The Waltz Dad Wrote for Mama

The Phone Call

I did not have five hundred and twenty dollars in my purse. I am a pharmacy tech. I count pills for a living.

I asked Forrest to hold it until the end of the day, and he said he’d hold it until the end of the week.

Then I walked out to the side lot by the feed store, where it was quiet, and I called my stepmother. It was half past twelve. I could hear her television going in the background when she picked up.

“Darla, it’s Erin. I’m standing outside Forrest’s. Dad’s fiddle is in his window.”

There was a long quiet on the line. I could hear her breathing. Then she said, flat and tired, “It was mine to sell, Erin.”

“It was Dad’s,” I said.

“I hold his power of attorney,” she said. “You know I do. Your daddy signed it himself, back when he could still sign. Everything he owns, I have to manage it now. That fiddle was a thing he owned.”

She wasn’t wrong, not on paper. Dad had signed that paper three years ago, when the forgetting first started, and he had signed it to her because she was his wife and she was the one there every day. There was nobody to call and nothing to sue over.

“You could have called me,” I said. “Before you did it. One phone call.”

“And said what?” Her voice cracked, just a little, then went hard again. “That I need four hundred dollars? You’ve got two boys and a mortgage. I wasn’t going to come begging to you.”

“So you sold his fiddle instead.”

“I sold a lot of things,” she said. “I have to go.” And she hung up.

I sat in my car for the rest of my lunch break with the heater running. I did not cry.

How We Got There

My father is Orval Tolliver. He was born in a four room house up a hollow in eastern Kentucky in April of 1946.

His daddy worked in the mines and bought that fiddle off a coal camp fiddler in 1938 for eleven dollars and a shotgun.

Dad started playing it when he was ten years old. By the time he was nineteen, people were paying him five dollars a night to play their dances.

He drove a road grader for the county for thirty one years. He had big rough hands from the work, and I never understood how those same hands could be so light on a bow.

The summer he married her, he wrote her a waltz. He never wrote it down. He never wrote anything down.

He just played it at the end of every dance for the rest of her life, and everybody in the county called it Eula’s Waltz.

My mother died of a stroke when I was fourteen. Dad played her waltz at the graveside, standing in the sunshine in his good white shirt, and I remember thinking it was the most terrible and beautiful sound in the world.

He married Darla four years later. I was eighteen and mad at the whole world, and I was not kind to her.

She was a widow from the next county, a cafeteria cook, plain and steady. She did not try to be my mother. I will say that for her.

She took good care of Dad. She kept his shirts pressed and his blood pressure pills sorted. I never had a reason to think hard of her.

Then the forgetting came. It started small, the way it does. He would lose his truck keys.

He would ask me the same question twice in one visit. Then he forgot the words to hymns he had sung since he was a boy.

The fiddle was the last thing to go. Even when he could not tell you what he ate for breakfast, he could put that fiddle under his chin and play Eula’s Waltz clean through without one wrong note. Then one day, last summer, he couldn’t.

In September, he walked out of the house in his sock feet in the middle of a weekday afternoon.

A man hauling hay found him two miles down the state road, standing in a ditch, looking for the community building that burned in 1994.

After that, Darla said she could not keep him safe. She has a bad knee and a heart that skips.

She could not lift him if he fell. The doctor agreed. In October, she moved him into the memory care place by the hospital.

I helped carry his clothes in. I hung his white shirts in the little closet and put Mama’s picture on his dresser.

I asked Darla where the fiddle was, and she said it was put away at the house. I believed her. I had no reason not to.