I heard a door open behind me. My father came out into the hall in his undershirt and pajama pants, and stopped, and then came and sat down on the step above me, without a word, and put his hand on the top of my head. A minute later Sam came stumbling out of his room with his hair sticking up and his eyes half shut and said, "Is it Santa?" and my father said "Shh," and pulled him down onto his lap, and the three of us sat there on the stairs in the blue dark and listened to my mother play.
When she finished, she held the last note down, a low E-flat this time, the same note but deep and dark at the bottom of the piano, and let it ring all the way out until there was nothing left of it. Then she sat with her hands on the keys.
"Carol," my father said from the stairs, very softly.
She turned around. Her face was wet, but she was smiling, and it was not the bright fast smile of that morning in the kitchen at the beginning of December. It was something slower than that. It came up from somewhere far down and took its time.
"Ray," she said. "I'm not selling the piano."
"No," my father said. "I didn't figure you were."
"We'll figure it out. The money. We will."
"I know."
"Is it Santa?" Sam said again, muzzily, and my mother laughed, that big sudden laugh that made people in the grocery store turn around, and it went up the stairs and filled the house the way the note had.
Oliver did not go upstairs that night. He climbed down off the keys into my mother's lap and lay there, and she sat on the bench with him until we'd all gone back to bed, and I fell asleep with my ear by the grate, listening to her talk to him. I couldn't hear the words. Just the sound of her voice, low and steady, telling him something, for a long time.
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