Afterward, the woman took both my hands and looked at them, then she looked across the room at my father and said, “She asked you to let her play this piece.” My father didn’t answer. The woman told me my mother had spoken to her about the song months before she died. She had wanted me to play it at her memorial because it was the first piece I’d ever learned from her.
I asked why my father had never told me. The woman shook her head. She said my mother had left something with her the week before she went into the hospital. A recording. She had told her not to give it to me until after the memorial, because she knew my father would try to stop me from playing.
The woman handed me an envelope. Inside was a small flash drive and a note in my mother’s handwriting: “If he tells her I didn’t want the music, she’s going to believe him.” My hands were still swollen when I read it. I asked the woman what was on the recording, and she said, “Your mother talking about the night your father told her you weren’t good enough to play.”
That night I listened to it alone. My mother explained that she’d kept encouraging me because the piano was the one thing that made me feel like myself, and she knew my father hated hearing it. Then she said something that made me stop the recording and cry: “If I’m not there when she plays this, tell her I heard every note she ever thought wasn’t good enough.”
The next morning I played the piece at her memorial with bandaged hands. I missed notes. I played too slowly. But I finished it. Afterward, my father came up to me and said nothing. The woman stood beside me and said, “Your mother got what she wanted.” For the first time in my life, I realized the music hadn’t been for my father to approve of. It had always been for my mother to hear.
