Dad returned to the lobby alone.
Mrs. Harlow was waiting beside the piano.
She had asked the employees to leave the immediate area.
The manager was nowhere nearby.
Dad approached her.
"You wanted to see me?"
She nodded.
"There's something I haven't told you."
Dad looked at her.
She turned toward the corridor leading to the ballroom.
"Come with me."
They walked slowly.
An employee offered to help her with her cane.
She declined.
Dad stayed beside her.
I wasn't there for their conversation.
But Dad later told me what happened.
The ballroom doors were still there.
The same doors through which my parents had entered on their wedding day.
The room had been renovated over the years.
The curtains had changed.
The furniture had changed.
The lighting had changed.
But the shape of the room remained familiar.
Mrs. Harlow stopped near the entrance.
"I remember your wedding."
Dad smiled.
"I remember it too."
She looked toward the far wall.
"You played for everyone."
"That was the plan."
"You were nervous."
Dad laughed.
"I was more nervous than Margaret."
Mrs. Harlow smiled.
Then her expression became serious.
She asked him whether he remembered the last evening he had played the melody in the lounge.
Dad nodded.
He remembered.
It had been in 1977.
Mrs. Harlow's husband had been ill.
He had spent much of that year in and out of the hospital.
On one particular evening, he had returned to the hotel.
He wanted to sit in the lounge.
He wanted to hear the song.
Dad had played it.
Mrs. Harlow and her husband had sat together near the windows.
They didn't talk much.
They simply listened.
A short time later, her husband died.
The song became painful for her.
She couldn't hear it without remembering that last evening.
So she asked the hotel to stop playing it.
And they did.
Dad had respected her wishes.
He hadn't played it in the lounge again.
Mrs. Harlow explained that she had kept the piano untouched partly because it reminded her of those years.
She had also wanted to preserve the instrument.
But the song was the real reason she had made such a strict rule.
Dad listened without interrupting.
Then he said something she later repeated to us.
"I wasn't trying to bring back a sad memory."
Mrs. Harlow looked at him.
"I know."
"I thought you might want to hear it again someday."
She looked down.
For several seconds, she said nothing.
Then she reached into her handbag.
She took out a small photograph.
The edges were worn.
The paper had turned slightly yellow.
She handed it to Dad.
It showed a younger man sitting beside the same piano.
A woman stood near him.
Dad recognized them immediately.
Mrs. Harlow and her husband.
He studied the photograph.
Then he noticed something written on the back.
A date.
1977\.
And a short handwritten note.
He read it quietly.
Mrs. Harlow explained that her husband had written it after one of those evenings in the lounge.
She had kept the photograph for nearly fifty years.
Dad handed it back carefully.
"Thank you for keeping it."
She smiled.
"I kept more than the photograph."
She looked toward the ballroom.
"I kept the memory of the people who were here."
Dad nodded.
Then she asked him something.
"Would you play it again sometime?"
He looked surprised.
"You said you couldn't bear hearing it."
"I know."
She took a breath.
"Perhaps I've been waiting until I could hear it without feeling that I was losing him all over again."
Dad looked toward the piano.
Then back at her.
"I can try."
Mrs. Harlow smiled.
It was the first time Dad had seen that expression on her face in decades.
Click here to continue reading: PART 12: The Hotel Manager Returned With an Apology, but Mrs. Harlow Was No Longer Interested in Hearing Promises From Someone Who Had Already Broken One
I Thought Our Parents Deserved One Perfect Anniversary, Until We Found Them Sitting Beside Their Suitcases in the Hotel Lobby
Part 11 of 20
