Chapter 48

“I did what I could.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“Why do you think I never gave you a hard time about giving Tom your cast-off cars?”

“I never gave it a lot of thought,” she said.

“And,” he continued, “who do you think paid to have that big mother of a piano shipped from Charlotte to Jacksonville? You don’t want to know how much that cost. My grandmother didn’t have that kind of loose change lying about.”

“Pop,” Tom said, “I went to see her not too long after the piano arrived. She sort of led me to believe that she’d paid for it.”

“That’s what I told her to do. By the way, she was genuinely touched that you flew up there to thank her in person.”

“I flew home from a concert in Atlanta by way of Charlotte. It was the least I could do after such a generous gift.

“I didn’t know any of this,” Mrs. Foster said, “and I think you owe your son an apology.”