Who Does She Think She Is

Harald clicks on the link his niece Elaine sent him, settling in with his glass of Blanton’s to watch something underwhelming, even embarrassing, just entertaining for all the wrong reasons. The video is called May 2026 Round Robin—Herndon Lodge, and it will document for all time his 72-year-old sister onstage, guitar in tow, making a complete ass of herself. All the proof they’ll ever need that she belongs at home and needs to stay in her lane, on the path long set for her: taking care of the oldest family members as they lose the ability to care for themselves. Kaitlyn was born to work diligently, ’round the clock if need be, to keep their old folks out of the rest homes and retirement communities that would drain their estates dry and leave nothing for their heirs.

As the video loads, he notices the total run time: more than two hours. He sighs and starts skipping forward in big chunks, right past the first three performers. He expects they’re professionals—comfortable onstage, skilled, clearly well known to the audience, far more seasoned and accomplished than Kaitlyn—but none of that matters. Their names mean nothing to him, and their confidence is irrelevant.

He stops when the camera homes in on Kaitlyn.

She’s being introduced by the host with a warmth that catches him off-guard, and the room responds to her with friendly applause. After a very brief panicked expression blooms and fades from Kaitlyn’s face, she adjusts her microphone height and greets the audience in a calm, low voice. “This one’s based on the time my college freshman roommate brought her brand-new fiancé home for Thanksgiving to meet her family. They’d known one another maybe six weeks. The great-grandmother in the story is actually based on my great-grandmother, the only one I ever met, the one who supposedly said the first time she saw me: ‘Oh, what a nice little baby, but you know what? She looks like him.’”

Harald smirks at that, despite himself.

Then she begins “Great Grandmother.”

Her playing is just clean enough to get by. Her voice, though not slick or commercial, carries a seasoned, textured clarity that holds the room. Harald listens, alert for any small misstep—a wrong chord, a flubbed lyric, some sign of amateurism. If it happens at all, it’s over before it has time to register.

“I hope he’s a lover ‘cause he’s sure not a looker / And I hope he’s brighter than he seems…”

The line gets a solid laugh from the audience. Harald’s jaw sticks.

Kaitlyn finishes the song without losing the room. When her turn comes up again, she leans forward on her chair toward the listeners. “Okay, so this next one’s a little bit blasphemous. I can just imagine some lonesome Supreme Being saying, ‘I want to create something like a pet, only a little smarter—something that will love me and depend on me and obey me. But I want this creature to do all that not because I’ve baked it into their response system, but because they decide, with the intellect I will give them, that they want to do all this of their own free will.’ So I think maybe where it all went wrong is that if this Supreme Being had hopes of us being something a little bit dog-like in our nature, what we ended up with instead is a nature that’s a little more cat-like. Seriously, none of this is our fault.”

Kaitlyn eases into “Down from the Trees.” By now, Harald realizes he hasn’t skipped ahead in quite a while. He’s still watching, even leaning in slightly, arms crossed more out of habit than conviction.

“When you mean to be human you need to be warned / It’s a long way down from the trees…”

He frowns. The lyric hangs in the air—clear, unsettling.

The melody works. The rhythm works. The audience chuckles at a line he doesn’t quite catch, and someone in the front row nods. Harald can see that they trust her. His jaw tightens.

One more time around and Kaitlyn is introducing the third song of her set: “This one is kind of a shout-out to music teachers. It’s about what happens when natural ability runs into the brick wall of massive difficulty and you have to work your way through it or go find a different hobby, and how that translates into learning how to learn. If you can master something, you can apply it to learning all kinds of other things: powering through the hard part until it’s not hard anymore. It’s also about how teachers never know when they’re changing a life. Sometimes the payoff doesn’t show up until decades later.”

Then she begins “She’ll Be All Right.” Harald notes how naturally the story unfolds. With no gimmicks, no overplaying, there’s a softness to her presence that seems to enhance the emotional weight of the lyrics.

“Topeka might be the worst town yet / To grow some wings and fly / And thirteen is the worst year we get / ’Til the year we die…”

He sees people in the audience leaning forward now, like they’re soaking in something intimate and true. The other performers seem engaged as well.

