The Piano That Paid for College

“He was opening two more and needed partners. He showed me the numbers. I read numbers all day, Jana. I thought I was being smart. I thought I’d turn thirty-one into sixty and the boy could go to any school in the country.”

He stood up and rubbed his face with both hands.

“It went under in eight months. Rick filed bankruptcy. There was nothing left to get back. It was all gone. Three years ago this June.”

“Myron. Why didn’t you say something?”

“Marcia knew. She’s the only one.” He shook his head. “What was I going to say to him? Hey, son, your dad took your mother’s coffee can money and threw it at a car wash because he thought he was smarter than everybody?”

“So instead you let him think it was because he’s adopted.”

That landed. I watched it land. My brother closed his eyes.

“I didn’t say that. I never once said that.”

“You didn’t have to. You paid for the girls and you told him there was nothing. What did you think he would think?”

“I thought,” Myron said slowly, “that it would be easier for him to be mad at me for being cheap than to know his dad was a fool. I thought I’d make it up somehow. Every month it got closer and I didn’t find anything, and the girls’ bills came, and those were already promised.”

He spread his hands. “Then it was Easter and he asked about the deposit in front of everybody, and I said the worst thing I could think of so he’d stop asking.”

He looked back at the empty corner.

“And then today I watched my little sister hand him the last thing Celia had in this world, because I couldn’t. In front of the whole town. In front of him.” His voice cracked. “That’s what I’ve got to live with now. I’ll see that corner every time I come in this house.”

I didn’t gloat. I want you to know that. There was nothing in me that wanted to. He was my brother, and he was standing in my living room in a wrinkled suit looking at a hole in the carpet, and I loved him, and I was so angry with him I could hardly see.

“He thinks he’s the extra one, Myron. He told me so. Right across the counter at school. He said, ‘Kenna and Laine are his real kids.'”

My brother sat down on the floor. Just sat down, right there, with his back against the wall where the piano used to be.

“He said that?”

“He said, ‘I’m not mad, I’m just not dumb.'”

Myron put his face in his hands. I sat down on the floor next to him, the two of us like kids, and neither of us said anything for a long time.

“You have to tell him,” I said finally. “All of it. Not me. You.”

“I know.”

“Tomorrow.”

“I know, Jana.”

Rowan called me the next morning before I had my coffee. He had not slept. I could hear it.

“Aunt Jana. Where did Mom’s piano go?”

“To Nancy Albrecht. On the north end. She teaches lessons.”

“Is it still there?”

“It’s still there, honey.”

He was quiet a second. “Do you think she’d let me hear it? Just once? I don’t even remember it. I don’t remember her playing it. I was a baby. I just…” He stopped. “I’d like to hear it once. Before it’s just somebody else’s piano.”

I called Nancy as soon as I hung up. She didn’t hesitate for a second.