Every Note Played(52)
“You guys hungry? We’ve got food in the kitchen. Grace?”
“Sure.” Grace follows her uncle into the other room.
Richard takes a seat in the rocking chair and looks around the living room as if he were visiting for the first time. It may well be the last time. Much like its former occupant, the house is old and outdated. The floorboards are worn and creaky, the paint on the cracked walls is chipped, the ceiling is mottled with water stains. With the exception of the missing piano and the additions of a giant-screen TV and an oversized recliner, the living room is furnished exactly as Richard remembers it.
There are still no curtains on the windows. His mother believed in sunshine and having nothing to hide. She often said she wouldn’t do anything she wouldn’t mind the neighbors seeing. On this four-acre, heavily wooded property, the nearest neighbor would’ve needed the Hubble telescope to see Sandy Evans smoking cigarettes in her pink curlers and nightgown.
Even though his mother has been gone for twenty-eight years, it’s her absence and not his father’s that Richard feels most acutely in this room. She was his only ally in the family, the only one who truly saw and accepted him. Without his mother, he couldn’t have played piano. She arranged for his lessons, insisted on the money from Walt to pay for them, drove him to every lesson, every recital and competition, and defended his right to practice.
He remembers the time she put herself between Richard’s piano and Walt’s chain saw. Richard can’t remember what set him off. Maybe he’d had a half dozen beers, and the Patriots lost. Richard does remember the thumping of his heart in his ears playing percussion with the distant buzz of his father’s chain saw slicing through the branches of a maple tree in the backyard after Walt stood down, determined to destroy something. Richard remembers sitting at the kitchen table while he listened, his mother’s hands shaking as she measured out flour and salt for apple-pie dough. He remembers stupidly asking, “Can I play now?”—his mother answering, “Not now, honey.” He remembers he was ten.
She was so proud of him for getting into Curtis on scholarship. She died just before he turned nineteen. She never met Karina, never got to see him graduate or play professionally, never got to hold her granddaughter. She never knew that her son would someday have ALS.
He thinks his mother would’ve approved of Karina. What little his father experienced of her, he was never a fan. Walt didn’t trust anyone from out of town, never mind from out of state, never mind from Poland. His world played out within his zip code, his life revolving around his job at the local quarry, the town church, the bank, the school, and Moe’s tavern. He didn’t like that he didn’t know Karina’s parents, that he couldn’t judge what kind of family she came from. When asked about her religion, she told him she was a lapsed Catholic. The only kind of person Walt, a Protestant and faithful Sunday churchgoer, trusted less than a Catholic was a godless woman. He found no charm in her accent and didn’t appreciate her sophisticated vocabulary, which, even spoken in broken English, was far superior to Walt’s. He blamed Karina for his son’s name preference of Richard over Ricky when she had nothing to do with it. Walt took her to be uppity, a snob, a heathen, probably a communist, a lazy immigrant only interested in Richard as a ticket to a green card.
The grown-ups filter into the room carrying food and drinks and take seats. No one chooses the recliner. That must’ve been “the chair.” Richard’s not sure if everyone is staying off it in reverence to Walt or if they all find it too creepy, knowing he died there a few days ago. On Monday, his father was sitting in that chair watching TV. Today he’s in a box in the ground.
Grace says she isn’t hungry after all and joins seven of her eight cousins outside, sledding on the hill. They range in age from three to twenty-two, nieces and nephews Richard doesn’t know. They were all stone-faced and tearless during the funeral, seemingly more weirded out by their drooling, unfamiliar uncle than their dead grandfather. It’s probably easier to bear witness to the graceful exit of an old man than the sloppy, slow-motion, paralytic crawl to death that is ALS in someone who should be in the prime of life. The older kids snuck periodic glances at him as if on a dare, and when caught staring, their eyes fled to somewhere safer, often the coffin.
Brendan, age eight, wiry with a buzz cut, a sharp nose, and curious eyes, doesn’t feel like getting wet or cold and is sitting sandwiched between his parents, Mikey and Emily, on the small couch. Tommy and Karina are on the love seat. Tommy’s wife, Rachael, is outside, helping her two youngest kids up and down the steep hill. Everyone is eating deli-meat sandwiches and Buffalo chicken wings on paper plates. The men are drinking Budweiser out of cans, and the women are drinking white wine.
Richard watches his brothers eat, massive bites of bread, ham, and cheese churning around in their open mouths like clothes in a circular dryer window while they talk, and he’s a kid again at the supper table. Skinny, he ate modest meals, always a single helping, and finished quickly. Never allowed to be excused early, he felt as if he spent hours at the table every night, waiting in lonely silence as his brothers gorged on several platefuls of meat and potatoes. Unlike Richard, they were big boys with big muscles to feed. Athletes who were every day running on a field or bench-pressing at the gym, they were in good physical shape when they were young, but now, they’re both overweight. They’ve got beer guts and full-moon faces and beefy arms and legs that look stiff when they walk, like growing kids stuffed into last winter’s snowsuits.