My son made me stop seeing the only man who’d asked me to supper in twelve years. “He’s after your money, Mama,” Lanny said. I believed him. That night I sent Burnell a text: “I think we’d better stop.” He answered, “Yes ma’am.” In September, he died.
I had six Sundays with Burnell before that text. He had sat two pews behind me at First Methodist for nine years. I knew he was a widower and a retired TV repairman, but we had never spoken much beyond church greetings. Then, last spring, he asked if I’d have supper with him.
He wore a tie clip shaped like a little television set. I laughed when I noticed it, and he blushed.
“My grandson gave it to me,” he said. “I wear it so he’ll see it on the church video.”
We went to the café on Main and took the back booth beside an old upright piano nobody played. We talked about church, family, and the ordinary things two people talk about when they are trying to find out whether they like each other. Burnell never hurried me. After supper, he walked me to my car and opened the door.
He did that every Sunday. He never tried to kiss me.
On our third supper, I told him about my mother’s piano. It was a Kimball upright, and she taught me to play on it before she died in 1977.
When I was nine, I scratched my initials beneath the lid. Mama spanked me for it, and I can’t say she was wrong.
In 1979, the Army sent my husband and me to Germany. We couldn’t ship the piano, so I sold it to a little church near Fort Bliss for a hundred dollars. I regretted it almost as soon as it was gone.
“What happened to it?” Burnell asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve been sorry every day since.”
He didn’t try to console me. He looked over at the café piano and stayed quiet for a while. I assumed he was thinking about something else.
My husband had been in the Army for twenty-six years. We moved eleven times. “Home is wherever the boxes are, Merlene,” he used to say. I learned to pack a house in two days and to cry in the car where the children couldn’t see. After he died, I came back to Bandera, Texas. I thought the part of my life that included supper with a man was over.
At First Methodist, people called me Peaches. I had brought a peach cobbler to every funeral in town for twelve years, starting with my husband’s. When Lanny came up from San Antonio after the sixth supper, I didn’t think of that as anything unusual. I was still getting used to the fact that someone had asked me out.
Lanny saw Burnell’s truck in my driveway when he arrived. Later, at my kitchen table, he didn’t ease into the subject.
“He’s after your money, Mama.”
“Lanny, that man has a nicer house than me.”
“Men like that look for widows,” he said. “Trust me, I see it at the bank every week.”
I wanted to tell him that Burnell had never asked me for anything. He had paid for supper, walked me to my car, and asked about a piano I had loved. But Lanny was smart, and he worked at a bank. I thought he knew things I didn’t.
“So you think I’m being foolish,” I said.
“I think you don’t know him.”
“I’ve known him at church for nine years.”
“That’s not the same thing, Mama.”
He said it as if the matter were settled. I let it be settled. I am ashamed of how quickly I believed him.
That night, I sent Burnell the text. It took ten minutes for him to answer. “Yes ma’am.”
No argument. No request to explain. No attempt to change my mind.
The next Sunday, he sat in a pew on the other side of the church. In the parking lot, he nodded politely and went to his truck. I told myself that was proof Lanny had been right. I had gotten out just in time.
Some nights I sat beneath my late husband’s Army picture and felt like the silliest old woman in Texas. I had wanted to enjoy six suppers. Instead, I had acted as if I’d caught Burnell doing something wrong.
In September, Burnell had a heart attack in his tomato garden and died. I made a cobbler for his funeral, as I had for the others. I sat in the back pew. I didn’t want his children to have to look at me.
A lawyer named Mr. Osborne called me afterward.
“Mrs. Rhoades, Burnell Haskew named you in his will,” he said.
I nearly dropped the phone. “You tell his children I don’t want a thing. I barely knew the man.”
“Ma’am, he wrote it a particular way.”
“That doesn’t make it right.”
“His children don’t see a dime until you come in,” he said. “He said you’d say that. That’s why he wrote it that way.”
I called Lanny that night.
“Don’t you dare go,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Folks will say you went after a dead man’s money.”
“I’m going to hear what the lawyer has to say.”
“Then don’t expect me at Thanksgiving.”
He went quiet for a moment, then hung up. I sat up half the night. Maybe he was right. Maybe by Sunday I’d be the widow who chased a dead man’s money, and maybe my only son would stop speaking to me over six suppers.
Burnell’s estate was worth about $600,000. His two children were waiting on me before they could receive anything. I couldn’t make myself keep them waiting just because I was afraid of how I might look. That was what decided it.
On Monday, I drove to Burnell’s house, where Mr. Osborne had asked to meet. His son, Rayburn, and daughter, Glynis, stood on the porch with their arms crossed. Glynis didn’t offer her hand.
“Let’s just get this over with,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t ask to be in the middle of this.”
She looked away. “Neither did we.”
Mr. Osborne led us around back to the garage. Burnell’s tools still hung on the pegboard, each in its outline. In the far corner stood something tall covered by an old wedding-ring quilt.
