For a while, I thought the music had stopped because Dad was too sad to play.

At nine years old, that explanation made sense to me.

Mom had been the person who made everything feel warm, even on days when we had almost nothing.

Without her, the house felt different. The curtains stayed closed longer in the mornings.

Dinner became something Dad heated rather than cooked. The old radio on the kitchen counter gathered dust.

His guitar remained propped against the living room wall for almost three months. I remember counting the days between the times he touche d it.

At first, I would sit beside the instrument and wait for him to notice.  Sometimes I ran my fingers lightly across the strings, hoping the sound might remind him of the evenings when Mom stood in the kitchen singing.

One afternoon, I finally asked him to play. “Remember the song Mom liked?” I said.

Dad was sitting at the table, looking through a pile of envelopes. “Which one?”

“The one about the train. You played it when she made pancakes.”

He stopped moving the papers. For a moment, I thought he was remembering something good.

Then he pushed his chair away from the table.