The Piano That Paid for College

She went through the stack slowly. Hymns. Wedding marches. A book of children’s pieces with Celia’s students’ names penciled at the top of each page. And then, near the bottom, a single worn copy of “Clair de Lune,” the pages taped along the spine where they had come apart from use.

Nancy opened it on the stand. There were pencil marks all over it in Celia’s handwriting. Fingerings. Little arrows. A circled place near the middle where she had written “breathe.”

And at the top of the first page, in pencil, in the small, slanted hand I would know anywhere, it said: “Slower tonight. R asleep on my lap.”

Rowan read it. I watched him read it. He reached out and touched the letter R with one finger, very carefully, like it might smudge.

“That’s me,” he said. “That’s me, isn’t it?”

“That’s you,” Nancy said softly. “She must have played it with you right there on her lap. That’s why it’s slower. She didn’t want to wake you.”

Nobody in that room said anything. Myron had his hand over his mouth. I was holding onto the arm of the sofa so hard my knuckles hurt.

“Would you like me to play it now?” Nancy asked. “The way she marked it?”

Rowan nodded. He couldn’t talk.

So she played it. Slow, the way Celia had written it, with the long pause at the place where Celia had written “breathe.” The afternoon sun lay across the keys and the sound filled the whole parlor.

I closed my eyes and I was fourteen again, upstairs with my homework, hearing it come through the floor at ten o’clock and knowing the day was done.

Rowan sat on the bench the whole time, the same bench his mother had sat on, his shoulder nearly touching Nancy’s. He didn’t move. He didn’t wipe his eyes. He just let them run.

When it was over, nobody spoke for a long time. Nancy laid her hands in her lap.

Then Myron got up off the sofa. He crossed the room and stood behind his son and put both his hands on the boy’s shoulders. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. Rowan reached up and put one hand over his dad’s, and they stayed like that.

“You can come back,” Nancy said to Rowan. “Any time you want. Sunday afternoons I’m here. If you want to learn it, I’ll teach you. No charge. I think she’d have liked that.”

“I can’t play anything,” Rowan said, his voice rough.

“Neither could she, once,” Nancy said. “Neither can anybody, until somebody shows them.”

We stayed for coffee and lemon bars. Nancy told how Celia once taught a little boy who couldn’t sit still to play standing up. Myron laughed at that. It was the first time I had heard my brother laugh in months.

When it was time to go, Myron and Nancy were talking on the porch, and I went back into the parlor to get my purse.

Rowan was still there. He was standing by the piano with Nancy’s permission, alone in the late light, and he didn’t hear me in the doorway.

He had closed the fallboard over the keys. He wasn’t trying to play. He was just standing there, a tall boy in a borrowed tie, with one hand resting flat on the lid of his mother’s piano, the way you would rest your hand on the shoulder of someone you had only just met and already loved.