“He drove clear out to Fort Bliss in July,” Mr. Osborne said. “He wouldn’t tell anybody why.”
Rayburn looked at his sister. “Daddy drove to West Texas? Daddy wouldn’t drive past the county line.”
Mr. Osborne took hold of one corner of the quilt and looked at me.
“He asked me to do this part myself,” he said.
Then he pulled the quilt down. Against the wall stood a Kimball upright piano.
I didn’t move. The finish was worn, and it looked smaller than it had in my memory. I knew the shape of it anyway. Mr. Osborne lifted the lid, and there, beneath it, were the initials I had scratched into the wood when I was nine.
“That’s my mother’s piano,” I said.
Rayburn leaned closer. Glynis’s arms dropped to her sides.
Mr. Osborne handed me a folded letter. “Burnell asked me to give you this with the piano.”
The letter was in Burnell’s handwriting. He wrote that he had remembered what I told him at the café. He had found the little church near Fort Bliss, learned that the piano was still there, and bought it back. He had driven out in July to bring it home. He wanted me to have it because he knew I had regretted selling it.
The piano was the thing he had left me. His will directed Mr. Osborne not to distribute the rest of the estate to Rayburn and Glynis until I had come to see it and accepted it. Burnell had known I would refuse money. He had left me something I had once loved and lost.
I read the letter again. Then I held it out so Rayburn and Glynis could read it too.
“He did all that because of one conversation?” Rayburn asked.
“He remembered it,” I said.
Glynis looked at the piano, then at me. “And you thought he wanted your money?”
I had no answer that made me look good. “My son thought so. I let myself believe him.”
Mr. Osborne kept his voice careful. “Burnell didn’t ask you to defend him. He asked me to make sure you knew why the piano was here.”
Glynis looked at her brother. “We’ve been waiting because of this.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
She exhaled and rubbed her forehead. “I thought you were coming for something from Daddy.”
“I didn’t want anything from him,” I said. “Not money.”
Rayburn glanced at the letter. “He could have told us.”
“He asked to tell her himself,” Mr. Osborne said.
No one argued with that. They had come expecting a stranger to claim a piece of their father’s estate. Instead, there was the piano he had gone out of his way to return to me, and a letter explaining why.
Mr. Osborne said the rest could be distributed once I accepted the piano. I asked him to proceed. I wasn’t going to make Burnell’s children wait any longer, and I didn’t want the money that was theirs.
The piano had settled the question of what Burnell had meant. It did not settle what Lanny had done.
I called him from the house. When he answered, I told him the covered thing in Burnell’s garage had been my mother’s Kimball piano, the one I sold near Fort Bliss in 1979.
There was a pause.
“He found it?” Lanny said.
“He did. He went out there in July and brought it back.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because I told him I was sorry I’d sold it.”
Lanny began to say something, then stopped. “I didn’t know.”
“No,” I said. “You didn’t.”
“I was trying to protect you, Mama.”
“You told me he was after my money.”
“I thought he might be. I see people at the bank who, ”
“You didn’t know him. You didn’t ask me what he’d said or done. You saw his truck and decided.”
His voice got sharper. “I didn’t want you to get hurt.”
I could understand that. I could also understand that his fear had become my decision before I had a chance to make it myself.
“I ended it because I trusted you,” I said. “Burnell answered, ‘Yes ma’am,’ and never bothered me again. I don’t get those Sundays back.”
Lanny went quiet. It wasn’t the kind of quiet that fixed anything.
“Can I come see the piano?” he asked.
“You can,” I said. “But don’t tell me what I ought to do with it.”
“I won’t.”
He came to Burnell’s house later that day. Rayburn and Glynis were still there with Mr. Osborne. Lanny stood near the doorway for a moment, looking at the piano and the open letter.
“This is the one?” he asked.
I nodded.
“I’m sorry, Mama.”
Rayburn glanced over at him. “You were the one who told her our dad wanted her money?”
Lanny looked down. “I was.”
“I shouldn’t have said it,” he added. “I didn’t know Burnell. I saw a truck and made up the rest.”
Glynis folded the letter back along its creases. “It made things harder for her.”
“I know,” Lanny said.
He didn’t try to explain his way out of it again. I did not tell him it was all right. It wasn’t. But I let him stay while Mr. Osborne went over what would happen with the estate. Rayburn and Glynis would receive what their father had left them, and I would take the piano.
When we left the garage, I told Mr. Osborne I accepted Burnell’s gift. The children no longer had to wait on me. I wasn’t taking their money, and they weren’t being asked to approve of what their father had done.
The piano came to my house. It had been out of my life for decades, and I couldn’t pretend those years hadn’t happened. I also couldn’t undo the text I had sent Burnell. I could only stop letting Lanny’s fear make my choices for me.
Lanny and I are speaking again. He knows I’m not going to ask his permission before I trust someone.
Burnell gave me back my mother’s piano. I kept it.
