The Song Two Hundred Guests Finished

The morning after

We opened gifts the next afternoon on my mother’s porch steps and out in the front yard, with folding tables and leftover cake and about thirty family members who had stayed in town.

Paula came. I was not sure she would. She brought a pan of cinnamon rolls, the kind she makes from her own mother’s recipe, the one in the plastic sleeve in her binder.

Before anybody opened anything, she stood up on the bottom porch step and asked if she could say something.

The yard went quiet the same way the lawn had gone quiet the night before.

“I owe some people an apology,” she said. Her hands were folded tight in front of her.

“Eloise most of all. And Woody. And Emmy.” She nodded at my mother. “And that boy with the speakers, if anybody sees him.”

She told them. Not every word she had told me on the lawn, but enough. That the song had been Willard’s for her.

That it played when they closed his casket. That she had not been able to hear it since, and had not told anyone.

“I was wrong to put my hands on that cord,” she said.

“I was wrong to try to run somebody else’s day so I wouldn’t have to say one hard sentence. I’m sorry. I’m going to try to do better at saying things out loud.”

Nobody said anything for a second. Then Uncle Woody got up out of his lawn chair, walked over to the porch, and hugged her.

He is not a hugger either. He held on a long time.

My mother went next. She and Paula had been polite to each other for three years, the way two women are polite across a church potluck table.

That afternoon on the porch steps, they stood there holding each other’s elbows, both of them widows, both of them crying.

Paula found Alonzo’s number from the email that week and called him to apologize. He told me about it later.

He said she also sent him a check for another hundred dollars and a note that said, “For the trouble. Thank you for being kind about it.”