“I may look like Daddy, but I have my mother’s
hands.
Piano hands, Ma called them,
sneaking a look at them any chance she got.
A piano is a grand thing,”I say.
“Though ours is covered in dust now.
Under the grime it’s dark brown,
like my mother’s eyes.”
I think about the piano
and how above it hangs a mirror
and to either side of that mirror,
shelves,
where Ma and Daddy’s wedding picture once stood,
though Daddy has taken that down.
“Whenever she could,
Ma filled a bowl with apples,” I tell Louise.
“I’m crazy about apples,
and she filled a jar with wildflowers when she
found them,
and put them on that shelf above the piano.”
On the other shelf Ma’s book of poetry remains.
And the invitation from Aunt Ellis,
Daddy and I tore it into strips
to mark the poems we thought Ma liked best.
“We weren’t always happy,” I tell Louise.
“But we were happy enough
until the accident.
When I rode the train west,
I went looking for something,
but I didn’t see anything wonderful.
I didn’t see anything better than what I already had.
Home.”
I look straight into Louise’s face.
Louise doesn’t flinch.
She looks straight back.
I am the first one to back down.
“My hands don’t look real pretty anymore.
But they hardly hurt. They only ache a little,
sometimes.
I could play right now,
maybe,
if I could get the dust out of the piano,
if I wanted to get the dust out of the piano.
But I don’t. I’m not ready yet.”
And what I like best about her,
is Louise doesn’t say what I should do.
She just nods.
And I know she’s heard everything I said,
and some things I didn’t say too.
November 1935