The Weight of Waiting
The music box sat on my dresser for thirty-seven years, silent as a secret I wasn’t ready to tell. It was pale blue with tiny painted roses, the kind of delicate thing that belonged in a little girl’s room. But I wasn’t a little girl anymore when Mama gave it to me, and I haven’t been one for a very long time.
I was sixteen that last summer, all sharp edges and wounded pride, convinced that nobody understood me, especially not her. Mama had been sick for months by then, though she tried to hide it behind rouge and forced smiles. The cancer was eating her from the inside out, but she kept pretending everything was normal, kept making my favorite cornbread and humming while she folded laundry.
I hated that she was pretending. I hated that she wouldn’t talk about what was happening. Most of all, I hated that she was leaving me.
The fight started over something stupid—it always does. I’d wanted to spend the night at my friend Sarah’s house, but Mama said no. She wanted me home, wanted us to have dinner together, maybe watch one of those old movies she loved on the little television in the living room.
“I never get to go anywhere!” I’d shouted, standing in the kitchen doorway with my arms crossed like armor. “You treat me like a baby!”
Mama looked up from the pot of soup she was stirring, her face tired but patient. “Lily, honey, I just thought—”
“I don’t care what you thought!” The words came out sharper than I’d meant them to. “I’m not spending another boring night in this house just because you don’t want to be alone!”
Something flickered across her face then—hurt, maybe, or fear. But she just nodded and turned back to the stove.
“All right,” she said quietly. “You can go to Sarah’s.”
I should have felt victorious. Instead, I felt hollow.
I grabbed my overnight bag and headed for the door, but stopped when I heard her call my name.
“Lily.”
I turned around, expecting her to change her mind, to tell me I had to stay after all.
Instead, she walked over to the shelf by the window and picked up the music box. Her hands shook slightly as she held it out to me.
“This was my mother’s,” she said. “And her mother’s before that. It’s been in our family for over a hundred years.”
I stared at it, not taking it from her hands. “Why are you giving this to me now?”
“Because,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper, “sometimes we don’t get to choose our timing. Sometimes we have to trust that the right moment will find us when we need it most.”
I wanted to ask her what she meant, but I was still angry, still hurt. So I took the music box without really looking at it and shoved it into my bag.
“Whatever,” I mumbled, and walked out the door.
That was the last conversation we ever had.
Mama died three days later while I was at Sarah’s house, watching movies and painting our nails and complaining about how unfair life was. I wasn’t there to hold her hand or tell her I loved her or say I was sorry for being such a difficult daughter.
I wasn’t there at all.
The guilt nearly killed me that first year. I carried it like a stone in my chest, heavy and sharp-edged, cutting me from the inside every time I thought about that music box sitting unopened in my room. I couldn’t bear to wind it up, couldn’t stand the thought of hearing whatever song it played. It felt too much like listening to Mama’s voice calling me home when I was already too late.
So I left it silent.
Years passed. I graduated high school, went to college, got a job at the local newspaper writing obituaries and wedding announcements. I moved into a small apartment above the bakery on Main Street, but I took that music box with me. It found a place on every dresser, every bookshelf, every surface I called mine.
People would ask about it sometimes—dates, friends, my landlady Mrs. Chen who brought me soup when I had the flu. “What a beautiful music box,” they’d say. “Does it play?”
“I don’t know,” I’d always answer. “It’s broken.”
But it wasn’t broken. I was.
I tried dating, of course. There was David, who sold insurance and laughed too loud at his own jokes. There was Marcus, who wrote poetry and wanted to save the world one protest song at a time. There was Rebecca, who taught kindergarten and had the kindest eyes I’d ever seen. Each relationship started with promise and ended with me pulling away, always finding some reason why it wouldn’t work, why I wasn’t ready, why the timing was wrong.
“You’re afraid of being happy,” Rebecca told me the night I broke up with her. “You’re punishing yourself for something, Lily, but I don’t know what.”
I knew what. But I couldn’t tell her that every time someone got close, I heard Mama’s voice reminding me that I was the kind of person who walked away when things got difficult. I was the kind of daughter who chose anger over love, who left when I should have stayed.
I was thirty-eight when I met James.
He was covering a story for the regional paper—some nonsense about a dispute over the town’s Christmas decorations. I was assigned to show him around, introduce him to the key players, help him get the quotes he needed.
