The Hymn My Mother Still Knew
“My feelings are sixty-eight years old. They can take it.” She said it dryly, and I liked her very much. “She doesn’t have to know us. We know her. That’s enough to go on.” I heard a chair scrape. “There’s still some of us around, you know. Not the whole nine. But some. Is there a piano in that place?”
“There’s a spinet in the dining room. One key sticks.”
“One key. She played a church piano for forty years that hadn’t been tuned since Eisenhower. Let me make some calls.”
She called me back Thursday night with five names besides her own.
I called Kim, the activities director, on Friday morning. I told her it was six visitors, all past sixty-five, on Sunday afternoon once lunch was cleared, and I asked whether it would be too much for the residents.
“Too much?” Kim said. “Anne, I pay a man with an accordion to come once a month. Two o’clock. I’ll put the coffee on.”
That left the piano.
Pete went over Saturday morning with his toolbox. I went along to hold the flashlight. He stood and looked at that spinet for a good minute with his hands on his hips, the same way he looks at a feed auger that has quit.
“I’m no piano man,” he said. “But a stuck thing is a stuck thing.”
He set the fern and the doily on a chair. He lifted the lid and found the screws that held the long front board over the keys. He took it off and laid it on the carpet, and then he got down on one knee and shone the light along the front of the keys.
“Huh,” he said.
He went in with needle-nose pliers and came out with a red bingo chip. It had slid down in front of the D above middle C and wedged there, heaven knows how many Fridays ago.
He pressed the key. It came back up the way it should.
“There’s your trouble,” he said. He put the bingo chip in his shirt pocket, for Kim.
It was still out of tune. Even I could hear that. Pete asked if he ought to call somebody, and I said Mrs. Halvorsen had told me not to bother, and he nodded and put the front board back on. He straightened the bench and tightened one of its legs while he was down there.
Sunday it rained in the morning and then cleared off.
They came in two cars. I was standing at the front entrance when they pulled up under the canopy, and I knew which one was Mrs. Halvorsen before she had the car door all the way open. She was small and square, with short white hair and a raincoat, and she was carrying a nine-by-thirteen pan with foil over it.
“Lemon bars,” she said, and handed them to me. Then she took my face in both her hands and looked at it. “You’ve got her chin.”
Behind her came the others. There was Jim, who is seventy-one and farmed out by the church his whole life, in a clean plaid shirt buttoned to the neck. There were two sisters, Karen and Sandy, who still sit side by side and still finish each other’s sentences. There was Tom, who had driven up from Cedar Rapids that morning by himself, a little over two hours each way, and who told me he sang in a barbershop chorus for thirty years on what my mother taught him. And there was Barb, on a walker, who was the youngest of that choir. She was six when she started.