I pulled the contract out of the long brown envelope and laid it on the kitchen table next to the plate of bacon, with the printout of Jo Ann on top of it. Tiffany picked it up first. She is a dental assistant, thirty one, a quiet woman who had never spoken a hard word to me. She read the first page, and then she looked at the figure and set the paper down very carefully, the way you set down something that might go off. “Mr. Delbert,” she said. “Six million, two hundred thousand dollars.” Wade snatched it up, read it, and sat down heavily in his chair. The baby fussed in the next room. A truck downshifted out on the road.
“It is for the bracing pattern,” I said. “The one I drew in 1974 on the back of a set list. Forty one designs in all. The company wants to build a signature line, with my name inlaid on the headstock. They want to call it the Delbert Series.” I turned the printout of Jo Ann toward my son and tapped it. “And that is the pension fund. Paid every month for thirty six months into an account that ends in 2047. Wade, I would like to know whose account it is.” He did not answer. He put the contract down, and he looked at his wife, and I saw that boy of mine, who could pick any melody out of thin air, run out of notes.
Tiffany set down the calculator. “Wade,” she said slowly, “that is the account for the PA system.” He opened his mouth. “And the truck.” He closed it. “You told me you were getting extra gigs on Broadway. You told me the band was booming.” Her voice did not rise. It sank, and the quieter it got, the harder it landed. “You said your father insisted on helping with the garage because he could not afford the loft. Wade, I thought we were being kind to him.” She swallowed. “And all that time, he was paying us rent. Cash. In an envelope. Every month. I put it in the jar myself.”
A long brown envelope opened beside a plate of bacon revealed a contract, a pension printout, and a lesson in listening.
Wade rubbed his face with both hands. When he lowered them, he looked fifteen years old again, a skinny kid in a flannel shirt, caught with a cigarette behind the barn. “Pop, I am sorry,” he said. “I did not think of it as stealing. The fund was just sitting there. You never asked. You never complained. I thought, he is up in that apartment with his guitars, he has everything he needs, and we are drowning. The band was losing money. The baby came early. The hospital bills.” His voice broke. “Every month it got easier to do. Pop, I swear to you, I meant to put it back.”
I let him finish. I have played too many sessions with too many frightened men to rush a confession. When he was done, I said, “Wade, do you remember the first chord I ever taught you?” He nodded miserably. “G,” he said. “On the back porch. You said, A good musician listens for what is missing.” I smiled, tired. “Well, son, what is missing here?” He thought. A long silence stretched. Then he said, quietly, “Honesty.” I nodded. “That is a start. Here is what is going to happen.” I told him, and Tiffany sat very straight and listened with her chin raised.
He would repay every dollar of the pension, over six years, by a written agreement drawn up by a lawyer from the musicians union, who was an old friend. He would sell the PA system and the truck. He would give up the Saturday gig at the bar on Broadway for a year and take a day job. And every Sunday for the next two years, he would come up to the apartment over the garage and work with me at the bench. “Doing what?” he asked, bewildered. I said, “Learning to build a guitar. You have played one for twenty years. You have never once made one.” He stared at me. “Pop, I am not a woodworker.”
“No,” I said. “You are not. But I am seventy four, and I would like to leave this to someone who knows what is inside it.” I looked at my daughter in law and added, gently, “And you, sweetheart, I owe you an apology. I should have said something sooner. I let the lie run because I was curious, and curiosity is a luxury that costs other people.” She shook her head and reached across the table and put her hand on mine. “Mr. Delbert,” she said, “we are family. You do not owe us a thing.” Her eyes were brimming. “But I would love to learn the bracing pattern.”
The first Sunday, Wade came up the stairs in sweatpants, looking like he was walking to the gallows. I handed him a block of spruce, a spokeshave, and a pencil. By the sixth, he had begun to feel the grain, the way the plane sang when the blade was true. He did not speak much. The sound of shavings falling was the only conversation we needed. At the end of the third month, he held up a small test top to the window and tapped it. It rang, clear and bright, a perfect C sharp. “Pop,” he whispered. “Listen to that.” I closed my eyes. “I hear it, son.”
I moved out of the apartment in the spring, into a little house on Fatherland Street with a front porch and a workshop in the back. The guitar company built a display for the Nashville music show, with my face on a banner and a case full of Delbert Series instruments, spruce and mahogany, with the pearl inlay on the headstock. I stood in front of it in my pearl snap shirt, the one from the Opry. The man looked at the banner, then at me, and said, “That is the man who built the sound.”
Last month, Wade stood on the stage of a small club on Broadway. He wore a vest and a hat, and in his hands he held a guitar. It was a dreadnought in spruce and mahogany, with a slightly crooked purfling and a rosette he had cut himself. He had spent four hundred hours on it. Tiffany sat at the front table with the baby on her lap. Wade looked over the crowd, found me at the back, and said into the microphone, “This one is for my pop. He taught me to listen.” Then he played the first chord, a G, and the whole room seemed to lean in.