Alexander Seaborg would bring groceries and carry soiled and spoiled and recyclable things to curbside. A Cheng from next door would return the empty containers to his mother’s porch. The front yard still looked respectable. The old maples permitted little grass, and the periwinkle tended to itself. The backyard was overgrown with weeds and wiregrass, the Angkor Wat of Sherwood Avenue. The head of a stone woman peered over the growth. Farther back, the shrubbery enshrouded the old sheet-metal shed. Feral cats stalked this jungle. Rabbits and dandelions propagated, but neighbors balked at contacting the hermit-woman who lurked behind shuttered blinds and drawn curtains.

Alexander grew up serious, determined he would not be the son of the crazy woman and a fled father. He threw himself into the project after the Samson incident.

He returned home that day to find his mother crumpled and crying in a place where the music could not reach her, her sheets and songbooks scattered across the floor, a discordant symphony of spilled notes. He heard the story later from the neighbors. She had run out that morning, lavender bathrobe flapping like starling wings, jay-naked beneath, and wrestled the recycling bin from a stocky and thoroughly terrified man. “No! Don’t take it! Samson might be in there!”

Fifteen years earlier she’d accompanied a performance at Holy Trinity, a recital of Saint-Saëns’s Samson and Delilah. That morning an ad appeared in the local paper, Samson’s saucy soprano singing jazz at the Wyldridge Inn. For weeks afterwards, his mother searched for her copy of the music, which she could not find and never found again.

Blue-eyed Mrs. Cheng and her blonde bobbed hair greets him at the base of the shared drive. “We’re sorry about your mother.” He nods. “We hardly saw her, but we’ll miss her. Your mother was a sign of spring on Sherwood Avenue.”

“Oh?” He imagines she’s imagining Old Lady Seaborg, shrieking from the back porch.

“She’d slide open the windows when it got warm, and then we could hear her play piano. I loved hearing her play.”

Alexander feels his forehead furrow. “I see.” 

He enters the house and wonders if the old Kimball piano, engraved with leaves and acorns, can be salvaged and sold. It hasn’t been tuned in two decades. Musty music books sit on the shelves.  A framed poster promotes a concert his mother gave when she was twenty-one. He gazes through the fingerprint-stained glass of her stereo cabinet at her old vinyl records: Liszt and Chopin and Ralph Vaughan Williams. 

Which loss had been crueler for his mother: mind to unknowable demons or fingers to crippling arthritis?

He opens the blinds. Mrs. Cheng and her blonde bob have sauntered to the sidewalk and she’s shouting over a lawnmower’s howl to a man in a plaid flat cap, something about how they’ll all miss Mrs. Seaborg’s concerts. Sunlight illuminates the dust.

Alexander sits on the piano bench and folds his hands.