The Hymn For Someone Else

“Which one, Gran?”

“Safe in the Arms of Jesus.”

I knew the title the way you know a road you have seen on the map but never driven. It was not in the hymnal I grew up with. I could not have hummed you three notes of it.

“I can find the music,” I said.

“It’s in the piano bench. The red book. The one with the tape on the spine.”

“All right. And you want me to play it for the service?”

“No.” She shook her head on the pillow. “I want you to play it here. In this room. When the time comes. I’ll tell you when.”

I laughed a little, because I did not know what else to do. “Gran. Why that one?”

She looked at me for a long moment. Her eyes are pale blue, the color of a washed-out denim shirt, and they had not gotten any less sharp in ninety years.

“Play it first,” she said. “Then I’ll tell you.”

“Gran.”

“Play it first, Rochelle. Then I’ll tell you.”

I asked her once more before the week was out, on Wednesday, while I was changing the water in the vase on her nightstand. I got the same answer in the same voice. A woman of ninety who has made up her mind is not asked a third time. I had known that about her since I was six years old and tried to leave a lima bean under my plate.

That evening I was drying dishes next to my mother, and I said, “Why do you think she wants that one?”

My mother, Lorene, was sixty-seven that fall, and she had the same set to her jaw as her mother. She handed me a plate. “I couldn’t tell you. Mama has never sung that hymn once in my whole life.”

“Never?”

“Not at church. Not in the kitchen. Not at Daddy’s funeral.” She turned off the water. “Seems an odd thing to ask for, after all this time.”

I took six years of piano lessons from Mrs. Gunderson in Zanesville, at five dollars a half hour, from the age of eight to fourteen. I was the only one of the grandchildren who did. My cousins quit at the second recital or never started, and I stuck it out because I liked the order of it, the way a page of notes told you what was coming next. I am not good. I play for the Wednesday Bible study when the regular pianist has her hip replaced, and for the nursing home sing-along on the first Sunday of the month. But I can read music, and nobody else in that family can.

I was also, as Gran liked to say, the only one who ever listened in church.

She said it that first week, while I sat beside the bed with the red hymnal open on my knee. “You always did. Every one of those grandchildren would be picking at a hymnal or drawing on the bulletin, and there you’d be, looking up at Pastor like he was about to say something. You’re the one who listened. You can listen to this.”