The Green Notes on My Furniture

“Does your mother know you’re here?”

“I told her I was staying with you weekends till you can get around. She said that was sweet.” Hannah dropped the duffel by the couch. “She said it’d take a load off her mind.”

I let that go by.

I told her the spare room was made up. She said the spare room was too far down the hall, and she would take the couch. I woke at two that first night needing the bathroom, and I had not gotten the walker three clicks across the bedroom floor before she was in my doorway in her sweatshirt.

She had her tennis shoes on.

“Hannah Marie. Did you go to bed in your shoes?”

“So I can get to you faster, Grandma.”

She walked behind me the whole way down the hall with one hand an inch from the small of my back, not touching.

“I’m not helping,” she said. “I know you can do it. I’m just here.”

I got into that bathroom and shut the door and cried into a hand towel, as quietly as I have ever done anything. Not from the hip.

Sixteen years old, sleeping in her shoes.

It was Saturday morning when she found the notes. I had half hoped she would not understand them. But she is a quick girl, and there was a K, and an S, and a D.

She was sitting at the piano. I gave her lessons on that piano from the time she was six, every Wednesday after school, until Stacy moved them to Shenandoah. It is a Baldwin upright, nothing fancy, that my folks bought secondhand in 1961. Hannah had her fingers on the keys and her eyes on that yellow square.

“Grandma, what are these?”

“Your mother and your aunt and uncle were here while I was in the hospital. They got some things organized.”

She looked around the room, and I watched her find them, one after another.

“They picked?”

“It looks that way.”

“While you were in rehab?”

“Yes.”

Her face went red clear to the hairline. She is fair, like Stacy. Neither of them has ever been able to hide a thing.

“Is the piano Mom’s now?”

“The piano is mine,” I said. “I still play it.”

“Then why is that still on there?” She stood up so fast the bench scraped. “I’m taking them down. All of them. Right now.”

“No, honey.”

“Grandma!”

“Hannah. Come here.”

She came. She was shaking a little, the way you do at sixteen when you find out the grown-ups are only people. I could not get up quick enough to go to her, and I hated that, so I held out both my hands and she came and knelt down by my chair like a much smaller girl.

“Listen to me. You have not done one thing wrong. Not one. You hear?”

“It’s my mom, though.”

“It is your mom, and she is a good mother to you, and this is between her and me. It isn’t yours to fix. I won’t have you carrying it.”

“Then why don’t you take them down?”

“Because I didn’t put them up.”

She thought about that.

“What are the green ones?”

I told her. She got up and went and read them, the hall table and the dining table and the recliner. She read the recliner twice.

Then she sat back down at the piano and played “In the Garden” all the way through, soft, the way I taught her, and I sat in my chair with the arms and let it wash over me.