Tenney

Breakthrough

Mom and Dad are both working late, so Mason makes dinner, a frozen pizza burned at the edges with a side of shriveled peas. Tenney eats fast, eager to get back to her song, then carries her guitar and journal into the family room to work. Aubrey trails behind with markers and a notepad, promising to stay quiet as she kneels on the floor in front of the coffee table.

Tenney flips to a blank page and starts over, picking out the melody slowly. Every so often she stops to scrawl lyric ideas on her brainstorming page: love, miss, night, stars, words spiraling around one another like dragonflies. She tries out short sentences, rhyming “night” with “flight,” but the phrases refuse to click into anything that feels true. Every verse sounds forced and hollow.

Mason pokes his head into the family room to tell Aubrey it’s bedtime. She begs for five more minutes, but he scoops her up and tickles her until they’re both laughing. Then he winks at Tenney and carries Aubrey upstairs over his shoulder for some peace and quiet. “That song had better be about me!” Aubrey shouts over his shoulder, laughing.

Alone, Tenney notices the drawing Aubrey left on the table. It features Mom whisking something in a bowl, Dad leading Waylon on his leash, Mason banging a snare drum, Aubrey twirling like a ballerina, and Tenney herself strumming her guitar. She smiles, then turns back to her notebook. What is this song even about? Love, she writes, then stalls, recalling Portia’s advice that a good song is always about something meaningful to the person writing it. She’s never been in love or had her heart broken, and the closest thing to loss she can name is her favorite hat, hardly worth a whole song.

Tenney looks out the window at the night sky, starry over the backyard, where Waylon lies on the porch with his eyelids drooping. Needing a change of scene, she takes her guitar and journal outside to sit in the dark near his doghouse, where she can see the kitchen lit from within. New approach, she decides. Stop trying to answer and just ask questions. What’s the song about? What about it?

A food truck rumbles into the driveway. Through the window, Tenney watches Mom climb out, her eyes puffy and her mouth drawn into a weary frown. She looks more exhausted than Tenney has ever seen her. Mom trudges inside, sinks into a chair at the table, and drops her gaze to Aubrey’s drawing. Something in her tired face softens, and her eyes warm with love.

Tenney sucks in a sharp breath. That’s it, she realizes, that’s the song, not romance or heartbreak but the everyday, unglamorous love that carries a family through a long, hard day. She hurries inside, flips to a fresh page, and writes a title, “Reach the Sky.” The rest pours out after it, thoughts spilling straight onto the page instead of second-guessed lines.

By the time she heads to bed, Tenney has a full rough draft. She sings it to herself once, softly, and while it isn’t polished, it says exactly what she means. For the first time, songwriting feels like exactly what she was meant to do.