The opening guitar riff started, and the words appeared on the screen in blue, and Claire’s mind went completely blank.
But then Nina started singing.
She was awful.
Her voice was thin and slightly flat, and she was at least half a beat behind the music, but it didn’t matter. It did not matter one bit because she was singing.
Nina Vargas, who had spent eighteen months standing behind a glass wall watching the world go by, the woman who couldn’t feel a thing, who sat in parking lots gathering herself before she could walk into a room, was now standing on a stage in a dive bar singing Shania Twain.
Her voice cracked on the first verse, but she kept going. Claire jumped in. Her voice was better than she remembered, or maybe it was just louder, which, at Hank’s, amounted to about the same thing.
She found the melody, held onto it, and leaned into Nina. She sang the words they had been singing since they were way younger, words about feeling alive and wanting to go out and wanting a night to be wild and free.
The lyrics had meant something different when she was younger. Back then, they were an anthem. At fifty, they were a prayer.
Harper was last to start singing. She stood rigid for about four bars, clutching the microphone like a life preserver. And then something shifted. Claire saw it happen in real time.
There was a loosening in Harper’s shoulders, an unclenching of her jaw. There was a moment where the woman who controlled everything decided she was in control of absolutely nothing.
Harper opened her mouth and sang loudly. She was off-key and way too loud, but she didn’t care. She was performing. She was pointing at the audience. She was doing dance breaks.
Harper Ellis, vice president of a $200 million division, was doing Shania Twain’s dance break in a bar with peanut shells on the floor.
And she was magnificent.
The bar was right there with them. Claire did not know when it happened, but somewhere between the first and second choruses, the room had decided these women were their people.
They were clapping. Somebody was whistling. The couple who sang You’re the One That I Want were on their feet dancing.
Hank was nodding from behind the soundboard with a satisfied expression.
By the final chorus, they were shouting more than singing, arms around each other, completely out of tune and out of sync.
Claire felt something bubbling up in her body that she didn’t know was there.
She felt joy. She felt stupid, reckless joy.
She had not felt this since she was young enough to believe that dancing in the kitchen with a wooden spoon was all the purpose her life needed.
The song ended. The bar erupted in applause and cheers. It was full-throated, slightly drunk, and very genuine.
These people had just watched three women do something brave and beautiful.
Claire stood on that stage with Nina on one side and Harper on the other and thought, I forgot about this. I forgot what it feels like to do something that has absolutely no purpose but to just feel alive.
They walked off the stage on their shaky legs. Harper’s hands were trembling. Nina’s eyes were wet, and Claire could not stop smiling.
The man in the trucker hat bought them a round. The Patsy Cline woman raised her glass from across the bar, and the waitress with the ponytail said, “Well, y’all were the best kind of bad,” which Claire decided must have been a compliment.
They didn’t leave the bar for another two hours. They sat at their high-top table, drinking, talking, and laughing in the way only friends can after they’ve done something scary or crazy and actually survived it.
They replayed the performance moment by moment.
Harper’s dance break.
Nina’s voice cracking on the high note.
Claire forgetting the words to the bridge even though she had sung the song about four hundred times in her life.
