Her Sister Put My Wedding Picture in a Drawer

Forty-three years after her sister ran me off their father’s porch, I wed my high school girlfriend in a hospice room while that sister stood in the doorway and said, “She’s dying, Wilson. Dying isn’t the same as choosing.” We buried her six days after that, and her son came across the grass toward me with a shoebox.

I’d driven up to tune a piano, not to find anybody.

The hospice on the north end of Muncie had an upright in its family lounge, a donated thing with a dead F and a sustain pedal that squeaked like a screen door.

I test every piano with the same song.

The slow one we danced to in her parents’ garage in June of 1982, the door rolled up, her father’s truck backed out onto the street to make room.

I was halfway through the bridge when a nurse leaned in.

“The lady in room nine wants to know who taught you to play that so badly.”

I stopped with my hands on the keys.

Frances was sitting up against three pillows in a blue cardigan, thinner than anybody should be, a clear oxygen line looped over her ears.

She looked at me a long second. Then she laughed until the nurse came back to check on her.

“Wilson Bickford. You still drag the left hand.”

“You still listen through walls.”

“Honey, there’s nothing else to do in here.”

I went back the next day.

And the day after.

I took a room at a motel off the highway, called my customers back home and told them their pianos would hold a few more weeks.

We talked about the garage and the drive-in and her daddy’s beagle that bit me twice. We never once talked about the summer of 1983.

Her sister did.

Aileen came every afternoon at three, sat in the corner chair with her purse on her knees, and watched me like I’d come to take the television.

On the fourth day she followed me into the hall.

“You’ve got some nerve showing up now.”

“She asked me to come back.”

“She asks for applesauce too. They’ve got her on enough morphine to drop a horse.”

Then on a Thursday Frances told me what the doctor said.

Ten days. Maybe less.

My throat shut on me.

She reached through the bed rail and got hold of my wrist.

“Don’t you dare get weepy. You stood on Daddy’s porch and said you’d marry me. Remember that?”

“I remember him turning the porch light off on me.”

“Well, I’m calling it in. Forty-three years late, but I’m calling it in.”

I told her yes before she’d finished asking.

From the corner Aileen said, “Fran, you are NOT doing this.”

Frances didn’t look at her. “I’ve been told what I’m not doing long enough, Aileen.”

The chaplain married us four days later in room nine. A Monday morning.

I wore my one good sport coat, the gray one with the shiny elbows.

The rings were the problem.

Her knuckles had swollen, and nothing in the pawn shop’s case would slide over them.

So that night I sat on the motel bed and wound a band out of copper bass-string wire, the kind I carry by the coil, and filed the cut ends smooth on the edge of the bathroom sink.

When I put it on her finger she held her hand up to the window.

“You made me a ring out of a PIANO.”

“Out of a little bit of one.”

“Best thing I own,” she said, and she meant it.

Nurse Sonya signed as our witness. Aileen had been asked first. She said no, went down for coffee, and didn’t come back up until it was over.

I got six days as Frances’s husband.

She went on a Sunday, a little after four in the morning, with the wire ring still on.

They buried her on Wednesday beside Bobby, the man she’d married that fall of 1983, and I stood at the back, where a second husband stands.

When the folding chairs started to empty, Aileen walked over to me.

“Well. You got your little ceremony.” She pulled her gloves on, finger by finger. “Go home to Tulsa, Wilson. Nobody here needs a piano tuned.”

Then Terrence was coming across the grass.

Frances’s son. Forty-two, her wide forehead, a shoebox under one arm with a rubber band around it gone brittle and gray.

Aileen saw the box before I did.

Her whole face went slack.

She took two fast steps and caught him by the sleeve of his suit.

“Terry. That is family business.”

“That’s why I’m giving it to him.”

He held the box out to me.

“He is NOT family, Terrence.”

“Mom married him nine days ago, Aunt Aileen. HE IS FAMILY.”

The rubber band snapped the second I touched it.

Inside were envelopes.

Mine.

My handwriting at nineteen, my old return address, twenty-cent stamps. FORTY-ONE of them, and every flap still glued down.

I’d mailed them to her father’s house for a year and a half and never heard one word back.

I had decided that was my answer.

“They were in your cedar chest,” Terrence said to his aunt. “Mom found them at Easter. That’s why she quit taking your calls.”

Aileen’s mouth moved before anything came out. “Daddy TOLD me to. I was twenty-four years old.”

She turned and walked to her car and left her purse on the folding chair.

Terrence reached into the box past my letters and took out one more.