I expected him to be like most of the out-of-town reporters who passed through our little Missouri town: condescending, impatient, eager to get his story and get back to somewhere more important. Instead, he was curious about everything. He asked genuine questions about our history, our people, our traditions. He laughed when Mrs. Henderson told him about the Great Pumpkin Controversy of 1987, and he took notes when old Mr. Garcia explained the significance of the hand-carved nativity scene that had been passed down through three generations of his family.
“You really care about this stuff,” I said as we walked back to his car that evening.
James looked surprised. “Don’t you?”
I thought about it. “I guess I do. I just haven’t met many people from outside who do.”
“Maybe you haven’t been looking in the right places.”
Something about the way he said it made me look at him more carefully. He had kind eyes, the color of coffee with cream, and when he smiled, it reached all the way to the corners. His hair was starting to go gray at the temples, and there were lines around his eyes that spoke of a life lived fully, with both laughter and sorrow.
“Are you staying in town tonight?” I asked before I could stop myself.
“I was planning to drive back to Kansas City,” he said. “But if you’re offering to show me more of the local culture…”
We had dinner at Murphy’s Diner, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone and the pie is always fresh. James ordered the meatloaf special and asked our waitress, Dolores, about her grandchildren. He listened to her stories about little league games and dance recitals with the same attention he’d given the mayor’s explanation of the municipal budget.
“You’re good at this,” I told him over coffee and apple pie.
“At what?”
“Making people feel like they matter.”
He was quiet for a moment, stirring cream into his coffee. “My mom always said that everyone has a story worth telling. You just have to be willing to listen.”
“What was her story?”
“She was a teacher in a small town not unlike this one. Taught third grade for forty-two years. She used to say that every child who walked into her classroom was carrying something—joy, sadness, hope, fear—and her job was to see all of it, not just the parts that were easy or convenient.”
“She sounds wonderful.”
“She was.” His voice grew soft. “She died two years ago. Cancer.”
Something twisted in my chest. “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you. The hardest part was watching her worry about leaving me alone. She kept saying she wished she could have met the woman I was going to marry, wished she could have held her grandchildren.” He looked up at me then, his eyes sad but peaceful. “I told her that when I found the right person, I’d know she was watching over us.”
I excused myself to the bathroom, not because I needed to use it, but because I was afraid I might cry. I stared at myself in the mirror under the harsh fluorescent lights, seeing a woman who had spent twenty-two years running from love because she was afraid of losing it.
When I came back to the table, James was paying the check.
“I should head back,” he said. “Early meeting tomorrow.”
I nodded, disappointed but not surprised. “It was nice meeting you.”
“Lily,” he said as we stood to leave, “would it be okay if I called you sometime? When I don’t have a deadline hanging over my head?”
That was the beginning.
James called the next week, and we talked for two hours about books and music and the strange beauty of small-town life. He called again a few days later, and then again. Soon we were talking every evening, sharing stories and dreams and fears in the safe darkness of long-distance phone calls.
He drove down to visit a month later, then again two weeks after that. Each time, he stayed a little longer, learned a little more about my life, my work, my carefully guarded heart.
“You’re different,” I told him one evening as we walked through the park where I used to play as a child.
“Different how?”
“You don’t push. Most people, when they want something from me, they push. They try to make me move faster than I’m ready to move.”
“Maybe they’re afraid of losing you.”
“Are you afraid of losing me?”
He stopped walking and turned to face me. “Every day. But I’m more afraid of rushing you into something you’re not ready for and losing you that way instead.”
I wanted to kiss him then, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. Because kissing him would mean admitting that I was falling in love, and falling in love would mean risking the kind of loss I’d spent my whole adult life avoiding.
So I smiled and changed the subject, and James let me, because that’s the kind of man he was.
Our relationship continued like that for months—slow, careful, full of unspoken promises and fears. James would visit every few weeks, sometimes staying for a weekend, sometimes just for an evening. We’d have dinner, walk around town, sit on my tiny balcony overlooking Main Street and talk until the sun came up.
He never pressured me for more than I was ready to give. He never asked why I sometimes went quiet when he talked about the future, why I changed the subject when he mentioned meeting my family, why I’d never invited him up to my apartment.
