The Piano That Paid for College

My brother said it at Easter dinner, with the ham still on the table and the good dishes out, in front of his wife, his two daughters, his sister, and the boy he had raised since that boy was in diapers.

“There’s nothing put back for you, son. You can take loans or go to work like I did. Plenty of people do.”

Rowan had only asked about the deposit. Illinois State wanted two hundred and fifty dollars by the first of May to hold his spot, and he had asked his dad, very politely, whether he should write the check himself or whether Myron wanted to.

That was all. A boy asking who pays a deposit. And my brother set his fork down on the edge of his plate and said those words in a voice so flat it could have been the weather.

Nobody moved. Kenna had been telling us about the semester in Spain that Bradley was setting up for her junior year, and she stopped with her mouth half open. Laine looked at her water glass. Marcia, my sister-in-law, reached for the butter dish and then did not pick up the knife.

I watched Rowan. He was eighteen years old and six foot two, and he folded his napkin into a neat little square on his lap the way he used to fold his paper placemat at the Pizza Hut in Peoria when he was six and didn’t know what to do with his hands.

“Okay,” he said. “Sure. That’s fine.”

“The elevator’s hiring for summer,” Myron said. “Eighteen an hour. You’ll be surprised how fast it adds up.”

“Yes, sir.”

And then Rowan asked Laine to pass the green beans, and Laine passed them, and the dinner went on. That was the worst part, honestly. The dinner went on as if a door had not just been closed on that boy in front of everybody he loved.

I sat there with my hands in my lap and my face hot, and I did what I have always done in my brother’s house. I waited until I could get him alone.

I caught Myron in the driveway after the pie. He was walking out to his truck to get the folding chairs he had borrowed from the church, and I followed him out in my good shoes across the wet gravel.

“Myron. What was that?”

He didn’t turn around. He had the tailgate down and was sliding the chairs out one at a time. “It’s handled, Jana.”

“It didn’t sound handled. It sounded like you told your son he’s on his own.”

“I said it’s handled.” He stacked a chair against the bumper. “Stay out of it. I mean it. This is between me and him.”

I noticed his hands then. My brother has sold insurance in this county for twenty-six years, and he has the steadiest hands of anyone I know. He can fill out a claim form on the hood of a car in a sleet storm. That afternoon his keys were rattling against the tailgate.

I thought he was angry with me. I have thought about that a hundred times since. I had it backward, and if I had looked a little closer, I might have saved us all a spring.

“The girls are both at private schools,” I said. “Both of them. You found the money for that.”

“Kenna has a scholarship. Laine works in the library.” He closed the tailgate harder than he needed to. “You don’t know what anything costs, Jana. You don’t know what anything costs and you never have.”