because under that painted-over bottom, wrapped in a square of yellowed lace, was a single photograph and a pressed bouquet gone to paper, and I understood at last why the music never played.
The photograph was my grandmother and grandfather on their wedding day, young and laughing on the steps of a little white church, him in a borrowed suit, her holding the very bouquet that was pressed flat and brittle beside the picture. On the back, in her hand: the happiest day of my life, and a date.
The gears of the music box were gone, lifted out years and years ago to make room, and in their place my grandmother had laid the two things that meant the most to her in the world. And I finally understood the silence.
My mother told me the rest, standing in the doorway of that Sapulpa bedroom, the story she had only half known herself. The music box played their song, the one my grandparents danced to at that wedding. My grandfather died young, far younger than my grandmother, and after he was gone she could not bear to hear their song play in an empty house. So she had the works taken out, silenced it on purpose, and she kept it facing the window they used to sit at together in the evenings, and inside it she hid the photograph of the happiest day of her life and the flowers she carried that morning.
She could not stand to hear the song without him. So she kept the box, and kept it pointed at their window, and let it hold the day instead of the tune, for the rest of her long life.
Folded with the lace was a slip of paper, a line to no one and everyone.
The song stopped the day he did. But the day itself I get to keep. I look at it every morning and I am twenty-three again and he is holding my hand on the church steps.
I had to set that box down and sit on the edge of her bed, because for my whole childhood I thought Grandma was just a fussy old woman who did not want children breaking her broken music box. She was not fussy. She was guarding the happiest day of her life, the one she had sealed inside where a careless kids winding could never reach it, and she took it out of our hands gentle every single time rather than explain a grief that big to a child.
I did not put the gears back. That box was never meant to play again, and it is not going to. But the photograph and the pressed bouquet are framed now, side by side, on my own dresser, facing my own window, in the morning light. My grandmother kept her happiest day for sixty years in a silence she chose. The least I can do is give it back the sunlight she always pointed it toward.