The Waltz Dad Wrote for Mama

After

I’m not going to tell you everything got fixed that afternoon. It didn’t. Memory care still costs six thousand five hundred dollars a month.

Medicare still doesn’t pay a dime of it. That is not the kind of thing a waltz fixes.

But some things changed.

Ferrell walked over to Darla after the music stopped and shook her hand. Then Fleta hugged her. Then another lady from church, and another.

By the time the cake was cut, there were six women sitting around Darla’s chair, and nobody left her alone the rest of the day.

Somebody passed a hat. I didn’t ask them to. I didn’t know about it until Seth brought it to me afterward, a feed store cap stuffed with bills.

It came to eleven hundred and forty dollars, for Dad’s care, and Darla cried again when I handed it to her.

On Monday, Darla and I sat down at her kitchen table with all the papers. It was the first time she had ever let me see them.

Seth and I agreed to put three hundred dollars a month toward Dad’s care. It is what we can do. It is not nothing.

Darla agreed the fiddle stays with me. She signed a paper saying so, though she didn’t need to. “It was always going to be yours,” she said. “I should have seen that. I was too tired to see anything.”

She also asked me something I did not expect. She asked if I would teach her the words to the hymns Dad used to sing, so she could sing them to him on the days he did not know her.

She said she had never learned them all, being raised in a different church.

So on Sunday afternoons now, after church, we both go and sit with him by the window. Some Sundays he knows us. Some Sundays he doesn’t. I bring the fiddle every time now. Effie says the whole hall listens.

Clement still teaches me on Saturdays. He says I am not a fiddler yet, but I am a fair start on one.

He has started playing out again. He played Ferrell and Fleta’s fifty sixth anniversary in June, and I played second behind him.

The Last Thing

When the party was winding down that day, and the sun was starting to come in long and gold across the floor, and Effie was getting Dad’s sweater on him to go back, Darla came and found me by the hay bales where I was putting the fiddle away.

She stood there a minute with her pocketbook in both hands. She looked old and tired and a little afraid of me, and I suppose she had reason to be. I waited.

“Erin,” she said. “Before they take him back. Would you play it again?”