The Solo Mom Sang From My Tailgate

I picked Mom up at one. She came down her porch steps in her long camel coat, with the red scarf she wears to church wound twice around her neck, and she did not say a single word the whole drive in.

Steve had left early in his own truck to scout the parking lot. When we pulled in, he was standing by the school’s front doors with his hands in his jacket pockets, looking like any man waiting on his wife.

I backed my pickup, the dark green Ford I drive to the scale house every morning, up onto the curb apron beside the double doors. I let the tailgate down. It rang against the stops.

Steve handed me the quilt without a word. It was Grandma Ames’s, a pieced Ohio Star that had been on the foot of every bed in our family for sixty years, and I spread it over the steel so Mom would have something warm to put her hand on if she needed to.

I did not want her to need it. I laid it out anyway.

It was twenty past one. Through the glass doors I could see the lobby filling up with coats and hats and paper cups of cider.

Mom stood beside the tailgate with her hands folded in front of her. I stood on her left, in my navy peacoat, because I could not think of a place I would rather be.

“Is that Fred Wiley?” she whispered.

“It is.”

“He’ll tell everybody I’ve gone peculiar.”

“He’ll tell them you’ve gone to church in a parking lot.”

She snorted. It was a small, true laugh, and I felt something in my chest loosen.

Then she reached into her coat pocket, brought out the pitch pipe, and put it to her lips.

One note. Low and soft and clear, a little brass whisper in the cold.

She held the note in her ear, humming it back, and then she held the pipe out to me.

“Keep that for me, Jo. It’s heavy today.”

I closed my hand around it. It was warm from her pocket and a little damp from her mouth. I will carry that thing until I die.

“You’re sure?”

“No,” my mother said. “Not even close.”

And she lifted her chin, and she looked at the third window of the school, the one on the gym side, where on any other Sunday of her adult life her husband would have been sitting inside.

And she began.

“O holy night. The stars are brightly shining.”

She started small. I think she did not know, herself, how much voice she had left. It came out thin as a thread, and it wavered, and the wind caught the end of the line and carried it off across the lot.

A boy in a Buckeyes stocking cap was walking up the sidewalk with his mother. He stopped so suddenly she walked into him.

“It is the night of the dear Savior’s birth.”

Her voice found something there. I do not know how else to say it. Like a foot finding a stair in the dark. It dropped into a lower place than the one I remembered, a place with more wood in it and more weight, and it held.

The boy’s mother put her hand on his shoulder. Then Fred Wiley pushed open the glass door and came out onto the walk, and took off his seed cap and held it against his chest.