So he did it properly.
He didn’t have a speech ready. He’d had one ready, I learned later, with a plaque and a cake in the fellowship hall and a nice card signed by the church council. He set all of it aside.
He stood beside the organ, with his hand on the edge of the bench, and he told the congregation the truth.
He told them about his grandmother. About being fifteen and walking out of this sanctuary in the middle of a hymn because he couldn’t breathe. About how that hymn had followed him down the hallway and out the door and, he said, into seminary, though he had never once in fourteen years connected it to a real person with real hands sitting on a real bench.
“I thought it was just music,” he said. “I thought it came from nowhere. That’s the most foolish thing I’ve ever said out loud, and I’ve preached some foolish sermons.”
People laughed a little. It loosened something in the room.
“Five days ago, I told Mrs. Hoyt that we were moving in a younger direction. I said the organ felt dated.”
He looked out at them.
“I’d like to take that back. All of it. If she’ll let me.”
He turned to my mother.
“Mrs. Hoyt. Would you stay?”
My mother didn’t answer right away.
She looked at the organ. She looked at the stained glass lamb over the front doors. She looked at the people still standing, and I think she was finding each one of them in her notebooks.
“I’ll stay,” she said, “on one condition.”
“Anything.”
“You keep your band.”
He blinked. “What?”
“Those two children on the drums and the keyboard. They’re good. The girl on the keyboard has a nice touch, and she’s afraid of it. You keep them.” She stood up from the bench. It took her a second. I started down the side aisle toward her, and she waved me back. “And on the second Sunday of every month, you send that girl to me on Saturday morning, and I’ll teach her the organ.”
“Mrs. Hoyt—”
“I’m eighty-one years old, Pastor. I’m not going to play forever. Somebody has to learn how to hold the last chord a beat too long. It might as well be her.”
The girl on the keyboard was sixteen. Her name was Ava Pederson. She was standing beside the drum kit with her hands pressed to her face.
My mother looked at her.
“Saturday at nine,” Mom said. “Bring a pencil.”
Ava nodded so hard her ponytail swung.
And then, finally, the room sat down.
Pastor Whitfield gave the benediction. I don’t remember a word of it. Then my mother turned back around on the bench and played the postlude, the same Bach she has played as a postlude for as long as I’ve been alive, and nobody left. Not one person got up to leave until the last note was done.
Then they came forward.
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