Denise Cole came home that evening with her nursing textbooks in one arm and her diner apron in her bag. She was nineteen, in her first year of nursing school, working part-time at a diner near campus. She kicked off her shoes and called out, "Mama, I'm home."
"I waited," Miriam said from the kitchen, "but only because the soup waits better than you do."
Denise laughed and came into the kitchen, where the smell of vegetable soup and warm bread filled the small room like a blanket. Miriam was at the stove in her housecoat, her hair tied back, a wooden spoon in her hand. She looked, Denise thought, exactly like the woman who had raised her: steady, and funny in a quiet way.
They ate at the kitchen table, the way they always did, and Denise talked about her day: the anatomy lecture that had gone too fast, the diner customer who had tipped her a dollar and a life story, the exam coming next week. Miriam listened with her whole face, asking the question that made Denise think harder.
After dinner, while Miriam washed the dishes, Denise stayed at the table with her notebook open, pretending to study. But she was listening, really listening, because her mother always sang while she washed dishes, the same way she sang while she cleaned the stage.
Tonight the song was the one about the room after dark. Denise had heard it a hundred times, in kitchens and cars and hallways, and it still stopped her pencil in the middle of a word. Her mother's voice was rich and low, an alto, and it did not sound like a voice that belonged only in kitchens.
Denise put her pencil down. "Mama," she said.
"Mmm?" Miriam said, not turning around, her hands in the dishwater.
"Why do you only sing where nobody can hear you?"
Miriam laughed, a little too quickly. "I sing where I am, baby. That's everywhere."
"No," Denise said, and she stood up, because this was the conversation she had been carrying around for weeks. "You sing in kitchens. You sing in empty rooms. You sing at two in the morning to a stage with nobody in it. Mama, the show you clean up after holds auditions. In the very building where you work."
Miriam dried her hands on the towel, slowly, the way she did when she was buying time. "Denise," she said, "I am forty-four years old. I mop that stage. I am not the kind of person who walks out onto it."
"That's exactly the kind of person who walks out onto it," Denise said, taking her mother's hands. "Mama, you raised me on that voice. You sang in church before I was born, then you put it away to raise me and pay the rent. I'm grateful, Mama. But I'm nineteen now, in nursing school. You don't have to keep it put away anymore."
Miriam looked at her daughter, and something in her face softened and tightened at the same time. "It's not that simple, baby. Auditions are for young people with coaches and agents and dresses that cost more than our rent."
"Then it's a good thing the show judges singing, not dresses," Denise said. "And you have a coach, sort of. You have Earl, who hears you every night. You have your church. You have me. And you have a song nobody else in the world has, because you wrote it."
"Be proud," Denise said. "And then be brave. I'm daring you, Mama. Right here, in this kitchen. I dare you to fill in the audition form. Just the form. If you fill it in and nothing happens, I'll never mention it again. But if you don't even try, you'll be singing to an empty room when you're eighty, and you'll wonder."
The kitchen was quiet except for the dripping tap. Miriam looked at the window, where the evening light was going gold over the rooftops of St. Louis, and she thought about the stage after dark, and the empty seats, and the wish she had pushed away the night before.
"Just the form?" she said at last.
"Just the form," Denise said, and grinned, because she knew her mother, and she knew that once Miriam Cole put her name on a thing, she meant it.
Miriam sighed, a long, surrendering sigh, and then she laughed. "All right, baby. All right. I'll get the form. But if that judge with the silver hair says something rude to me, you are explaining it to your grandmother in heaven."
"Deal," Denise said, and hugged her mother hard, there in the warm kitchen, while the soup pot cooled on the stove. "You're going to be wonderful, Mama. You've been wonderful all along. Now somebody else gets to hear it."
Miriam held her daughter and thought that the bravest thing she had ever done was raise this girl. Maybe the second bravest thing was about to be a form, filled in by hand, in a break room at work, with her name on it.
Chapter 4: The Audition Form