The Piano on the Porch in the Rain

What Dennis asked for

On Monday, my father said four words in a row for the first time.

I was there, and so was Renee. It was the first time we had been in his room together since the stroke. She had come in the afternoon, which she never did, and she was sitting in the chair by the window with her purse in her lap. I was standing at the foot of the bed.

The speech therapist had left a board on the tray with pictures and letters on it. Dad pushed it away with his good hand. He looked at me, and then at Renee, and his whole face started working the way it worked on the picture of the cup.

“Sun,” he said. “Sunday.”

“Sunday?” I said.

He nodded. He lifted his left hand off the blanket and pointed at the window, toward town, toward the steeple you could just see over the elevator.

“Church?” I said. “You want to go to church?”

“Yeah.” He was breathing hard. He pointed at me. “Play.”

“You want me to play? On Mom’s piano?”

“Yeah.” Then he turned his head on the pillow, and he looked at Renee. He held out his left hand to her, open.

“Push,” he said. “You. Push.”

Renee stared at him.

“Dennis,” she said. “I can’t. Everybody there knows.”

He kept his hand out. He did not lower it. My father was a quiet man his whole life, but he had a way of waiting that made you do things.

“You,” he said again.

She put her purse on the floor. She got up and took his hand, and she held it in both of hers.

“All right,” she said. “All right, honey. I’ll push.”

I understood then what he was asking. He was not asking for the piano back in the living room. He was not asking anybody to be punished. He was asking his wife to walk into that fellowship hall in front of every person who had watched those six trucks go down Main Street, and to stand there with him while his daughter played his first wife’s song.

It was the hardest thing he could have asked of her. It was also the only door he could have opened for her. I think he knew both.