…“three days before she died. And ma’am, I think I know who Thomas Hale is. He’s my grandfather.”
The restorer’s name was Ben Hale. I had found him online because he had good reviews and lived nearby. Neither of us had any idea that our families were connected.
We sat on the living room floor surrounded by envelopes, sorting them by date. There were more than three hundred letters. None of them had ever been mailed. My grandmother, Evelyn, had written them for twenty-six years, starting the winter after my grandfather passed.
They weren’t scandalous. That was the first thing I noticed. They were ordinary. She wrote about the weather, the price of eggs, the new pastor at church, and the hymns she had practiced that week. But in every single letter, she wrote the same line at the end: “I still play our song on Sundays. I hope wherever you are, you can hear it.”
Ben explained what he knew. His grandfather Thomas had been a music teacher in our town in the 1950s. Family legend said he’d been engaged to a girl from the church choir, but her parents disapproved because he was poor. She married someone else. Thomas moved away, married, raised a family, and never talked about her.
“He’s still alive,” Ben said. “He’s eighty-nine. He lives in a care home twenty minutes from here. He doesn’t remember much anymore. But he still plays.”
I finally understood my grandmother’s instruction. The piano wasn’t locked to protect the instrument. It was locked to protect the letters. And she didn’t want anyone else to play it because it was meant to be played by one person.
I asked Ben if we could take the piano to his grandfather. He was quiet for a moment, then said yes.
It took four people and a borrowed trailer. The care home staff cleared space in the common room. When they wheeled Thomas in, he looked confused at first. Then he saw the piano, with its chipped walnut lid and the little brass hymn light my grandmother always kept on top.
He said one word: “Evie.”
He sat down without being asked. His hands shook, but he found the keys. And he played a song I recognized immediately, because my grandmother had played it every Sunday of my life. I had never known its name.
Halfway through, he stopped and whispered, “She was supposed to wait for me. I was saving up.”
I gave him the last letter, the one she wrote three days before she died. Ben read it out loud because his grandfather’s eyes weren’t good anymore. At the end she had written: “If you ever find this, Tom, I want you to know I was happy. I just never stopped wondering.”
Thomas passed away in February, peacefully, a few weeks after we brought the piano. Ben told me the staff found him in the common room one morning, sitting at the keys.
The piano is back in my living room now. I unlocked it for good. And every Sunday, I play their song.
