The Solo Her Grandmother Tried to Stop

What did not change

I want to be plain about this part, because people always want to know if I forgave her, and the answer is yes, and also that forgiving a person is not the same as handing her back the keys.

Royal kept his word. When he worked on his weekends after that, Nora stayed with me.

Gloria-Jean saw her for Sunday dinner and on Wednesday afternoons, when I could drop her off and pick her up myself.

She did not argue about it. She told Royal on the phone that it was fair.

I think losing those weekends was the hardest thing she had faced since her husband died, and she faced it without a word against me.

Royal drove the whole eleven hours home on his next days off. He did not even go to his own place first.

He came straight to my door and asked Nora to sing the song for him in the kitchen, and she did, twice, with the dish towel over her shoulder.

He stood there in his work boots with his hands in his pockets and did not say anything for a while after she finished.

Then he told her he was proud of her, and he told me thank you, and he went out to his pickup and sat in it a few minutes before he drove off.

I had been married to that man for sixteen years. I had never seen him like that. It made me think better of him, and I have kept thinking better of him since.

Abe and the scale house

On Monday morning I came in to the co-op at seven like always. Abe was already there with the coffee on. He did not say a word about Saturday.

But somebody had taped a picture to the side of the scale house window.

It was printed off the school’s page on the computer, of the whole fifth grade on stage, with a small red dress right in the middle.

I asked Abe if he had put it up. He said he did not know a thing about it.

Then he asked me if my girl had been nervous, and I told him yes, and he said all four of his had been nervous too, every single time.

“The first note’s always small,” he said, pouring himself another cup. “Then they hear themselves, and they come on.”

That was about the longest speech I ever heard out of Abe. I have thought about it a good deal. I think it is true of more than singing.

The spring concert

The fifth grade had its spring concert the second week of May, on a Thursday afternoon at two o’clock, in the same gym.

The windows were open this time, and you could smell the lilacs coming in from the park.

I took the afternoon off, properly this time, and Abe signed the slip without looking at it.

Royal was on his week off and drove down from his apartment in town. We sat together, which we had not done in three years.

When we came in through the gym doors, Gloria-Jean was already there.

She was in the front row of the folding chairs, right in the middle, in her good navy dress. She had come forty minutes early to get that seat.

She did not turn around to look for us. She sat with her purse in her lap and her program folded in her hands and her eyes on the stage.

Nora did not have a solo that day. She was just one voice in the middle of the second row of risers.

She sang three songs with forty other kids and waved at us once when Mr. Ahlberg was not looking.

When the last song ended, before Mr. Ahlberg had even turned around on the piano bench, before anybody else in that whole gym had moved, Gloria-Jean stood up out of her front row chair and clapped first.