I backed the screws out, slid the panel free, looked into the dark behind the strings, and when I saw what was waiting in there, I sank down onto the piano bench.
Tucked into the felt and the hammers, wrapped in one of her good Sunday handkerchiefs, was her old cassette recorder — the boxy one she’d used to tape herself practicing for forty years — and a single sealed envelope with my name on it in handwriting that wavered in a way her writing never used to. Beside it sat a stack of cassettes, each labeled in that same shaky hand. Sunday hymns. Your lullaby. The good mornings. And one more, set apart from the others, marked simply: For the day.
My mother could barely lift a coffee cup in her last weeks. And yet she had taken a screwdriver to the front of this piano, opened it, hidden all this inside, and screwed it shut again with new brass screws — spending strength she did not have, so that I would find her here.
I opened the letter first. “I couldn’t lift much at the end, my girl, but I could still hide your mother’s hands where you’d find them. When the house gets too quiet, play these. I’ll be on the other side of the music, same as I always was. And the one marked ‘for the day’ — don’t you dare play it yet.”
I knew exactly what “the day” was. I’d gotten engaged that winter, in the middle of the worst of it, and we’d all quietly understood she would never make it to the wedding. She knew it too. So I sat on that bench and pressed play on the cassette marked for the day, even though she’d told me not to, because I couldn’t help myself.
It was her, at this piano, playing the processional — the music I’d walk down the aisle to. She’d recorded it a few bars at a time, on the good mornings, when her hands still had it in them. You can hear her stop to rest. You can hear her start again. And at the end, a little out of breath, her voice: “There. I won’t get to play you down the aisle in person, sweetheart, so I played it here. When the day comes, let them press play, and I’ll be at this piano the whole time. You will not walk alone. I promise you that.”
We are not selling the piano. It’s in my own front room now, against the wall, where my children will fall asleep to it the way I did.
I got married in the fall. They wheeled that old piano to the front of the little church outside Amarillo, and when the doors opened, my mother played me down the aisle — every note, the resting, the catching of her breath, all of it filling that room. I did not walk alone. I never will. She made sure of it with the last strength she had, behind four bright brass screws, so that I’d always be able to find my way back to the sound of her hands.