The Green Notes on My Furniture

I did not raise my voice. I have never had to raise my voice at my children. Walt did not either.

“We were going to,” Stacy said. She was crying now, quietly, the tears just running. “We meant to. Then it got to be two, and Kevin had to get back, and I thought, she’ll be home in a week. I thought, she’ll never know the difference.”

“I knew the difference,” I said.

The room was very still. In the kitchen, Loretta had stopped cutting.

And then the piano bench scraped.

Hannah stood up. She did not look at me this time, and I think it was because she knew I would shake my head again. She turned to the piano, put two fingers on the yellow note above middle C, and peeled it off, slowly, so it would not tear.

She walked it across the room to her mother. She held it out.

“This one’s yours, Mom,” she said. “Grandma’s still playing it.”

There was no meanness in it. That is what I want people to understand. She said it the way you hand somebody a glove they have dropped.

Stacy looked at that little yellow square in her daughter’s hand for what felt like a full minute. Then she took it. She folded it in half, sticky side in, and put it in her coat pocket.

And then my daughter walked to the dining table and took down the next one herself.

She went through the house and got all eight. Nobody told her to. Dawn went after her and took down the pink ones, the sewing machine and the rocker and the dresser, and when the two of them met at the cedar chest they stood looking at that penciled “Talk?” and Dawn laughed, a wet, terrible little laugh, and rubbed it out with her thumb.

Kevin went last. He did it the slowest. The roll-top, the workbench, the freezer in the garage. He came back in and stood at the china cabinet a long time before he took that one, and he used his thumbnail so he would not mark the glass.

He left the recliner for the end. He peeled off the blue. He did not touch the green.

When they were done, the three of them stood in my front room with their pockets full of paper.

“I need two things,” I said, “and then we’re going to have coffee.”

They waited.

“Stacy, I need my house key back.”

Her head came up.

“Loretta carries it now. She’s who the hospital calls first, and then you. That’s not forever, and it isn’t because I’ve stopped loving you. It’s just who was here.”

Stacy opened her purse. Her fingers were not steady on the key ring, and Kevin reached over and worked the key off for her, and she put it in my hand herself.

“That’s fair,” she said. She could barely get it out. “Mom, that’s fair.”

“The other thing is the piano. I have not decided one thing about one stick of furniture in this house, because I am sixty-eight years old and I am using it. But I have decided the piano. It goes to Hannah, when she has a wall of her own to put it on. I made up my mind listening to her play it at two in the morning.”

Hannah’s mouth came open.

Stacy looked at her girl, and then at me, and I watched something in my daughter’s face that I had been waiting a month to see. It was not anger. It was not even hurt.