Pale green paper. No stamp. My name across the front in Frances’s round handwriting.

“She wrote this the September you left,” he said. “She made me promise I’d be standing right here when you opened it.”

He kept his thumb pressed on the corner, like he wasn’t ready to let go of it yet.

“Read the date at the top first,” he said. “Then look at me.”

September 18

The date was September 18, 1983.

Terrence put his finger under it.

“My birthday’s May twenty-fourth. Nineteen eighty-four.”

I looked from those numbers to his face. He had Frances’s forehead, yes. But his right ear stood away from his head more than his left.

Mine did that. My mother used to press it flat before school pictures, as if a little spit could correct engineering.

I put the shoebox on the folding chair beside Aileen’s purse. Both my hands were shaking, and there was nothing in that box I could bear to drop.

“Terrence.”

“Read it.”

“Does this say what I think it says?”

He took his finger off the date.

“I need you to read her words.”

Across the grass, Aileen stood beside her car. She hadn’t opened the door. Her keys hung from one hand.

Four relatives were still near the path. Frances’s cousin Georgia had come back for a scarf left over a chair. She stopped when she reached us.

“Do you want me to stay?” she said.

Terrence looked at me.

That was new. All week somebody else had decided where I should stand, when I should go, which part of loving Frances I was qualified to do.

“Please,” I said.

Georgia set her scarf beside the box.

Aileen started back toward us. Without her purse, she had something to come back for. I supposed even an escape needed a handbag.

Terrence moved closer to the chair.

“She can wait,” he said.

I held the letter below the date, where Frances had folded it. The crease ran through her opening line.

Nine days earlier, I’d slid a wire ring over her knuckle. I’d held that same hand while she slept. I’d helped her drink water from a cup with a lid that never seemed to fit.

And all that time, this paper had existed.

I wanted to be angry with her. It was a dreadful place to want such a thing, with the flowers still fresh beside us.

Mostly I wanted her back for five minutes.

Aileen stopped a few feet away.

“Before you read anything,” she said, “you ought to understand what things were like.”

I kept my eyes on Frances’s handwriting.

What else had Aileen decided I had no business hearing?

The drawer beside her bed

On my second afternoon in room nine, Frances asked me to open the drawer beside her bed.

There was a comb, a packet of peppermints, and a photograph of Bobby with a little boy sitting on his shoulders.

“Under that,” she said.

I lifted the photograph by its edges.

Bobby had one hand around each of the boy’s ankles. The boy was laughing. I put it down facing Frances, because there are manners even when your heart is behaving like a fool.

Underneath was a receipt folded around a key.

“My piano,” she said. “Aileen’s got it in her front room. That’s the key to the lid.”

“You lock a piano?”

“Only around family.”

I’d come through Indiana twice a year for years, doing work for customers who’d moved or passed my name along. The hospice job had been added to this trip by a man who called about a donated upright.

I hadn’t asked who was dying there. You don’t.

Frances unfolded the receipt. Bobby had bought her piano secondhand in 1985, for $475.00.

“He wanted to buy me earrings,” she said. “I told him my ears couldn’t play anything.”

I handed back the key.

“Sounds like he listened.”

“He did.”

Bobby had died three years earlier. She said it while smoothing the receipt against her knee.

I’d been divorced twelve years. No children. My former wife and I could speak without supervision, which I considered a respectable result.

Frances asked if I’d been happy.

“Some of the time.”

“Good.”

I nearly asked whether she’d been happy. Then she lifted Bobby’s photograph and rubbed a mark off the glass with her sleeve.

That answered enough.

Aileen came in at three carrying clean cardigans. She replaced the one on the bed before Frances had finished telling her it was fine.

“She gets cold,” Aileen said to me.

“I’m right here,” Frances said.

“I know you are, Fran.”

Aileen set the photograph straight. She had the manner of somebody tidying a room she expected to inherit.

Frances asked for the blue cardigan back.

Aileen held it a moment, then gave it to her.

At sixty-two, she could still make me feel nineteen. I hated that. I’d spent forty-three years acquiring a bad knee and opinions about tire prices, and she could remove the lot with one look.

That afternoon Frances asked about the room I’d rented after leaving town in 1983.

“Still remember the address?” she said.

I gave it to her.

She shut her eyes.

“What?”

“Nothing. I remembered it too.”

The room had been over a repair shop. I worked downstairs and practiced on a piano with two missing keys. Every other Sunday I wrote her a letter on paper stolen from the shop’s invoice pad.

I told Frances about the roof leaking into my shoe.

