home with Sanjay, she said when Young-Ja asked.

The choir members started to file in. Young-Ja quickly identified Mo-Sae, but he maintained his stage presence and looked straight ahead. Next came the soloists, distinct in tuxedos or dresses, taking their seats behind four music stands. Young-Ja felt her children settle into a humoring attitude.

When the new conductor strode to his place, the audience didn’t know whether to clap. As a congregation, they only ever said “Amen” after the choir sang on Sundays. But the conductor settled the matter by immediately turning his back. He gestured and the choir stood. He opened his palms and the choir opened matching black binders. The music began.

Young-Ja could not tell if the singing was good or bad, but she could see a new unison of attitude in the schooled faces, the binders that were kept open but hardly consulted. She noticed Christina and Timothy exchanging a glance but could not read its meaning. The music was long and wordy, with laughing scales—ha ha ha—sung soberly. Mo-Sae seemed to be keeping up. At times, she didn’t hear the music at all but found herself mesmerized by the flashing lights of the Christmas tree. At times, she recognized certain passages of scripture: Comfort, comfort ye my people. For unto us a child is born.

At times she caught moments of tuneful beauty.

She noticed a pattern. One of the soloists would stand to introduce a change in the music. The choir would take up a response. The same phrase would be passed around for some time among the various voice parts, altered and yet the same. She saw Mo-Sae in compliance, his mouth opening and shutting with the mouths around him.

“He trusted in God…”

“That he deliver him…”

“Deliver him…”

“Delight in him…”

“Deli-ha-ha-ha-ight in him…”

The tenor soloist stood up.

“He looked for some to have pity on him,” the tenor sang, “but there was no man…”

Then: movement in the risers.

Young-Ja was suddenly alert to the worry that had been pacified through the long listening. She felt that worry, which had been vague and formless, grow distinct as Mo-Sae sidled out of position on the top riser, setting off a wave of shirking among the choir members that blocked his path. With great seriousness of purpose, he came to the front of the stage. He took his place beside the tenor soloist, who had just launched into the melodic part of his solo. He opened his binder. He opened his mouth. He too began to sing.

Nothing could be read in the soloist’s expression. Perhaps that was what made him a professional: the ability to keep singing, keep pretending. And no interpretation could be made of the choir director’s turned back, from which a conducting arm continued to emerge and retreat in time. Or of the choir members who presented three rows of staunch faces.

But Mo-Sae’s face was laid bare to scrutiny. The expression on it was high-minded and earnest, but also a little coy, as though he was struggling to disguise his basking pleasure.

What was he possibly singing? In which language? To which tune? Or had he somehow learned the tenor solo on his own? He was not behind the microphone so no one could hear. But anyone could see from the childish look of surprise that came over Mo-Sae’s face that he was straining for the high notes that came forth in the soloist’s voice.

So there it was. The spectacle.

Young-Ja could do nothing but watch, to feel that there in the spotlight that she had never once sought for herself, her private miseries had become manifest.

Ultimately, it was Christina who made her way to the stage; who waited, hands folded, until the tenor solo had ended; who took her father gently by the arm and led him down through the pews with no sense of apology in her posture or pace. There then seemed to spread through the congregation a spontaneous kindness, a collective will to look away, to appear absorbed in the musical performance so that Young-Ja, Timothy, and his wife could cast about for their things and make their escape.

Afterward, things were different. Better, almost. Now that the secret was out, the church members treated her like one of the New Testament widows. They saw her as devoted, praiseworthy. They never asked Mo-Sae to rejoin the choir or even take part in a real conversation. Thus she was free from the burden of his reputation.

And yet, sometimes she took the opposite view. She was not really a widow so she was not really free. While Mo-Sae was alive, she could not pretend that he did not exist in some real, sometimes inconveniencing way. Others might pretend, but she had to look squarely into the question of Mo-Sae’s dignity. It was up to her to reclaim it from this point forward in a more complicated, arduous, thankless way.

At the start of the new year, she ran into Mr. Sorenson. He was leaning on a footed cane.

Just a fall, he told her. But his son (he had a son!) was convinced that he was too old to be living alone. Party time over. He was getting shipped out to a retirement community near Orlando. “You know Disney World? Mickey Mouse?”

He asked her, with new formality, whether she had a moment to step inside his house. He had something for her there.

Of course she did. Her life was once again full of such empty stretches, affordable moments.

The apartment was clean but smelled faintly of cooked cabbage and bleach. Over the recliner was a crocheted blanket in a classic granny-square, telling of some bygone female presence in his life. A few open boxes where he had started packing.

“Twenty medium-sized boxes,” he said in a false, hearty tone. “That’s what I get to take with me.”