Harald is watching every minute, all of Kaitlyn’s songs and all of theirs. He barely registers the names of the other performers, but he can’t ignore how good they are—polished, expressive, moving, entirely at ease. He knows enough to see that being part of this lineup means something. And, fucking hell, Kaitlyn doesn’t even look out of place.

As the music fades and the first half of the round robin ends, the video holds on Kaitlyn. She’s flushed and glowing.

Then comes the intermission, and the camera keeps rolling. Audience members are approaching Kaitlyn—first one, then another. Handshakes turn into hugs. People lean in close, speaking into her ear with bright smiles. A man clasps both her hands and says something that makes her laugh and look down.

Even through the screen, he can feel the weight of it—a connection he can’t claim, and a kind of belonging he can’t manufacture. He narrows his eyes. Kaitlyn is in her element and it’s happening without him.

The second half begins without fanfare. The camera returns to the stage just as Kaitlyn is stepping back into the circle. She’s smiling, still lit up from the intermission. Someone offscreen readjusts her microphone, and she gives a small nod of thanks.

“This is one of those songs about how we never stop making huge mistakes, even when we’re way past old enough to know better. It’s called ‘Wedding Waltz,’ and it should probably never be done at a wedding.”

The audience laughs. Of course they do.

The song starts slow—melancholy but edged with humor.

“They vowed their love never’d be altered / Though it alteration might find…”

The line gets a knowing murmur from the room.

“He was the uncle of the pretty young bride / I was there for the shrimp and the wine…”

Harald feels his chest tighten again. He watches the audience as much as Kaitlyn now. They’re grinning, nodding, visibly tracking the twists and turns of the narrative.

By the end, no one’s laughing, but no one’s disengaged either. Kaitlyn steps back, her smile faint, almost private, like she’s thinking of something no one else can see.

Next round, second to the last, and now comes “The Van.”

“I wrote this one after watching Nomadland,” she says. “It’s about finding a way to live that doesn’t make sense to most people—and finding some peace and contentment in it anyway.”

“There is a woman who lives in a van / At first ‘cause she had to, now ‘cause she can…”

Harald shifts in his chair.

“With a little more cash than it takes to survive / From selling a house that was eating her alive…”

The line hits him harder than he would have expected. He starts telling himself it’s just a story, just a fictional old woman in a yellow van. But that thread—of leaving, of making a new kind of life alone—winds around something deep in him, and pulls.

“She likes meeting up with friends from the road / Stories to trade in a campfire glow / Then when it’s time to back up and go / The solitude’s even sweeter…”

It’s not just freedom Kaitlyn’s describing, but relief from having people always pulling on you.

By the time Kaitlyn starts her last song, “The Call to Adventure,” the room is different, quieter yet. The crowd’s been gently rewired by the cumulative effect of the night’s performances. Harald can feel it, even over YouTube.

“This is for anyone who’s ever had to completely rethink the story of their life. It’s also about what happens when the world yanks you right out of what you thought was safe, and into something you would never have chosen on your own.”

She begins to sing: “The call to adventure sometimes comes early for some / Where battles are waged and where fortunes are won…”

Harald sits forward, elbows on his knees now. Each verse is about a different facet of the call to adventure: “The call to adventure can make you realize / You have based your life story on fables and lies…”

The room is so still no one coughs. No one even shifts in their seat. “The call to adventure is your call alone / Not your father’s or mother’s, they had their own / Your kids are your kids even once they have flown / But the call to adventure is your call alone.”

Kaitlyn plays the final chord and holds it. Then silence. And then the applause—spontaneous, hearty, sustained.

The camera lingers on her face. She smiles, a little dazed, clearly moved.

Harald doesn’t realize the applause is partly because now the event is over, all the performers are being acknowledged, and the audience is about to move on to the buffet bowls, the wine, the beer, and the soda laid out in the back of the room. He thinks all the clapping is for Kaitlyn, so right now he’s feeling a little worse than he probably should.

The silence in his own room feels stark and intrusive.

He tells himself it’s all theater. The audience doesn’t know her like he does. They haven’t seen how eager she’s always been to accommodate others, to say yes, to make herself small for the sake of peace.

Harald has known since they were children that she could be steered, influenced, and managed. She was his touchstone for learning how to grow and wield that kind of power. But that night, those people see something different. They see her standing in her own light, fully herself. And it’s not lost on him that the applause is recognition, not charity.

