Because there, in the little compartment behind the soundboard, was a thick sheaf of paper, and when I drew it out into the light, I understood at last why my mother wanted only me to have this piano.
Music. Handwritten. Page after page of it, in the careful notation of my mother, songs I had never heard in all my life.
She had been a composer, my quiet mother, writing her own music in secret for a lifetime, too shy ever to play it for a single soul, hiding it inside the very instrument, and leaving it to the one child of hers who would sit down and finally give it a voice.
Me. The one who played her hymns every evening. The one she was so firm about, in a way I never understood, until now.
My brothers would have sold the piano, or let it sit and gather dust. She knew that. She left it to me because she knew I would keep playing it, and that one day, dusting it or tuning it or reaching inside, I would find the music she never had the courage to share while she lived.
I sat down on the bench with shaking hands and I played the first page.
It was beautiful. Of course it was. Forty years I thought I knew my mother, and I never knew this, that behind the shy woman who cooked and cleaned and hummed at the sink, there was an artist, pouring her whole heart onto paper she hid inside a piano.
I have played every page now. Some of them I have learned by heart. And I have done the thing she was too shy to do herself.
I played her music at the little church she loved, in front of the whole congregation, and I told them these songs were written by my mother, who never once believed they were good enough to be heard.
They were good enough. They were more than good enough. There was not a dry eye in the place.
A young man from the church, a music teacher, asked if he might make proper copies, so her songs would not be lost to a single hidden sheaf again. I said yes. He has been arranging them, and a small choir sang one this past Easter, my mother music filling a church for the first time, forty years after she wrote it and was too shy to let anyone hear.
She would have hated the attention and loved the music being loved. Both things can be true. They were, of my mother, her whole life long.
Forty years her music hummed faintly inside that piano every time I played, waiting. My mother finally has an audience. It only took her whole shy life, and a compartment behind the soundboard, and a daughter who would not stop playing, to give it to her.