The Piano That Paid for College

Then he went back inside, and I stood in his driveway holding a paper plate of leftover ham that Marcia had pressed on me, and I drove home to Steve.

I should tell you about Celia, because none of this makes sense without her.

There were three of us. Myron was the oldest, then me, then Celia, eight years after me, the surprise baby our mother called her blessing. Myron and I grew up walking beans on the farm east of town. Celia was the one we both looked after.

She was the musical one. Our mother played piano for the Methodist church for thirty years, and with a little money from her own mother’s estate she bought a used Yamaha baby grand from a family in Bloomington. It took up half the front room.

Celia was the only one of us who could really play it. By twelve she was better than Mom. By sixteen she was playing for weddings all over Woodford County and saving the money in a coffee can on top of her dresser.

And every night, no matter what else was going on, she played “Clair de Lune” before bed. She said it was how she closed the day. You could be upstairs with your homework and hear it drifting through the house, and you would know it was nearly ten o’clock.

When Mom passed, the piano went to Celia. Nobody argued. It would have been like arguing over who got Mom’s voice.

Celia had Rowan when she was twenty-three. The boy’s father was not part of the picture, and I will leave it there, because Celia did. She rented a little house on the west side of Eureka, gave lessons to pay the rent, and rocked Rowan on her lap while she played.

She died the next winter, at twenty-four, of a brain aneurysm. There was no warning and there was nothing anyone could have done. One morning she had a headache and by that evening she was gone. Rowan was eleven months old.

I won’t write about the rest of that week. It was seventeen years ago, and some things you put in a drawer and leave there.

What I will say is that Myron and Marcia took that baby home the day after, and they never once acted as if they had been handed a burden. They already had Kenna, four, and Laine, two. Myron adopted Rowan formally that spring. He was thirty-five. Nobody had to ask him.

And he was a good father to that boy. I have to say that plainly. Myron coached his Little League team for six summers. He taught him to drive in the old Silverado on the gravel roads north of town. He sat in the stands for every basketball game with his tie stuffed in his shirt pocket.

So when he said what he said at Easter, it didn’t sound like my brother at all. That was what scared me.

As for the piano, nobody else had room for it. Myron’s house was full of girls and car seats. So it came to me. Steve and I hired a mover from Peoria to bring it over, and it went in the corner of our living room by the front window, and it stayed there for seventeen years.

I cannot play a note. I never could. I had it tuned every fall by an old man from Bloomington who smelled like peppermints and who always asked if anybody had played it since last year. I always said no, and he always sighed, and then he tuned it anyway.