The Piano That Paid for College

“Sunday afternoon,” she said. “Bring him at three. Bring whoever he wants to bring.”

Myron told Rowan the truth that Monday night, out in his driveway, sitting on the tailgate of his truck. I wasn’t there. I only know what each of them told me afterward, and the two versions matched, which is how I know they were both telling it straight.

He told him about the hundred and fifty dollars a month. He told him about the coffee can. He told him about the car wash and Rick Hammond and the bankruptcy, and about lying awake for three years trying to figure out how to fix it. And then he told him the part that mattered most.

“It was never because you’re not mine,” Myron said. “You hear me? I signed those papers when you were eleven months old and I’d sign them again tonight. I let you think it because I was too ashamed to tell you the truth. That’s on me. That’s the worst thing I ever did as your father.”

Rowan told me he didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he asked his dad if he was still going to be able to afford the girls’ tuition. Of course that’s what he asked. That’s the kind of boy Celia had.

Myron sold his bass boat that week, a sixteen-foot Tracker he took out on Lake Bloomington every Saturday from April to October. He got eleven thousand for it from a man in Pekin. It was the one thing he owned that was all his own.

He told Rowan he would pay for his books every semester for four years, out of his own pocket, and that the rest of the boat money was going toward his second year. He said it wasn’t enough to make up for anything, and it wasn’t meant to. It was just what he owed.

Rowan told me later that his dad cried in the driveway. He said he had never seen him cry except at his games, and those didn’t count.

On Sunday we drove out to Nancy’s together. Rowan rode with me. Myron followed in his truck. I don’t think either of them wanted to be in a car alone with the other one yet. That was all right. Some things take more than one week.

Nancy met us on the porch in a blue dress with her reading glasses on their chain. She shook Rowan’s hand and then held onto it for a second longer than a handshake.

“You have her eyes,” she said. “I’d know you anywhere.”

The piano was in her front parlor, in the bay window, with the afternoon sun coming across the lid. She had taken the lace runner I sent with it and laid it across the top just the way I’d had it. When I saw that, I had to stop in the doorway.

“Sit down, all of you,” Nancy said. “Rowan, would you sit here by me?”

She sat on the left side of the bench and patted the right side. Rowan sat down next to her, his long legs folded up awkwardly, his hands in his lap. Myron and I sat on her sofa against the wall like two kids in the principal’s office.

“I want to show you something first,” Nancy said. She lifted the lid of the bench, the hinged seat, and took out a stack of sheet music that had gone soft and brown at the edges. “These were inside when it came. I didn’t throw anything away. I thought somebody might want them someday.”