She laughed, then stopped.

“Did you ever go to the bus station?”

“Every Friday for six weeks.”

Aileen dropped a cardigan.

Frances turned toward her.

“I didn’t know that,” she said.

“You weren’t well that summer,” Aileen said.

“I was nineteen.”

“And you weren’t well.”

Before I could ask what she meant, Frances reached for my hand.

“Stay a little longer.”

So I did.

On our wedding morning, Sonya took a picture of us with her phone and brought back a print before her shift ended. Frances put it beside Bobby’s photograph.

When I returned from getting coffee, ours was gone.

Aileen stood beside the open drawer.

“She needs less clutter,” she said.

Frances held out her hand.

“Give me my husband.”

Three o’clock

Aileen gave her the photograph.

She did it the way people hand over car keys after they’re told they can’t drive home.

Frances put it against the water pitcher. In the picture, my sport coat pulled across my stomach. I’d buttoned it out of respect and nearly lost a button in service to romance.

“You look scared,” she said.

“I was trying to breathe.”

She laughed, and Aileen folded her arms.

That photograph became a small daily argument. Aileen moved it when Frances slept. I put it back. By Wednesday I could find it without looking in the drawer.

I’d have preferred to be brave about something larger than a four-by-six print.

But Frances wanted to open her eyes and see it.

Before the wedding, I tried speaking to Aileen alone. I thought two people who loved the same woman could manage ten minutes without turning it into a property dispute.

We stood near the lounge piano.

“I know this is hard,” I said.

“You haven’t the first idea about it.”

“Then tell me.”

She put her purse on the piano bench.

“I’ve been here for appointments. I’ve washed her clothes. I’ve listened to her being sick. You arrive with a song and suddenly you’re the groom.”

“I can do the washing.”

“That isn’t the point.”

“What is?”

She looked through the lounge door toward room nine.

“Don’t make her promises you can’t keep.”

I’d kept that sentence in my head for forty-three years, in one form or another.

On her father’s porch, I’d promised to come back for Frances once I had a job and a room. Aileen told me Frances didn’t want to see me.

I asked her to fetch Frances anyway.

She shut the screen door between us.

Now I said, “I wrote.”

“People write things.”

“Forty-one times.”

She picked up her purse.

“Then perhaps you should have taken the hint sooner.”

I wanted to tell her what those stamps had cost against my wages. Instead I asked whether Frances had read the letters.

“Leave that alone,” she said.

That afternoon, Frances slept while Aileen went through the drawer. She found the piano receipt and put it in her purse.

“That’s hers,” I said.

“It’s at my house.”

“The receipt.”

“I’m keeping her things together.”

I held out my hand.

She stared at it, then laid the receipt across my palm.

When Frances woke, I asked where she wanted it.

“With Terry,” she said. “He keeps things without deciding they belong to him.”

Terrence arrived after work with a bag of clean socks.

He was polite to me. Painfully polite. He called me Wilson and asked whether I needed directions to the motel, although I’d been sleeping there for a week.

I gave him the receipt and key.

“Your mother asked.”

His thumb went over the little brass key.

“She wants the piano here?”

“Too big for the room.”

He looked toward the bed.

“She asked me about bringing it home.”

Aileen stood up.

“Fran told me I could have that piano.”

From the pillows, Frances said, “I told you that you could keep it while I was sick.”

“You said you didn’t expect to play again.”

“Then it’ll stay in tune.”

Terrence put the key in his pocket.

I thought he’d taken a side.

Then Aileen followed him into the hall, and they stayed there long enough for Frances to fall asleep again.

When he came back, he asked me to step outside.

“Come out to the lounge. I have to tell you about my mother.”

The man who called

Terrence held the lounge door open for me.

I sat on the piano bench. He stayed standing.

“Aunt Aileen says you’re planning to take her away.”

“Your mother?”

“After the wedding.”

“Where would I take her?”

“Home with you.”

I rubbed my hands on my trousers. A man who spends his life touching piano keys learns when his fingers are filthy. Mine felt filthy then, though there wasn’t a mark on them.

“I told Frances I’d take her anywhere she wanted to go,” I said. “That was before she told me what the doctor said.”

“Did you tell my aunt that?”

“No.”

“Then don’t.”

He sat in a chair opposite me.

“Mom gets tired explaining herself. Aunt Aileen keeps asking until she gets an answer she likes.”

“Does it work?”

“Sometimes. People get tired.”

He said it without defending her. That helped.