But I could see the questions in his eyes sometimes, the gentle confusion of a man who was ready for something I couldn’t seem to offer.
The breaking point came on a rainy Thursday in October.
James had driven down for the evening, planning to take me to dinner and then head back to Kansas City. But his car wouldn’t start when we came out of the restaurant, and the local mechanic had already closed for the day.
“There’s a motel on Highway 9,” I said, not meeting his eyes.
“Or,” he said carefully, “I could stay with you. On the couch, I mean. If that would be okay.”
I wanted to say yes. I wanted it so badly it hurt. But the thought of him in my space, seeing my things, maybe noticing the music box and asking about it—it felt like too much, too soon, too dangerous.
“The motel would be better,” I said.
Something shifted in his face then. Not anger, not hurt exactly, but a kind of resigned sadness.
“Lily,” he said quietly, “what are you afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid of anything.”
“Yes, you are. You’re terrified. And I don’t understand why.”
We were standing in the rain outside Murphy’s Diner, water dripping from the awning above us. The street was empty except for a few cars parked under the streetlights, their windshields steaming up in the humid air.
“I care about you,” James continued. “I think I’m falling in love with you. But I feel like I’m always standing at the edge of your life, never quite invited in.”
I wanted to tell him he was wrong, but he wasn’t. I wanted to explain about Mama, about the music box, about the weight of guilt I’d been carrying for twenty-two years. But the words stuck in my throat like swallowed glass.
“Maybe,” I said finally, “this isn’t working.”
James stared at me for a long moment. “Is that really what you want?”
No, I thought. What I want is to let you love me. What I want is to stop being afraid. What I want is to wind up that music box and listen to whatever song my mother left for me.
But I couldn’t say any of that. So I just nodded.
James drove to Kansas City that night in a rental car, leaving his broken-down sedan in Murphy’s parking lot like a metal monument to my cowardice. He called the next morning to let me know he’d made it home safely, and then he didn’t call again.
I told myself it was for the best. I told myself I’d saved us both from the inevitable heartbreak that comes with getting too close to someone. I told myself a lot of things, but none of them made the ache in my chest go away.
Two weeks later, Mrs. Chen knocked on my door with a casserole and a concerned expression.
“You look terrible, dear,” she said, settling herself at my kitchen table without being invited. “When’s the last time you ate a real meal?”
I couldn’t remember. Since James left, I’d been surviving on coffee and the occasional piece of toast, throwing myself into work with the kind of desperate intensity that fooled no one.
“I’m fine,” I said automatically.
“Mm-hmm.” Mrs. Chen looked around my apartment, taking in the stack of unwashed dishes, the pile of laundry I’d been ignoring, the general air of neglect that seemed to follow me everywhere lately. Her eyes stopped on the music box, sitting in its usual place on the dresser.
“That’s beautiful,” she said. “Family heirloom?”
“Something like that.”
“Does it play?”
The question I’d been answering the same way for twenty-two years. “It’s broken.”
Mrs. Chen got up and walked over to the dresser. She picked up the music box carefully, turning it over in her hands like she was examining a piece of art.
“Seems fine to me,” she said. “Just needs to be wound up.”
“Please don’t—”
But it was too late. Mrs. Chen had already turned the small brass key on the bottom of the box. The mechanism clicked to life, and suddenly my apartment was filled with music.
It was “Moon River”—Mama’s favorite song. She used to hum it while she cooked dinner, while she folded laundry, while she braided my hair before school. The melody was sweet and sad and achingly familiar, each note a memory I’d been too afraid to face.
I started crying before the song even finished.
Mrs. Chen set the music box down gently and came to sit beside me on the couch. She didn’t say anything, just handed me tissues and let me sob out twenty-two years of grief and guilt and regret.
When I finally stopped crying, she spoke.
“My husband died fifteen years ago,” she said quietly. “Heart attack. One day he was here, the next he was gone. I spent months wishing I could have one more conversation with him, one more chance to say all the things I never got to say.”
I wiped my eyes with a tissue. “Did the feeling ever go away?”
“The wishing? No. But I learned something important. The dead don’t need our apologies, Lily. They’re beyond all that. The living are the ones who need forgiveness—especially from ourselves.”
After Mrs. Chen left, I sat on my couch and listened to the music box play “Moon River” over and over again. Each time the song ended, I wound it up and let it play again, as if I were making up for twenty-two years of silence all at once.
