…surprise. Close the curtains, Peter, she’s watching!”
Somebody laughed. Somebody else said “shhh” very loudly. I sat on my bed in the dark with my heart pounding, completely confused.
At nine the next morning, Mr. Henderson knocked on my door. He looked exhausted and embarrassed. “You peeked,” he said. “I knew you would. Your mother always did too. Will you come over? Please. They’ve waited thirty-eight years.”
In his living room were eleven people. The woman from the car stood up first. Up close, she wasn’t my mother. She was older, softer, with the same wide smile.
“I’m Annie,” she said. “Your mother’s younger sister.”
My mother had died of cancer when I was twelve. After the funeral, my father cut off her entire family. They lived in Ireland, and he said they’d never approved of him. Letters stopped coming. Or so I thought. I found out later that my father had returned them unopened for years.
Mr. Henderson wasn’t just my neighbor. He was my mother’s cousin. When my father died and I moved into this neighborhood fifteen years ago, the family asked him to buy the house next door. They wanted someone to watch over me until they found the courage to reach out. They worried I’d been told terrible things about them.
“I wanted to tell you a hundred times,” he said. “But they wanted to do it properly.”
The large wooden crate was in the middle of the room. Annie asked me to open it.
Inside was a small upright piano. My mother’s. She’d played it every night when I was little, until we moved to America and couldn’t afford to bring it. Her mother had kept it in a farmhouse in County Clare for forty years.
The framed photograph was one my mother had sent home when I was eight — me at a school recital, in a green dress, at a piano. “There she is,” Annie’s husband had said that night. “That’s the one we need to ask to play it.”
I hadn’t played since my mother died. My hands shook as I sat down. I played the only song I still remembered, the one she used to play to put me to sleep.
When I finished, Annie was crying, and so was everyone else. Mr. Henderson handed me the envelope with the thousand dollars. I gave it back. He’d given me something worth a lot more.
