I’m playing travel soccer, came back over the phone, which is why Mom is driving. Then tonight we’re going to Sophia’s bat mitzvah. From next door. Mom said I can drink as many Roy Rogers as I want.

Sounds fun, Emily wrote back. Good luck at the game. And enjoy the Roy Rogers!

She’d talk to Ari tomorrow. No need to interrupt her crazy day of plans with the story of her meeting last night with Rob. It would keep.

—

Emily showered and got dressed and then walked into the living room, where the keyboard was still sitting on the dining table. She wasn’t planning to go to the open mic in New Jersey, but she liked the idea of playing at one someday. She turned on the keyboard. What would she play for an audience, if she had the chance?

She fingered a few melodies with her right hand. There were some people, like Ezra, who strongly preferred one kind of music over another—he loved jazz and the Beatles; that was pretty much it. Rob had a slight penchant for 1970s British artists, but he was more like she was, appreciating all kinds of music, depending on the mood she was in. But she’d never really had a chance to choose what she’d play herself, she realized. Her piano teacher chose, her mom chose, Rob chose. What would she play, if she could play anything, any genre, any song?

It wasn’t just the melody, she realized, or the musicality of the song that pulled her toward one or another, it was the words, too, and how the lyrics and the music played with each other. She fingered some Peter, Paul and Mary—“If I Had a Hammer.” There was something about the way those words danced with the song’s rhythm that worked so well. The hammering of the guitar.

There were other songs like that. One that she’d loved when she first heard it in high school, even though it was more than ten years old by that point: Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” The insistent pulsing of it felt like riding in a car, and when Tracy started in with the repetition of the phrase “be someone,” it felt like the car was revving its motor, picking up steam. Emily fingered the melody on her keyboard and then started adding in chords with her left hand. Once she had that down, she sang along with the chorus, tentatively at first, and then full out, as if she were on stage. Her voice wasn’t as strong as it used to be; there were all those muscles involved in singing that she hadn’t been exercising for years. But she wasn’t as bad as she thought she’d be, either.