…”‘…died. Everyone said he’d been drinking. He hadn’t. I had.'”
Ben stopped reading. He folded the paper slowly.
Troy’s grin had disappeared. “My dad’s name was Daniel Whitfield,” he said. “He died in a car accident in 1998. On Route 30. They said he was drunk. My mom never talked about it.”
“I know,” Ben said. “I was his best friend since we were eleven.”
The church hall had gone completely silent. Somebody turned off the coffee urn.
Ben sat down on the piano bench. He held the note in both hands.
“February 1998,” he said. “I was drinking a lot back then. Your dad was the only one who still put up with me. That night, I got hammered at a bar in Millersburg and called him at midnight to come get me. He drove forty minutes in the snow. He put me in his passenger seat. He drove me home, and he walked me to my door, and he made me drink a glass of water. Then he got back in his car to go home to you and your mom.”
Ben’s voice cracked.
“A deer ran out on Route 30, two miles from your house. He swerved. He hit a tree. He was stone sober. He’d had one beer at dinner, six hours earlier. But the bar receipt in his pocket was mine. He’d paid my tab before he took me home. The cops saw a bar receipt and a crash and wrote it up the way it looked. And I was so drunk and so scared that I never said a word.”
Troy didn’t move.
“I tuned the piano at his funeral,” Ben said. “This piano. I couldn’t say it out loud, so I wrote it down and put it inside. I’ve been sober twenty-six years. I’ve wanted to tell you every single one of them. I didn’t know how. I thought you’d hate me. You should.”
For a long time, Troy didn’t say anything. Then he said, very quietly, “My whole life, people said ‘like father, like son’ every time I had a drink. My mom wouldn’t let me get my license until I was nineteen. Because of him.”
“I know,” Ben said. “I’m so sorry.”
Troy took the note out of Ben’s hands. He read it himself, twice. Then he took out his earpiece and put it in his pocket.
“He came to get you,” Troy said. “In a snowstorm. At midnight.”
“Every time I called,” Ben said. “He never once said no.”
Troy sat down next to Ben on the piano bench. They sat there for a long time without saying anything.
Then Troy put his fingers on the keys and played a few bars of something. It was slow and a little clumsy.
Ben looked at him. “Where’d you learn that?”
“My mom said it was his favorite,” Troy said. “She taught it to me when I was eight. I’ve never played it for anyone.”
Ben’s eyes filled up. “That’s the song he asked me to play at his wedding,” he said. “I played it badly. He said it was perfect.”
Troy went to see his mother the next day and gave her the note. She hugged him for ten minutes. Then she called Ben and invited him to Sunday dinner, for the first time in twenty-six years.
Troy still makes beats on his laptop. But last month he asked Ben to teach him how to tune a piano. “Just so I know what it takes,” he said. Ben is a very patient teacher. Troy is a very bad student. They meet every Thursday.
