The Solo Mom Sang From My Tailgate

“Does she know the cantata is a week from Sunday?”

“Of course she knows.” I looked at him. “She has the date written on her calendar in red pen. She has had it written there since July.”

“Mm.” He rubbed his jaw. “Well. I was just thinking. The school lot’s public, right? It’s not the gym.”

I stared at him.

“Nobody said she had to sing inside,” Steve said. “That’s all. Your mother didn’t promise anything about a parking lot.”

I took it to Mom on Monday, at her table, with a plate of her own date bars in front of me for courage.

“I want to ask you something, and I want you to hear the whole thing before you say no.”

She raised an eyebrow. She was shelling pecans into a bowl and did not stop.

“On cantata Sunday, the gym doors open at one-thirty for seating. The program starts at two. Everybody stands around in the lobby for half an hour, in their coats, waiting.”

“I know when the doors open, Joanne. I have been going for fifty-two years.”

“I’d like to back my truck up by the front doors. Let the tailgate down. Put Grandma’s quilt across it. And I’d like you to stand there and sing O Holy Night.”

The pecans stopped.

“Not in the gym,” I said. “Not on their program. Not on anyone’s schedule. In a parking lot, on a Sunday afternoon, to whoever feels like listening. I won’t say a word to Janet or Marcia or anybody. I will not make a scene. I’ll just be standing there.”

She was quiet for a long time. The furnace kicked on. Somewhere out on the road a grain truck downshifted for the stop sign.

“I don’t know if I can still do it,” Mom said.

It was the first time she had said anything like it out loud, and I felt it all the way down.

“Mom, you sing every day.”

“To the dishes. To your father’s chair.” She put the nutpick down. “That is not the same thing. Janet might be right. I do not know. I haven’t tried that high note since last December, and I was afraid to.”

“Then try it Sunday,” I said. “If you crack, you crack. I’ll be standing right there, and I will think you are the finest woman in the state of Ohio.”

“You would say that if I sang like a barn cat.”

“I would say it a good deal louder.”

She almost smiled. Then she looked at the window over the sink, at the bare yard, and said, very quietly, “I would rather crack in a parking lot than be spared.”

She did not say yes. She went upstairs and came down ten minutes later holding something in her hand.

It was my father’s pitch pipe. He had bought it at a music store in Lima in 1985, the first winter she sang the solo, and he blew it for her every year from the third row before the cantata began. A tiny brass thing, round as a harmonica, with the note names stamped on it so worn I could barely read them.

“If I’m going to do it,” she said, “I will do it with this.”

The Sunday of the cantata came up bright and cold, thirty-eight degrees, with a wind that smelled like woodsmoke and nothing falling out of the sky. It had been a dry December. Nothing falling from the sky, just gray crusts of old snow along the lot, the corn stubble standing bare in the fields and the maples around the school scraped clean of leaves.