Corey turned the envelope over in his hands, and read the return address a second time under his breath. Then he drew out the contract. The paper was heavy and cream colored, with a musical staff printed in the corner, and it began with the words, Between Leon Washington, songwriter, and Delta Gate Music, Nashville, Tennessee. He read down the page. A hundred and twelve songs. Exclusive publishing rights. A payment of nine million seven hundred thousand dollars. The chicken grease popped in the pan. Nobody went to turn it off. Angela put her hand on her necklace and held it there, as though it were the only thing in the room that would not move.
“Daddy,” she said, “you wrote songs?” I said, “A hundred and twelve of them, baby. You sang four of them in the youth choir. Do you remember Walk Me Home, Shepherd?” Her mouth opened. “That was yours?” I said, “That was mine. I wrote it the night your mother went into the hospital, on a napkin, in the waiting room.” Her eyes filled. Then I laid the VA printout beside the contract, the sheet from the young sergeant, and I tapped it with one finger. “Account ending in 9921. The pension that you said was suspended. I would like you to say whose account this is.”
Corey did not wait for her to answer. “Angela,” he said, “that is the boutique account. The one you said your aunt Pearl helped you open.” His voice shook. “You told me my hours were cut, and that we had to be careful. And all the time you were filling a store with dresses.” Angela stared at the tablecloth. “It was supposed to be temporary, Corey. A loan to myself. I was going to pay it back.” He rose from his chair. “From the pension of your father.” The bells across the street went on ringing for the evening service, and for a long moment, none of us could speak.
A long white envelope from the piano bench brought a Nashville contract to a dinner table and gave one retired choir director the evening to bring his daughter home.
I opened the Bible I had brought, the one with my rent envelope pressed in the Twenty Third Psalm, and I read two lines aloud, not because they were wise but because I needed something steady to hold. Then I closed it. “Angela,” I said, “do you know what I prayed for on the day you were born? I prayed that you would never feel small. I thought that if I gave you everything, you would never feel it.” I shook my head. “I think I got it backward. I think I gave you so much that you could not tell the difference between love and things.”
Angela put her face in her hands. She was fifty, a woman who ran a Sunday school and chaired the hospitality committee, and at that moment she looked about eight years old. “Daddy, I was ashamed,” she said. “All the women at church have so much. Their husbands drive nice cars. Their daughters go to nice schools. I wanted to be somebody you could be proud of.” I said, “I was already proud of you.” She said, “You were proud of me when I was good. I did not want you to see when I was not.” She wept until Corey brought her a napkin.
I told them what would happen, standing up, in my dress blues, as straight as my knees would allow. The account would be closed. The pension would come to me, with every missed month. The boutique would be sold, and what could be recovered would go back to the Army. And I would go back to my own place, a little house near the church where I had directed the choir for twenty five years. “But first,” I said, “I want my piano out of that garage. Today. Corey, you have a truck.” Corey looked at his wife. Then he said, “Yes, sir.”
We carried the piano out together, Corey and two men from the church. They set it down in the front room of my new house, on a rug the color of old gold, and I lifted the lid. The keys were yellow. The strings had gone flat. I sat down on the bench and pressed middle C, and it rang out into the empty room, sour and sweet and alive. I played one chord, and then another. By the third, I was crying, because I could hear all the years in it, the nights and the napkins and the garage tarp, and all of them were still singing.
The recorded songs began to come out on a Friday. Delta Gate Music sent me the first six, in a box with a letter, and I took them to Mount Zion on Sunday. The choir stood in their purple robes and read my music for the first time. A hundred and twelve songs, I told them, and we would sing one a week. When they reached the chorus of Walk Me Home, Shepherd, the whole sanctuary changed. A woman in the third pew stood up with her hands raised. Another began to clap. And in the back, at the end of the pew, Angela sat with her face wet, mouthing every word.
She came to see me on Tuesdays. She brought a casserole, and she sat on the piano bench beside me, and I taught her the second verse of a song she had not heard since she was six. She is not a singer, and I told her so, and she laughed. The boutique was sold in March. She had not wanted to tell the women at church, but she stood up one Sunday, in the fellowship hall, and said it herself. Nobody judged her. An older sister took her by the hand and said, “Honey, we have all done something.”
Last Easter, the choir sang my songs for the whole congregation, and at the end, the pastor called me forward. I stood in front of the pulpit in my dress blues. The room was silent. Then, from the back, Angela began to clap, slowly, and the whole church rose, and the sound filled the roof like a river. I looked down at my hands, the same hands that had written the songs on napkins and programs. I did not take a bow. I lifted them in the air, the way I used to before the first note.