The Solo Mom Sang From My Tailgate

We found it eventually, of course. It had slipped down behind the cushion of Dad’s old chair, where it had been sitting, I like to think, the whole time.

The next Sunday, the week before Christmas, Mom sang the solo of O Holy Night at the evening service at the Ridgeley United Methodist, as a favor to the pastor. It was not part of the cantata.

It was a short service in a small room, with the candles lit and about sixty people in the pews, and she stood beside the piano in her good blue dress.

She cracked on the high note. Of course she did. It was there and gone in a heartbeat, and Marcia, standing beside her in the alto row, took it and carried it, and nobody in that room so much as shifted in a seat.

I thought of the tailgate. I thought of Grandma’s quilt, which I’d washed and folded and put back on the foot of Mom’s guest bed, where it belonged.

I thought of what Steve said to me in the garage that night, putting away the folding chairs.

I was telling him the whole thing again, the way you do after a day like that, and I said I couldn’t understand how a woman could be so afraid for her mother that she took away the very thing her mother loved best.

He thought about it for a good while, wiping down the tailgate with a rag.

“People get scared of the wrong thing,” he said. “They get scared of watching somebody they love get old, so they try to make the old part happen where nobody can see it. It’s backwards. Your sister didn’t need to take the singing away. She needed to sit in the second row and hold her breath and let your mother do it.”

“That’s what she did on Sunday.”

“That’s what she finally did.” He folded the rag. “Takes some people a year.”

We did the cantata again the next December. It was the forty-second. Mom stood at the front of the gym with Kelsey Dunn on her left and my sister in the alto row and, in the third row, an empty folding chair that Janet had set aside with a program on it, which nobody had asked her to do.

Mom took the pitch pipe from her pocket. She blew one soft note. She gave a little nod to the room.

She sang the first verse alone, no piano, the way she always had. When she reached the second one, Kelsey’s clear young soprano came in under hers, and then my sister’s alto, and then the choir behind them, the whole of it rising up from the risers like heat off a field in August.

And she went up for “fall on your knees.”

I won’t tell you whether she hit it. I will tell you that I stopped breathing, and that Steve took my hand, and that when it was over the whole gym stood up, three hundred and some people in their coats, in a room the furnace has never once warmed.

On the drive home Mom was quiet. At the stop sign on County Road 12 she turned to me.

“Joanne.”

“Yes, Mom?”

“Don’t wait for the parking lot next time. I’d like to be asked.”

“I’ll ask,” I said. “I’ll ask every year.”

She nodded and looked out at the dark fields, her hand resting on the dashboard, folded one over the other.

“Good,” my mother said. “Then I suppose I’ll have to keep singing.”