“Someone you know well,” George had written. “Pastor Eugene Wills of the First Baptist Church. Call him, Lillian, and tell him it is time.” I took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes. Marcus, the young mover, was still standing by the front door with his cap in his hand, looking as if he would rather be anywhere else and nowhere else. I dialed the number from memory. The pastor answered on the fourth ring, and when I said my name, he was quiet for a while. “Lillian,” he said softly. “I wondered when this call would come. I have the original in the church safe.”
He brought it over that very evening in his old green sedan. Pastor Wills was eighty four, with hands like roots, and he laid a manila folder on my kitchen table with great care. “I signed as a witness on the fourteenth of March, 2018,” he said. “George came to my office with Daniel. Daniel signed because he knew he owed his father more than he could pay. He was sober that morning, or nearly so. I would not have witnessed it otherwise.” He set a notarized copy beside the deed. “It is as sound as the Rock of Gibraltar.”
The piano teacher who had bought the piano arrived the next morning, with Marcus carrying her bag. Her name was Edna Fairchild, and she was eighty four years old, tiny, with a silver bun and quick bright eyes. She walked straight to the upright without even greeting me, lifted the lid, and played a rippling run of notes from one end of the keyboard to the other. “Out of tune,” she said, nodding. “But good bones in that case. A little work and it will sing.” We looked at each other, two old women in a living room, and began to laugh.
A father who pays his sons debts in silence has already decided what the final gift will be.
Daniel came on Thursday, a heavy, flushed man of fifty with a days stubble. “Mom, you went behind my back,” he said from the doorway. “You made me look like a fool in front of the buyer. That was my business.” I did not argue. I took the deed from the folder on the table and held it out. “Your name is on this,” I said. “So is the name of your father, and the signature of the pastor.” He laughed shortly. “That is a forgery.” Pastor Wills stepped out of the kitchen with a cup of tea and said, “I was there, Daniel.”
My son sat down on the piano bench. The color drained from his face, and for a minute he looked ten years old, a boy caught with a window broken. “I owed a man,” he said in a hoarse voice. “Fourteen thousand dollars. I did not know where else to turn. I thought if I sold the piano, nobody would be hurt.” His shoulders began to shake. “That piano was the wedding present of Dad, Mom. I knew it when I sold it. I knew it the whole time.” I sat beside him on the bench, the way I had when he was small and afraid of thunder.
I will say what I did next in a few words, because it was the hardest thing I have ever done. I did not give him a dollar. I told him that the house in Hot Springs was mine and that he could live there rent free, on one condition: ninety days of sobriety, shown on paper, with a meeting each week at the church and a sponsor of his choice. If he relapsed, the house would go to the recovery ministry of Pastor Wills. I said it in a quiet voice. Daniel nodded and wiped his face with the back of his hand.
The next Monday, Pastor Wills drove him to a treatment center in Little Rock, and Daniel went through the doors without looking back. I do not know what happened there. I only know that he called on the sixth day, and again on the thirteenth, and that on the twenty first he said, “Mom, I want you to know that I have never been this scared.” I told him I knew. I told him that fear was the first honest thing he had said to me in years. We stayed on the line a long time without talking.
In March, Edna and I drove to Hot Springs to look at the little white house. The chimney was crooked, as it was in the photograph, and the porch sagged on one side. Inside, the rooms smelled of dust and cedar, and the sunlight came through a small window over the sink. Edna stood in the middle of the front room with her cane. “This house needs a piano,” she said. A week later, a truck arrived with a small upright that had belonged to her late sister, and two men hauled it in and set it against the wall.
Daniel moved into the house in April, after ninety four days. The first thing he did was sit down at the old upright and press a single key. It rang through the empty house. “I have not played since I was twelve,” he said. “You made me practice an hour every day, and I hated you for it.” I smiled. “I know.” He found the first line of a hymn, slowly, with two fingers, and his mistakes were as loud as bells. I closed my eyes and thought it was the sweetest sound I had ever heard.
On the first anniversary, he stood in the front of the sanctuary at First Baptist and played “Amazing Grace” for the congregation, crooked and gentle and a little too slow. I sat in the third pew with Edna, who whispered, “His left hand is coming along.” When he finished, there was a silence, and then the whole church rose. At home that night we played the old duet, the two of us at the upright in my living room, and I made him play a little Elvis. “For your father,” I said. He grinned, and his grin was the grin of George exactly.