I told him I wasn’t taking Frances anywhere without his knowledge. I wasn’t there for her belongings. He could put that in writing if it would make him comfortable.

He looked offended.

“I didn’t ask you for that.”

“No. I’ve been practicing arguments in the shower.”

For the first time, he laughed.

Then he covered his mouth, as though the room next door could hear him enjoying anything.

“She talks about you,” he said.

“What does she say?”

“That you put too much sugar in coffee.”

“Fair.”

“That you used to hold the garage door up because the spring was broken.”

It had taken both hands. Frances used to duck beneath my arms and kiss me on her way past. I hadn’t remembered the broken spring in decades.

Terrence looked down at his shoes.

“She said you waited at the bus station.”

“I did.”

“Did you ever get a message telling you not to?”

“Aileen came to the shop once. Said Frances was getting married and wanted me to stop.”

“When?”

“October. I kept writing anyway.”

“Why?”

That question deserved something better than what I usually told myself.

“Because I thought she’d answer if I found the right words.”

He pressed his palms together.

I asked if Frances knew we were talking.

“She asked me to make sure you weren’t going home.”

I wanted to go back into room nine and tell her she could stop worrying about that particular thing. There were enough others.

Instead, I said, “I canceled work.”

“How much?”

“Enough.”

“That’s what she said you’d say.”

He got up and opened the door.

Aileen was outside.

There wasn’t any reason for her to be there except the obvious one.

“Terry,” she said. “Your mother needs quiet.”

“She’s asleep.”

“And she needs to stay asleep.”

He stepped around her.

I stayed on the bench until he was gone.

Aileen looked at the piano. I’d repaired the dead F and stopped the pedal squeaking. She pressed one key with her forefinger.

“You always did make an impression with very little,” she said.

“I fixed what I was asked to fix.”

“Then you should have left.”

That evening I went to the motel and wrote down what staying would cost.

Two customers couldn’t wait. That was $1,120.00 gone. The motel bill kept growing. I had money set aside for a replacement van, and the van had opinions about postponement.

I called the remaining customers anyway.

Then I put my tools back in their case, except the coil of bass-string wire.

The telephone rang while I was turning that coil in my hand.

Terrence said, “Mom wants me to tell you who hired you.”

The receipt for $475.00

I went back.

Frances was awake, with Terrence beside the bed and the piano receipt on her blanket.

For a moment I thought they meant Bobby’s piano.

Then Terrence held up his phone.

My name was on the screen above a message about the hospice upright. His message. The one I’d answered before driving north.

“I called you,” he said.

“I know that now.”

“She asked me to.”

Frances raised one finger.

“Don’t blame him. He’s a poor liar. Gets it from his mother.”

I’d imagined our meeting every which way since Sonya came into the lounge. Mostly I’d tried not to imagine it too much, for fear I’d fall apart over something as ordinary as a squeaking pedal.

“You knew I was coming?”

“I hoped.”

“For how long?”

She looked at Terrence.

He said, “I found your business number in August. Your message said you’d be working in Indiana this month.”

Frances pulled at the blanket.

“I wasn’t going to drag you halfway across the country because I was frightened.”

“You could have.”

“I know that now.”

“Frances.”

She held out her hand, and I took it.

“The piano needed fixing,” she said.

I laughed once. It hurt.

“You paid a hundred and eighty-five dollars to have me walk past your door?”

“I got the piano fixed too. I’m not made of money.”

Terrence gave us the room.

I sat on the edge of the chair.

“Why didn’t you just call?”

She looked toward the drawer.

“I needed to see whether you wanted to stay.”

“You could have asked.”

“I could have done a lot of things.”

She cried then. Frances had been making jokes through pain that would have turned me into a public nuisance, and now she was crying because she’d booked a piano tuner.

I moved onto the bed beside her.

“I wanted you to come in because you heard me,” she said. “Not because somebody told you to feel sorry for me.”

I put my arm behind her shoulders.

“I came back because you called my playing bad.”

“It is bad.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“The left hand, Wilson.”

We sat until she could breathe without crying.

I wanted to ask about the letters. About the address she’d remembered. About why she went still when I said I’d waited for the bus.

She put her hand over mine before I spoke.

“There’s something I have to tell Terry first.”

“What?”

“Something I should’ve told him a long time ago.”

“Does it have to do with me?”

She nodded.

I waited.

She kept her eyes on Bobby’s photograph.

“Give me until after Monday.”

It was Saturday. Two days until our wedding.

I said yes.

That answer has bothered me since. I wanted every hour with her to be kind, so I mistook waiting for kindness.

