Under the velvet lining, wrapped in tissue gone the color of weak tea, was a folded sheet of music. Hand drawn staves, notes inked in a careful old-country hand, and across the top, a title. For my Liesel. I sat down right on the floor, because I knew that name. Liesel was my grandmother, gone twenty years before him.
My grandpa played that accordion for seventy years, at every wedding and festival and beer hall in our little German town, every polka and waltz our people ever danced to. And in all that time, in all those thousands of songs, there was one he wrote himself and never once played for a living soul.
He wrote her a waltz. A quiet one, by the look of it, slow where his dance tunes were fast, and he tucked it under the lining of the one thing he held in his hands every single day, and he carried it there for decades, under his fingers at every dance, and he never played it. Not at her funeral. Not on the porch in his last month. Not ever. It was too much his. Some things a man cannot hand to a crowd.
I do not read music well, but I know a man who does, an old friend of my grandpa from the band. I took the sheet to him, and he sat at his piano, and he worked it through slow, and for the first time in the world, seventy years after a young immigrant boy fell in love, my grandpa waltz filled a room.
It was the most beautiful thing I ever heard, and my grandpa never let a single person hear it, because he wrote it for a woman who was already gone, and it was the one song he wanted to keep just between the two of them.
My grandpa came over as a boy from a German family, taught himself to play as a child, and never put that accordion down for seventy years. I always thought I knew what was in him, all that music, all that joy, a whole hall of people spinning. I did not know that under the joy, under the lining, he was carrying one slow waltz for Liesel that he loved too much to share.
We played it at the family gathering that summer, the old friend on the piano, all of us gone quiet. There was not a dry eye in the German hall where my grandpa had made so many people dance. And then somebody wiped their face and got up, and then somebody else, and we danced to it, slow, the whole family, to the one song he wrote and never got to see us dance to.
The accordion is mine now, and the waltz is out of its hiding place at last, copied and shared so it can never be lost again. My grandpa spent seventy years giving everybody else the music to dance to. He kept exactly one song for himself and the woman he loved. Now we all have it. And every time we play it, the two of them get one more dance.