“The solo is hers,” she said at last. “For as long as she wants it. And if she’d rather not sing it, there will be a chair at the front for her every year, and I will announce her by name.”
“You’ll ask her yourself,” I said.
“I’ll go to her house on Tuesday. I’ll bring something to eat.”
“Bring a pie,” said Steve. “She’ll take that better than an apology.”
Janet laughed. It was a wet, shaky laugh, but it was real. She went back in to finish the second half, and I heard later that Kelsey Dunn had walked up to her at the intermission and said, quite plainly, that she had never wanted to sing a solo that belonged to somebody else.
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
She sang it anyway, that afternoon, because the program was printed and the people had come. She sang it well. When she finished, she walked off the risers, and she took the program out of her folder and went and found Mom in the lobby, and put it in her hands.
It had the date on it. It had a space by the solo where Kelsey had written, in pencil, “Next year, Mrs. Ames. Please.”
That should be the end of it, I suppose, but I want to tell you about the Tuesday.
Janet came out to the farmhouse at four o’clock in the afternoon, in a clean coat, carrying a sour cream raisin pie in a Pyrex dish with a dish towel over the top. Mom met her at the door in her apron. They stood in the kitchen a long while.
I wasn’t there for most of it. I was in the yard with Marcia, who had come to drive Mom to the first of the rehearsals and had arrived forty minutes early. She had brought a thermos of her own, and the sheet music, and a bag of the butterscotch candies Mom keeps in her purse.
We stood by her car, two grown women, and watched the farmhouse windows.
“She hasn’t spoken to me in two days,” Marcia said. “Not really. She asks me to pass things.”
“She’s working on it.”
“I know.” My sister looked at her shoes. “Jo. I owe you something, too.”
“You don’t.”
“I do. I should have called you. I should have told you what I was thinking. I didn’t, because I knew you would say no, and I knew you’d be right, and I wanted to be in charge of it.”
I thought about that for a minute. I thought about all the years I’d let her be in charge, and had let her handle the phone calls and the doctors and the bed, and said thank you, and kept my own thoughts folded up in my pockets.
“I should have told you what I thought, too,” I said. “A long time ago. You make a decision, and I go along with it, and then I get mad at you in the garage. That’s not a fair way to treat you.”
“That is not a fair way to treat anyone,” she said, and we both laughed, a little.
The farmhouse door opened. Janet stepped out onto the porch, and behind her, in the doorway, I saw Mom with a slice of pie on a saucer.
“Joanne!” Mom called. “Marcia! Get in here. Your father’s pitch pipe’s gone missing off the table, and I know one of you has hidden it to be funny.”
I looked at Marcia, and she looked at me. Neither of us had touched it.