The Seat They Gave Me At Her Recital

The recital that was ours

Josie is nine now. She still plays. We got her a real piano finally, a secondhand upright the church was getting rid of, and four men from the men’s group hauled it into our front room on a Saturday and would not take a dime. It sits by the window where the little dime-store keyboard used to be. She practices after supper with the light going gold across the county road outside, and I do her billing at the same table, and it is quiet in the good way now, the way a house is quiet when nobody is reorganizing it.

She had a recital this past spring, a small one, just Mrs. Alderman’s students in the fellowship hall at the church with folding chairs and a sheet cake after. There was no printed program on good yellow paper. There was a piece of construction paper Mrs. Alderman had lettered by hand, and it said Josie Pruitt, fifth on the list.

I sat in the front row. Front and center, close enough to see her feet reach the pedals now, which they do. She did not need to look for me in the back of any room, but she looked at me anyway, once, before she started, the way she has always done, finding her mother’s face so she knows she is safe enough to begin. And I looked right back at her and I did not blink and I did not hide it, because I have learned that a child looking for her mother in a crowd is not a weakness anybody gets to rename. It is the whole point. It is the thing I built my life around and I will build it around that until I am gone.

She played her piece perfect, both hands, and at the very end, so quiet almost nobody caught it, she slipped in four extra notes that were not on the sheet. Up and back down.

Come on home, little bird.

She looked at me when she played them and she grinned, because now it was not a rope thrown across a dark room. Now it was a joke between us, a wink, a thing that meant I am home, Mama, I never got taken, you heard me and you came. I mouthed it back at her from the front row where I belong.

Come on home.

And she did. She came down off that little stage and across the fellowship hall and climbed into my lap even though she is getting too big for it, and we ate sheet cake off paper plates, and that is the end of the story, which is a thing I did not think I would get to say. A story that ends. My daughter, in her own name, safe in the front row town where I can see her, humming the song that was only ever ours.

They gave me a seat in the back once. I sat in it for one night because I am a reasonable woman and I did not want to make a scene.

I will never sit there again.