The Waltz Dad Wrote for Mama

The Plans

By the end of March, I could play Eula’s Waltz all the way through. Not well. Not like Dad.

But all the way through, and in time, and Clement said that if I didn’t rush the second part I would not shame myself.

“Will you play with me?” I asked him. “At the dance?”

Clement looked at his hands. They were twisted and spotted, the knuckles big as walnuts. “I haven’t played out in eight years,” he said.

“You could play second,” I said. “Like you did for Dad.”

He did not answer me that Saturday. He did not answer me the next Saturday either.

But on the third Saturday, when I came in the door, his red fiddle was already out on the table, and it had new strings on it.

Seth and the boys cleaned out our barn the first two weekends of April.

They hauled out forty years of junk, swept the loft, and laid down a dance floor out of tongue and groove boards from a church fellowship hall that was being torn down two counties over.

Seth borrowed a string of bulbs from his foreman and hung it across the rafters.

I told him it would be a daytime party and we would not need them. He hung them anyway. “It’s a dance,” he said. “A dance has lights.”

We stacked hay bales along the walls for people to sit on.

I called the memory care place and got permission to take Dad out for the afternoon of his birthday.

They said four hours, with a family member signing him out and back in. Effie said she would ride along if we wanted, on her own time.

Then I called Darla.

“We’re having a party for Dad,” I said. “Saturday the eighteenth, two o’clock, in our barn. You’re welcome. I wanted you to hear it from me.”

There was a long pause. “Who’s coming?”

“Everybody, I expect,” I said. “Half the county. Everybody who ever danced to him.”

“I’ll come,” she said, very quietly. Then, “Thank you for calling me.”

The Town Knows

You cannot keep a thing secret in a place like ours. I never told one soul outside my own house, and still, by March, everybody knew. Forrest’s front window faces Main Street.

Half the county drove past it on the way to the bank or the post office. Old men who had danced to it at their own weddings had stood on that sidewalk and looked at it.

Nobody said anything ugly to Darla. People around here don’t do that.

But at church, I noticed, the ladies who used to save her a seat in the fellowship hall had started finding reasons to sit elsewhere. At the grocery, conversations stopped when she came down the aisle.

I did not make that happen. I did not stop it, either. I suppose I could have.

I suppose a better woman would have told people about the six thousand five hundred dollars a month. I didn’t. I let her carry it, and I am not proud of that.