The Hymn My Mother Still Knew

That made six of the nine. One lives in Arizona now and could not make the trip. The other two are in the cemetery beside the church. Mrs. Halvorsen told me which rows.

Marcy was there too. It was her day off. She had on jeans and a sweater, and she stood by the dining room door twisting her hands until her grandmother went over and took one of them and held on to it.

Pete had gone and got my mother from her room. She came in on his arm, in the lavender cardigan, with her hair brushed. I had done the hair that morning after all.

He sat her at her regular table. She looked around at all those people the way she looks at everybody.

“Is it a funeral?” she asked him.

“No, ma’am,” Pete said. “It’s company.”

Mrs. Halvorsen sat down in the chair beside her. I saw her work to keep her face steady.

“Miss Dorothy,” she said. “It’s Judy. I was your alto. I never could keep the nickel on.”

My mother looked at her politely.

“How do you do,” she said.

That was all. There was nothing behind it. I had told them to expect that, every one of them, and I still saw it go through the six of them like a draft under a door. Tom looked at the floor. Karen took hold of Sandy’s sleeve.

Mrs. Halvorsen did not flinch. She patted my mother’s hand once. Then she did the only sensible thing there was to do.

She started to hum.

It was low and plain, the way she must do it over the dishpan. One at a time the other five came in under her, humming, not singing. It was the first line of that old cradle of a hymn, in a care home dining room on a Sunday afternoon, with the coffee maker dripping in the corner.

My mother’s head came up.

She put her left hand flat on the table, the same as Tuesday. She stood. This time I was close enough to take her elbow, and I did, because I thought she was going to sing where she stood.

She did not. She walked.

She walked straight across that dining room. She was the one leading and I was the one being led. She went between the tables and past Walt in his cap, right to the spinet on the far wall. She pulled the bench out with her foot. I had seen her do that ten thousand times in my life.

She sat down. She sat like she meant it.

Her hands came up and hung over the keys for a second. I held my breath, because I remembered the first month, when she had looked at those keys and said, “Isn’t that nice.”

Then her hands came down, and they came down in the right place.

She played the last line of the hymn by itself, slow, as an introduction, the way a church pianist does to give the people their note. The piano was a little sour. She never blinked at it.

Before she started the verse she turned her head and looked over her shoulder at the six of them sitting around the table.

“Well, stand up,” my mother said. “And stand up straight. Nobody’s chewing gum.”

There was a second of dead silence.

Then Jim, seventy-one years old, reached up and took a piece of gum out of his mouth. He folded it into his handkerchief and put the handkerchief in his back pocket.