Harald stares at the frozen frame on the screen. He doesn’t know how all the ice managed to melt in his untouched glass of Blanton’s. But he understands something clearly: Kaitlyn no longer needs him to measure her worth. Worse still, she might never have needed him at all. Who does she think she is, anyway?

Harald tells himself again that he knows her far better than they do. But that version of her—the one who hung on his words, who used to ask if he liked her hair a certain way, who once wrote a sappy high school essay about how much he inspired her—where is that girl? Is she still here in this retired woman, this widowed grandmother? He wants to believe she is, but now he’s not so sure.

He reaches for his laptop again and rewinds to the moment before she starts The Van. He watches her calm, focused facial expression. He watches her fingers: strong, steady, and practiced. He listens again to the first lines, then pauses, suddenly irritated by how clean it sounds.

He closes the screen. He leans forward and stares at the floor for a long moment. It used to be easy to read her. She used to want to be read. That was the point of Kaitlyn, wasn’t it? She’s always been the open book, the sentimentalist, a harmless, useful, people-pleasing featherweight. You could set your watch by her eagerness to appease. But the woman in the video—the one hugging friends, holding a room with six songs and a wry smile—she was not following anyone’s lead.

He remembers Kaitlyn at twelve, crying in the kitchen after he critiqued her science fair project just before she had to bring it in, when it was too late to change anything: The Effect of Time and Temperature on Bacterial Growth in Milk.He hadn’t touched it—just asked questions, poked holes, made her doubt what she thought she knew. She thanked him, of course. She always did. That’s what little sisters do. That’s what she used to do.

He stands up abruptly and begins to pace four times across the room and back.

It’s not exactly that he wants her to fail. He just wants her to stay realistic, to stay in her lane, to remember who she is and what her role is. But something in him knows she’s forgotten the rules, or that maybe she’s started writing her own.

He exhales sharply, rubbing his eyes. The room feels smaller now, the bourbon watery and useless.

He picks up his phone and taps Elaine’s phone number.

She picks up right away. “Hey, Uncle Harald.”

“That video you sent.”

“You watched it?”

“I did. Herndon Lodge, huh? Our Kaitie’s hit the big time.”

“It’s a good room,” Elaine says.

“Oh, I guess, but that really was a lot to sit through.”

“You didn’t skip ahead?”

“At first I did, I’m not a masochist. Though I did stop once Kaitlyn came on.”

She waits.

He continues. “She looked nervous at first, and maybe out of her depth. That weird little smile she does when she hopes nobody knows she’s bluffing. And that first song… not exactly Gershwin. But… she held the room, I’ll give her that. Even with that bizarre second one, ‘Down from the Trees’? What the hell even is that?”

“She wrote it,” Elaine says. “She wrote them all, and not a flop in the bunch.”

“I gather. Still, that one? Darwin had a fever dream and decided to pick up a banjo?”

“And yet you watched the whole thing?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Kind of surprised me, too,” she says.

There’s a long pause.

Harald says, “She held her own.”

“She put herself out there and made it work,” Elaine says.

“You’re getting sentimental about her.”

“No. You just aren’t used to seeing her like this.”

Another silence.

Harald asks, “How does this change anything? About stepping up to take care of Aunt Charlotte, about Kerrville?”

Elaine pauses. “She’s already packing.”

“Jesus.” Harald exhales slowly through his nose. “She actually thinks she belongs there.”

“Maybe she does,” Elaine says. “She won her spot in that competition, and apparently against all odds.”

“Don’t start going soft on me now.”

“I’m not. I’m saying if we want her to come around, we’ll have to do better than calling it irresponsible and hoping she listens.”

Harald doesn’t speak for a second. Then: “She needs to stop pretending she’s twenty-five and get back to doing what’s best for the family.”

“Which is to give up the one thing that’s actually lit her up again—maybe her very last shot at it?”

“Which is to be useful,” he says. “Anyway, thanks for the link.”

“Sure.”

He ends the call before she can say more. The screen fades to black, but he still sees Kaitlyn’s face: calm, luminous, utterly at ease. You’d think she was accepting a fucking Grammy or something.