The Piano That Paid for College

He did not look angry. He looked like a man who had just been caught at something.

Rowan turned to him with the check still in his hand. “Dad?”

Myron looked at the card. He looked at me. He looked at the boy he had raised. His mouth worked for a second without anything coming out of it. When it did, it wasn’t what I expected.

“You sold it,” he said, very quietly. “You sold Celia’s piano. For him.”

“Somebody had to,” I said. I did not say it unkindly. I said it plain.

My brother nodded slowly, like a man taking a blow he had been expecting for a long time. And then he said the thing I will remember for the rest of my life.

“That was supposed to be me, Jana. It was supposed to be me.”

He put his hand on Rowan’s shoulder for a second, just a second. Then he turned around and walked out of the gym through the side doors, past the balloons and the grandmas and the little brothers, and he didn’t look back.

Rowan stood there staring after him. “What does that mean? Aunt Jana, what does that mean?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said, and that was the truth. “But I think we’re about to find out.”

He came to the house that night.

It was nearly ten. Steve had already gone to bed because he had first shift in the morning. I was sitting in the kitchen with a cup of decaf, still in my red blouse, when I saw his headlights swing across the front window and stop in the driveway.

I opened the door before he knocked. He was still in the gray suit. He had taken the tie off and his shirt was rumpled, and he looked about ten years older than he had that morning.

“Can I come in?”

“You don’t have to ask that.”

He came in. And he didn’t go to the kitchen. He walked straight through to the living room, to the corner by the front window, and he stood there looking at the dents in the carpet where the piano had stood.

I turned on the lamp. Neither of us said anything for a long time.

“I used to come over here sometimes,” he said finally, “when you were at work. I have a key. I’d come in and sit on her bench for ten minutes. Didn’t play. I can’t play either. I’d just sit.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Nobody knew that.” He crouched down, the way Dad used to crouch in the field to look at the corn, and he put his fingers in one of the caster dents just like I had. “There was money for him, Jana. There was money.”

I sat down on the arm of the couch.

“From the day we adopted him, I put a hundred and fifty dollars a month in an account. Every month. Even the year Marcia was laid off. By the time he was fifteen it was thirty-one thousand dollars. Plus what Celia had in her coffee can. It was enough. It was more than enough for State.”

“So where is it?”

He laughed, but there was nothing funny in it. “You remember Rick Hammond? Had the car wash out on War Memorial in Peoria?”

I did, vaguely. One of his clients. A big friendly man who always wore a golf shirt.