On Monday afternoon, after the ceremony, Terrence came out of her room with his coat over his arm.

He walked past me without speaking.

I stood up.

“Terry?”

He stopped at the lounge door.

“Not yet,” he said.

Aileen came out behind him.

“What have you done to that boy?” she said to me.

I went into room nine.

Frances had her eyes shut. The ring was on her finger, and our wedding photograph stood beside Bobby’s.

“Did you tell him?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell me?”

“He’s asked me for some time.”

I sat down hard enough to make the chair complain.

“Am I supposed to sit here guessing?”

“No.”

But she didn’t tell me.

I loved her. I was angry with her. Both things fit in that chair, though there wasn’t room for much else.

On Tuesday, Terrence stayed away.

On Wednesday, he came while I was out buying Frances a cardigan that didn’t have buttons. Her fingers couldn’t manage them anymore.

When I returned, Aileen was folding the wedding photograph into a towel.

I took it out.

She said, “Bobby would have been ashamed of this.”

From the bed, Frances said, “Don’t you use Bobby.”

Sunday, 4:17

The last evening, Frances asked me to play.

Sonya opened the lounge door and the door to room nine. I put a chair against the hallway wall so I could see Terrence sitting beside his mother while I played.

Aileen stayed in the corner.

I made it through the garage song once.

Then Frances called, “Again.”

Aileen came into the lounge.

“She’s exhausted.”

“She asked.”

“She doesn’t know when to stop.”

I kept my hands on the keys.

“You can tell her no yourself.”

Aileen returned to the room.

A few seconds later, Frances called, “Play, Wilson.”

So I played.

I’d spent my working life hearing the smallest wrong sound in a room. That night I couldn’t hear half the notes through my own breathing.

Afterward, I sat beside the bed.

Frances turned the wire ring with her thumb.

“Does this come off?”

“If you want it off.”

“I don’t.”

“Then it stays.”

She nodded toward Bobby’s photograph.

“He wasn’t a mistake.”

“I know.”

“You don’t have to be generous about him.”

“I’m trying to be accurate.”

She smiled.

“You always did sound like an old man.”

“Saved time in the long run.”

Terrence sat on the other side of the bed. He had barely spoken to me since Monday. Sometimes he’d start a sentence and stop when his mother moved.

I wanted to take him outside and demand whatever she had told him.

Then Frances would reach for one of us, and I would stay.

Aileen went home around midnight. Before leaving, she told Terrence to call her first.

I pretended not to hear.

At a little after four, Frances’s hand stopped closing around mine.

Sonya came in. Terrence stood beside me. I said Frances’s name several times, as though she might be in the lounge and hadn’t heard.

Terrence put his hand over hers.

He cried with his face turned toward the wall.

I wanted to put my arm around him. I didn’t know whether I was allowed.

That is the sort of thing a man can think while the woman he loves lies dead between them. Whether he’s allowed to touch somebody’s shoulder.

Sonya left us alone.

I kissed Frances’s forehead and told her I’d be back in a minute. I didn’t know what else to say.

In the hall, I tried to call the motel. I thought somebody should know I wasn’t going to be there for breakfast, although breakfast was a machine and a basket of muffins.

I couldn’t make the phone work.

Aileen arrived with her coat unbuttoned.

She went past me into the room. When she came out, she carried my wedding photograph.

“I’ll keep this with her things,” she said.

“Give it here.”

“Wilson, please.”

“Give it to me.”

Terrence came to the door.

Aileen held the photograph against her coat.

“He’s exhausted,” she said. “He needs to go back to that motel.”

Terrence looked at me.

“She’s right. You should go.”

I wanted him to say he didn’t mean it. He could have said he wanted an hour alone with his mother. I would have given him that.

Instead he stood in the doorway while Aileen reached for the drawer.

I took the photograph from her hand.

Nobody stopped me.

At the motel, I sat on the bed in the sport coat I’d worn for our wedding. There was a loose thread at the elbow. I pulled until the seam opened.

Then I cried.

I cried for Frances at sixty-two and Frances at nineteen. I cried because I’d let a frightened woman put off a conversation she no longer had time to finish.

Mostly I cried because the chair beside her bed was empty and I wasn’t allowed to go sit in it.

By Monday, Aileen had arranged the family to meet at Frances’s house after the burial.

Georgia called to make sure I’d come.

“Aileen says you’re heading home.”

“I haven’t said that.”

“Then come.”

I almost refused. There is a kind of pride that wears good shoes and takes you nowhere.