And slowly, as the familiar melody filled my apartment, I started to remember things I’d forgotten. Not just the fight we’d had or the harsh words I’d spoken, but everything else. The way Mama used to wake me up with pancakes shaped like Mickey Mouse ears. The stories she told me about her own mother, a woman who’d raised six children during the Depression and never complained once. The nights when I had nightmares and she’d let me crawl into bed with her, stroking my hair until I fell back asleep.
The love. There had been so much love.
I called James the next morning.
“Lily?” He sounded surprised to hear from me, and maybe a little wary.
“I need to tell you something,” I said. “Can you come down? Or I could drive up there, if you prefer.”
“Are you okay?”
“I will be. I think I will be.”
He arrived that evening, looking tired but hopeful. I met him at the door and led him straight to the couch, where the music box sat open on the coffee table.
“This was my mother’s,” I said without preamble. “She gave it to me three days before she died, but I never opened it until yesterday. I was too afraid of what I might feel.”
James sat down beside me, close enough that I could smell his cologne, but he didn’t touch me. He just waited.
So I told him everything. About Mama’s cancer, about our last fight, about the twenty-two years I’d spent punishing myself for being a typical teenager who said things she didn’t mean. I told him about the guilt I’d carried, the relationships I’d sabotaged, the way I’d convinced myself that I didn’t deserve to be happy because I’d failed the person who mattered most.
“She died while I was at a sleepover,” I said, my voice breaking on the words. “I was painting my nails and complaining about my life while my mother was dying alone.”
“Oh, Lily.” James reached for my hand then, and I let him take it. “You were sixteen. You couldn’t have known.”
“But I should have been there. I should have stayed home that night, should have spent those last days with her instead of being angry about stupid things that didn’t matter.”
“Maybe,” he said gently. “But you can’t change what happened. You can only decide what to do with the time you have left.”
I looked at him then—really looked at him. His kind eyes, his patient smile, the way he was willing to sit with my pain without trying to fix it or rush me through it.
“I’m afraid,” I admitted. “I’m afraid that if I let myself love you, something will happen to you too. I’m afraid that I’ll lose you the way I lost her, and I won’t survive it this time.”
“You might lose me,” James said. “I might lose you. That’s the risk we take when we love someone. But Lily, the alternative is losing each other right now, on purpose, and that seems like a much bigger tragedy.”
He was right, of course. I’d been so focused on protecting myself from potential loss that I’d guaranteed actual loss. I’d been so afraid of being hurt that I’d been hurting myself for years.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I whispered. “I don’t know how to let someone love me.”
“We’ll figure it out together,” James said. “One day at a time.”
That night, James stayed over for the first time. Not because his car broke down or because he missed the last flight, but because I asked him to. We didn’t make love—we weren’t ready for that yet—but we fell asleep holding hands while the music box played “Moon River” on repeat.
I dreamed about Mama that night for the first time in years. In the dream, she was sitting in her favorite chair in our old living room, looking exactly as she had before the cancer took her—vibrant and laughing and whole. She was holding the music box in her lap, winding it up and letting it play.
“You opened it,” she said, smiling at me.
“I was afraid to,” I replied.
“I know, sweetheart. But you did it anyway. That’s what courage is—being afraid and doing it anyway.”
“I miss you so much, Mama.”
“I miss you too. But I’m not really gone, you know. I’m in every song that makes you think of home. I’m in every act of kindness you show to someone who needs it. I’m in every moment when you choose love over fear.”
I started to cry in the dream, and Mama stood up and walked over to me. She cupped my face in her hands the way she used to when I was little and scared.
“Stop carrying my death around like a punishment,” she said firmly. “I didn’t die to teach you a lesson about loss. I died because I was sick, and that had nothing to do with you. But I lived to teach you about love, and you’ve forgotten that lesson.”
“How do I remember?”
“By living,” she said simply. “By loving that good man who’s sleeping beside you. By letting yourself be happy without feeling guilty about it. By understanding that the best way to honor my memory is to build a life full of the same kind of love I tried to give you.”
I woke up with tears on my cheeks but peace in my heart. James was still asleep beside me, his breathing steady and calm. The music box had finally wound down, leaving the room in gentle silence.
