The Solo Her Grandmother Tried to Stop

Two o’clock

At two o’clock straight up, the principal stepped out and thanked everybody for coming, and reminded us to silence our phones, and said the fifth grade had worked very hard.

Then she stepped off, and Mr. Ahlberg sat down at the piano.

The first half hour went by the way those shows go. A wagon wheel fell off the refrigerator box.

A boy playing a mule forgot to come out until his mother hissed at him from the third row. Everybody laughed, and the boy bowed.

I watched it all with my heart in my throat. I don’t remember much of it now.

I remember a song about breaking sod, and a girl in a sunbonnet who sang it twice as fast as the piano, and a lot of clapping.

Then the stage cleared, and the stripes of sun lay across the empty boards, and Mr.

Ahlberg played four soft notes on the piano. I knew those four notes the way I knew my own kitchen.

Nora walked out to the middle of the stage by herself. She was in her red dress with her curly hair pinned up after all, and somebody had put a little bit of color on her cheeks.

A boy in a straw hat handed her the microphone and went back behind the curtain. She held it in both hands, the way Mr.

Ahlberg had shown her. I lifted my phone up over the heads of the people in front of me and pressed record.

Down by the Big Blue

Her first note came out small. It came out so small that I heard a chair creak in the back of the gym, and I thought, oh, no, here it comes, Gloria-Jean was right, and I hated myself for thinking it.

Then Nora lifted her chin.

I have seen her do it a thousand times. She does it when she is about to argue with me about bedtime, and she did it when she was four and decided to jump off the high dive at the city pool.

She lifted her chin, and the second line came out full and clear and sure, and the whole gym went still around it.

Even the babies went quiet. Even the boy in the mule costume stood still in the wings.

She sang the first verse about waiting by the river in the spring. She sang the chorus.

Then she came to the second verse, the hard one, the one about the land office, the one she always missed.

I saw her eyes go out over the crowd. I saw her looking. I held my phone as still as I could, and I did the only thing I could think of.

I lifted my other hand, just a little, the way you wave to a child across a parking lot.

She saw it. I know she saw it. Her shoulders settled, and she sang the whole second verse right through, every word of it, the land office and the long road and the wagon coming home.

When she came to the last note, she did not look at Mr. Ahlberg, and she did not look at the parents on the folding chairs.

She turned her face and looked straight across the floor to the side where I stood. She looked at me.

She held that last note looking right at me, and the sun from the high windows was across her face, and I could not see the screen of my phone anymore for crying.

I just kept holding it up and hoping it was still recording.