Instead I asked whether Terrence wanted me there.

Georgia said she’d find out.

He called that evening.

“Please come to the burial,” he said.

“I was going to.”

“And afterward.”

“All right.”

He started to say something else. I heard paper move.

Then he said, “Don’t leave before I speak to you.”

On Wednesday morning, I checked out of the motel. Nine hundred forty-two dollars and thirty-six cents. My van fund had become a wedding fund without consulting the van.

I put my suitcase beside the tools.

At the cemetery, Aileen directed people toward the chairs. She touched elbows and passed tissues. She told someone Frances would have wanted everything simple.

I stood at the back holding the wedding photograph inside my coat.

When the service ended, Aileen came over and told me to go home.

For a moment, I reached for my keys.

The fold in the paper

Then Terrence brought the shoebox.

Now he stood beside me with his hand on the chair, and Aileen waited for me to listen to her explanation.

I unfolded Frances’s letter.

“Wilson,

“I bought the ticket for Friday. Aileen says you sent yours back, but I don’t believe her. I know what you said in the garage.

“I’m going to have a baby in May. Yours. I haven’t been with anybody else, and I hate that I even put that sentence on this paper.

“Daddy says I can’t leave. Bobby says he’ll help me if I need help. I need you to answer me yourself.

“If you don’t want me for a wife, tell me. I can bear you telling me. I can’t bear getting it from her.”

There was more. An address for a friend where I could write. A time she intended to call the shop. She’d crossed out one sentence so hard the paper had worn thin.

At the bottom she’d written, “I still want the room over the shop.”

I sat on the folding chair.

Aileen’s purse fell over. Neither of us picked it up.

Terrence crouched in front of me.

“She never mailed it,” he said. “Aunt Aileen told her she’d spoken to you.”

I looked at Aileen.

“You came to the shop in October.”

She put her hand against her mouth.

“You told me she wanted me to stop writing.”

“She was getting married.”

“Did you tell her about the baby?” Terrence said.

Aileen looked at him.

“Did you tell him?” he said again.

“No.”

The word came out small. It was the smallest thing she’d given us all week.

I looked back at the letter.

September. May.

Forty-two years.

Terrence had been a baby while I was asking a post office clerk whether letters could take three weeks to cross two states.

He’d gone to school while I worked on pianos in other people’s houses. Somewhere he’d had a first shave, a broken heart, a day he needed somebody to come get him.

I didn’t know what to do with my hands.

He put one of his in mine.

“Mom told me Monday,” he said.

I nodded.

“She wanted to tell you herself. Then I asked her not to. I needed a few days.”

I couldn’t answer.

“I thought I had more.”

“So did I.”

He rubbed his face with his free hand.

“I found the box with her at Easter. We were getting blankets from Aunt Aileen’s chest. Mom knew you’d written. She didn’t tell me the rest until after you married her.”

“Why the grave?”

“She said you might try to spare her. Say whatever would make her happy. She wanted you to have a choice after she couldn’t ask you for anything.”

I pressed the letter against my knee.

“That sounds like her.”

“She said you’d be angry.”

“I am.”

He started to pull his hand away.

I held on.

“With her,” I said. “For leaving this so late.”

His face crumpled.

I put my other hand behind his head and pulled him against me. He was forty-two years old and crying into a coat that needed mending.

I held him as if somebody might come and tell me to stop.

Behind him, Aileen said, “Bobby was his father.”

Terrence stood up.

Georgia picked up the shoebox.

I folded Frances’s letter along the old crease and put it in my inside pocket beside our photograph.

Then I took my keys out again.

“We’re going to Frances’s house,” I said. “And this time we’re finishing the conversation.”

Bobby’s chair

Aileen came because Terrence asked her to.

She still believed he would take her side once there were walls around us and nobody at the cemetery could hear.

Georgia rode with me. Terrence drove behind us. Aileen followed in her own car.

At Frances’s house, I carried the shoebox into the living room and set it on the footstool.

Bobby’s chair stood beside the window. Terrence sat there.

I took the sofa. Georgia sat beside me.

Aileen kept her coat on.

“I don’t know what you expect me to say,” she said.

“The part you left out,” I said.

She looked at Terrence.

“Your grandfather was beside himself. Fran was nineteen. Wilson had no money, no prospects, and a room above a shop. You think that was somewhere to take a baby?”

“You never asked me,” I said.

“You’d have said anything.”

“I wrote it down.”

I lifted the shoebox lid.

The first envelope had a postmark from September. I broke the flap with my finger.

