Tenney

Lillian Street Senior Center

On Thursday, the Jamboree committee tours the Lillian Street Senior Center. The director shows them a brick patio and lawn for the stage, food carts, and craft stalls. Holliday suggests stringing lights across the lawn, too, and Ms. Carter agrees, then turns to getting the seniors involved so they can stay connected to the community.

Ms. Carter tells the group to pair off with a senior to learn how they’d like to help at the Jamboree. In the activity room, seniors chat, read, and play board games while Tenney hovers at the edge. Jaya beelines for a cheerful man in rainbow suspenders, and Holliday claims a woman in a pink jumpsuit. Tenney has her eye on a kind-looking man in a bowtie, but a classmate reaches him first, and every senior has a partner but one.

In the corner, huddled in a deep chair and frowning out the window, sits a woman with messy gray hair, Tenney’s only option. When Tenney asks her to be partners, the woman agrees so sourly it sounds like she’s been asked to eat boiled okra. Tenney smiles and introduces herself, and the woman hesitates before giving her name: Portia. She admits she likes backgammon and general thinking, neither useful for a Jamboree stall.

Tenney asks if Portia bakes, and Portia’s expression brightens as she admits, with a small smile, that she could. Encouraged, Tenney keeps asking questions, but Portia’s answers stay clipped and distracted. Still, when it’s time to leave, Tenney glances back to catch Portia watching her, and returns her wave.

Walking home, Jaya gushes about her partner, Frank, a retired newspaperman planning a block-printing booth with a borrowed portable press and Jaya’s limited-edition poster design. Jaya’s excitement makes Tenney wish she and Portia had clicked half as well. When Tenney admits she isn’t sure Portia even likes her, Jaya loops their arms together and reassures her that Portia just needs time, suggesting Tenney find something they have in common, the way she and Frank did. Relieved to have a plan, Tenney agrees.

That evening, once dinner, dishes, and homework are done, Tenney carries her guitar and songwriting journal to the backyard, Waylon trotting after her to the grass beside his doghouse under the oak tree. Her new melody has looped in her head all through dinner, and now she wants to focus on the lyrics. Her sister, Aubrey, teases the journal as a “diary” of crushes and hearts, but to Tenney it holds puzzle pieces waiting for the right song. So far she has only two lines: “This song’s for you, my love. You watch over me from above.” She wrinkles her nose, since “from above” sounds like her love died or is stuck on the roof, and nothing rhymes better: dove, glove, shove. Worse, she still can’t say who “my love” is.

Frustrated, Tenney considers asking Mom or Dad, then remembers the family rule against getting help until she’s tried on her own first. Dad would flash his crooked smile and quote his favorite line from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” the poet she’s named for, about striving and seeking, while Mom would say the best songs come from digging into her own feelings.

The screen door creaks, and Mom calls her into the house as “Dreamy,” her nickname for whenever Tenney disappears into her music. The words on the page have already started to blur together, so Tenney sighs and hops up. Mom reminds her there’s always tomorrow. No song gets built in a day.