I got up quietly and walked to the window. The sun was just beginning to rise over Main Street, painting the sky in soft shades of pink and gold. It was going to be a beautiful day.
“Lily?” James’s voice was soft behind me.
I turned around. He was sitting up in bed, his hair rumpled from sleep, looking at me with concern.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I said, and meant it. “I think I finally am.”
James and I were married eight months later in the little church where Mama used to take me for Sunday services. It was a small ceremony—just a few close friends, Mrs. Chen, and James’s family from Kansas City. But it felt full, somehow, like love was taking up all the extra space.
I carried Mama’s music box down the aisle with my bouquet. At the reception, I wound it up and let “Moon River” play while James and I had our first dance as husband and wife. People said it was unconventional, but it felt perfect to me. Like Mama was there, dancing with us, blessing our new beginning.
We honeymooned in Ireland, where James had always wanted to go, and we walked through green fields that stretched on forever under gray skies that made everything look like a painting. On our last night there, we sat in a pub listening to traditional music, and when the fiddle player struck up “Moon River,” James took my hand and smiled.
“She’s everywhere, isn’t she?” he said.
“Yeah,” I replied. “She is.”
We moved into a house on the outskirts of town—nothing fancy, just a little two-bedroom place with a garden and a front porch swing. The music box found a place of honor on our bedroom dresser, and I wound it up every morning while I got ready for work. The song had become a kind of prayer, a daily reminder to choose love over fear, presence over regret, joy over guilt.
Two years after our wedding, I found out I was pregnant.
I was terrified, of course. The old fears came rushing back—what if something went wrong? What if I lost the baby the way I’d lost Mama? What if I wasn’t strong enough to handle that kind of loss again?
But James was patient with my panic, and Dr. Martinez was understanding about my need for extra checkups and reassurance. And somehow, miracle of miracles, everything went right. Our daughter, Luna, was born on a snowy February morning, healthy and loud and absolutely perfect.
When I held her for the first time, I felt Mama’s presence so strongly it was like she was standing right beside the hospital bed. I could almost hear her voice saying, “Look at that beautiful granddaughter of mine.”
Luna is five now, and she loves the music box as much as I do. She knows it was her great-grandmother’s, and that it plays a special song just for our family. Sometimes, when she’s had a bad day or a nightmare, I’ll wind it up and we’ll listen to “Moon River” together until she falls asleep.
“Tell me about Great-Grandma Mama,” she always asks.
So I do. I tell her about the woman who raised me with more love than I knew what to do with, who taught me that courage isn’t the absence of fear but the decision to act in spite of it. I tell her about pancakes shaped like Mickey Mouse ears and bedtime stories and the way Mama’s voice could make any song sound like a lullaby.
I tell her about the fight we had and the words I said that I can never take back. But I also tell her about forgiveness—how sometimes the hardest person to forgive is yourself, and how love is stronger than regret if you let it be.
“Do you miss her?” Luna asks.
“Every day,” I say. “But missing someone doesn’t have to hurt forever. Sometimes it can feel like love instead.”
Last week, Luna asked if she could have the music box when she grows up.
“It’s a family tradition,” she said seriously. “The music box gets passed down to the daughters.”
“That’s right,” I told her. “But you have to promise me something.”
“What?”
“You have to promise that when I give it to you, you’ll open it right away. Don’t wait for the perfect moment or the right time. Just open it and let it play.”
She looked at me with James’s thoughtful eyes and nodded solemnly. “I promise, Mama.”
I believe she will keep that promise. Because Luna is growing up understanding something it took me thirty-seven years to learn: that love isn’t fragile, and music boxes aren’t meant to stay silent, and sometimes the right moment is simply the moment when you’re brave enough to reach for it.
The music box still sits on my dresser, and I still wind it up every morning. But now, instead of a reminder of loss, “Moon River” has become a celebration of everything I almost let fear take away from me. It’s the soundtrack to Luna’s bedtime routine and James’s weekend cooking sessions and the thousand small, perfect moments that make up our life together.
It’s the sound of love choosing to stay, even when loss tries to convince you to leave.
And every time I hear those familiar notes, I swear I can hear Mama humming along, her voice joining the melody like an echo of everything that matters most: family, forgiveness, and the courage to open your heart when the moment is finally right.
THE END
