“He told me to stay out of it. I’m staying out of it. This isn’t a loan, and it isn’t his business. It’s from Celia.” I folded a towel. “He can think whatever he wants.”
Steve kissed the top of my head and didn’t push. That is one of the reasons I married him.
Graduation was the last Sunday in May, at two in the afternoon, in the high school gym. It had rained in the morning and the parking lot was steaming. I had spent the whole week before typing the program, two hundred and eleven names, checking every middle initial twice.
When I typed “Rowan Celia Wexler,” I stopped and looked at it a long time. Celia had given him her own name for his middle one. I don’t think he ever told anybody at school.
I wore my good black blazer over a red blouse. We sat in the bleachers with Myron and Marcia and the girls, and when they called Rowan’s name, Myron stood up and whistled through his fingers like he did at basketball games.
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I watched my brother clap until his hands were red. He was crying a little. He wiped his eyes with his thumb and pretended he wasn’t.
I thought, he loves that boy. I know he loves that boy. So what in the world is going on.
Afterward, the gym turned into what it always turns into. The folding chairs got pushed every which way. Families poured out of the bleachers with balloons and grocery store flowers. Grandmas were trying to get everybody into one picture.
Marcia’s knee had been bothering her, so she went with the girls to bring the car around to the side door. Steve went out to bring our truck around. That left Myron and me making our way across the floor toward Rowan.
He was standing by a stack of folding chairs near the free throw line in his navy cap and gown, taller than everybody around him, looking around for somebody to take his picture. When he saw me, his whole face opened up.
“Aunt Jana. You made it.”
“I typed your name, didn’t I? I wasn’t going to miss it.”
He laughed and hugged me with one arm, the tassel swinging against my cheek. I could feel Myron come up a step behind me, at my shoulder. I had the white envelope in my hand. I had been holding it so long the edges had gone soft.
“This is for you,” I said. “Open it later, at home.”
Rowan has never once in his life opened anything later. He slid his finger under the flap right there between the folding chairs.
He took out the cashier’s check first. I watched him read the number. I watched him read it again, his lips moving a little, and then he looked up at me with his eyes gone very wide.
“Aunt Jana. This is eight thousand dollars.”
“Read the card.”
The card was a plain white one from the Casey’s on Route 24. Inside, in my handwriting, I had written: “From your mother’s piano. She would want it to carry you. Love, Aunt Jana.”
Rowan read it. Then his face went still, and the color left it, and he stood there holding that card in the middle of all those balloons and all those people laughing.
“You sold Mom’s piano?”
“I did.”
“Aunt Jana. That was the only thing.”
“It was a piano, honey. You’re her son.”
Then I saw Myron’s face. He had read the card in Rowan’s hand. He was standing a step behind me in his gray suit, his graying hair combed flat for the day, and I watched my brother’s face fall in a way I had not seen since we were children.