My handwriting was crowded, every line bent slightly upward. I’d been trying to fit my whole week onto two sheets.

I read only the part about the room.

“The landlady says there can be two of us. The bathroom’s down the hall, but the door locks. I know that matters to you. I’ll put money aside for the bus every Friday.”

Aileen shook her head.

“There. That’s what I’m saying. A bathroom down a hall.”

I picked up another.

“I got a raise. Twelve dollars more a week. Don’t laugh. That’s groceries.”

Terrence bent forward in Bobby’s chair.

I stopped reading.

Aileen filled the space at once.

“Bobby had a house. He had a proper job. He cared for her. I knew she’d be safe with him. Look at the life she had. Look at this room.”

She put a hand on the back of the chair.

“You grew up here, Terry. Your father put that window in himself.”

Terrence moved his shoulder away from her hand.

“Yes,” he said. “He did.”

“And now everybody’s acting as if I did some terrible thing by wanting that for you.”

Georgia spoke.

“Did Frances know Wilson was waiting at the bus station?”

Aileen stared at her.

“That isn’t your business.”

“She was my cousin before you started assigning seats.”

I almost laughed. It came out as something worse.

Aileen turned back to Terrence.

“Your mother was happy. She told me she was happy.”

“She was,” he said.

“Then why are we doing this?”

“Because you told her he didn’t want us.”

Aileen opened her mouth, shut it, then tried again.

“Your grandfather told me to keep those letters away from her. She was settled by then. What good would they have done?”

“Let her decide,” Georgia said.

“She was emotional.”

“She was pregnant,” Terrence said.

Aileen pulled off one glove.

“I was trying to help.”

He stood.

“Did Dad know?”

She looked toward Bobby’s photograph on the mantel.

“About Wilson?”

“About the letters.”

“No.”

“Did he know about me?”

Aileen’s face changed.

This was the answer she wanted to give.

“Of course he knew. He married her anyway. He gave you his name. He stayed. This man wasn’t there.”

I put both hands on my knees.

There were words I could have used. Most of them would have given her somewhere to hide.

Terrence went to the mantel and took down a photograph.

Bobby stood outside the house beside a crib still in its cardboard box. Frances was next to him, one hand over her belly.

I’d seen the smaller version in room nine.

Terrence held it toward me.

“Mom told me this part too,” he said. “Dad said she’d have a home even if you came back. He said she could leave if she wanted. He wouldn’t make her stay because he’d helped her.”

Aileen said, “Well, he could afford to be generous.”

Terrence lowered the photograph.

“He was scared she’d go.”

Nobody spoke.

“He told her that. He helped her anyway.”

Aileen pulled at her other glove until one finger turned inside out.

“Then he was a fool.”

Terrence put the photograph back.

“Get your hand off his chair.”

She stepped away.

“Terry.”

“You don’t get to use him like that.”

“I helped raise you.”

“I know.”

“I was at every birthday.”

“I know.”

“Where was he?”

She pointed at me.

I stood up.

“Writing.”

She looked down at the open shoebox.

For once, there was an answer in the room she couldn’t speak over.

Terrence came to stand beside me.

“I sent you away Sunday,” he said.

“You’d lost your mother.”

“I knew what she told me. And I let Aunt Aileen do it anyway.”

Aileen reached toward his arm.

He moved.

“I wanted my dad,” he said. “The one I knew. And you were there, and I was angry you were there.”

I nodded.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You can want him.”

He covered his face.

I put my hand on his shoulder this time. Nobody was going to decide whether I was allowed.

Aileen said, “So that’s it? After everything I’ve done, you throw me away for somebody you’ve known two weeks?”

Terrence wiped his face with his sleeve.

“Give me Mom’s house key.”

She stared at him.

“And the garage remote.”

“You can’t mean that.”

“Put them down.”

She took the key from her ring. It took a while. Her nails kept slipping.

The remote came out of her purse.

Both went on the mantel below Bobby’s photograph.

Terrence said, “We’re getting the piano Saturday.”

“Fran said I could have it.”

I handed him the receipt.

Georgia said, “I was there when she asked you to store it.”

Aileen looked from one of us to the next.

She started crying then.

I wanted to feel sorry for her. I could manage remembering that she was Frances’s sister. That was all I had available.

At the door, she turned to me.

“You’ve taken my whole family.”

I held the shoebox against my coat.

“You had your turn.”

Forty-one envelopes

We collected the piano Saturday morning.

Georgia came with us. Terrence borrowed a trailer from a friend, and I brought the equipment I used for moving uprights.

Aileen stood in her front room beside it.

She’d put a vase on top and arranged photographs across the lid. Frances’s piano had become a shelf with eighty-eight inconveniences underneath.

I asked her to clear it.

She took down the photographs one by one.

Terrence stayed beside me.

“Your mother liked it here,” Aileen said.

“She asked me to bring it home.”

“She said a lot of things when she was sick.”

He took the lid key from his pocket.

“She gave me this before she went into hospice.”

Aileen stepped aside.

We moved it without damaging her floor. I mention that because I considered the floor less deserving of care than usual, but Frances would have had something to say about it.

At the trailer, Aileen came down the path.

“Thanksgiving’s still at mine,” she said to Terrence.

“No.”

“I’ve ordered the turkey.”

“Cancel it.”

“You’re really doing this over old letters?”

He fastened the last strap.

“Forty-one,” he said.

She waited for him to add something.

He climbed into the truck.

That afternoon, Georgia called the relatives who’d been at the burial. She did it from Frances’s living room, with Terrence beside her.

Nobody got a polished version.

Frances had wanted the wedding. Wilson had written. Aileen had kept the letters. Terrence was my son, and Bobby had loved him and raised him.

Those were the facts. Georgia repeated them whenever somebody tried to make them more comfortable.

Aileen lost the house key and the garage remote. She lost the piano she had decided was hers. Thanksgiving moved to Frances’s house.

Terrence took her name off the little group conversation where everybody arranged family visits. He told her she could call him herself, but she couldn’t speak for him anymore.

There wasn’t any money in the shoebox. No hidden account, no sudden fortune to make the years seem worth it.

There were forty-one letters.

We opened every one.

Some were embarrassing. Nineteen-year-old me apparently believed describing a carburetor repair was courtship.

Frances would have read those pages anyway. That was the part that kept catching me.

Terrence sat on the floor beside the footstool and handed each letter back when he finished.

In the last one, I’d written that I would stop.

“I hope he’s kind to you,” it said. “I hope you got somewhere with windows.”

Terrence put it down.

“She did,” he said.

I nodded.

Then he moved onto the sofa beside me and asked, “What do we do with the envelopes now?”

The left hand

I went home for eleven days.

There were customers to call and a van that needed repairs whether I’d found a son or not.

Terrence called the first evening.

“Did you get there?”

“About an hour ago.”

“Good.”

Neither of us knew what came next.

I asked whether the piano had settled after the move.

He said it sounded terrible.

“That’s how they get you,” I said. “You buy one, then they need a man.”

He laughed.

The next night he called again.

By the fourth night, he stopped apologizing for it.

We didn’t try to fit forty-two years into a telephone. He told me about the fence Bobby built and the time Frances locked herself out while carrying a birthday cake.

I told him about the shop and the room over it.

He asked whether I’d really waited six Fridays.

“Yes.”

“What did you do while you waited?”

“Bought terrible coffee.”

“Did you keep buying it?”

“I was nineteen. I thought suffering helped.”

His laughter got away from him, and he had to put the phone down.

I drove back the following week.

Terrence opened Frances’s front door before I could knock. He took my suitcase and put it in the spare room.

There was a towel on the bed. A drawer had been cleared.

I stood in the doorway a little too long.

“Is that all right?” he said.

“Yes.”

“You’re doing that face.”

“What face?”

“The one Mom did when she wanted to cry and make fun of somebody at the same time.”

I put my hand over my mouth.

He came across the room and hugged me.

Neither of us said anything useful. We weren’t especially skilled at it yet.

The piano stood by the living-room window. Bobby’s photograph was on one end. Our wedding picture stood on the other, out where anybody could see my coat trying to kill me.

I set my tools down.

Terrence sat on the bench.

“Mom said you’d teach me.”

“I will.”

“I can’t read music.”

“Neither could half the people who bought pianos from the shop.”

He moved over.

I sat beside him and showed him where to put his left hand.

He pressed too hard. Then too softly. Then he got three notes in the right order and looked at me with such surprise that I had to stare at the keyboard for a moment.

“Again?” he said.

“Again.”

We worked through the first part of the garage song. He kept losing the beat when his right hand joined in.

“How did she stand listening to you practice?” he said.

“She had opinions.”

“I remember.”

He tried it once more.

This time I played beside him. His shoulder bumped mine, and he didn’t move away.

At the end, he kept his fingers on the keys.

“Can we do that again, Dad?”

I put my hands beside his.

“From the beginning, son.”