I crossed the lawn with my old trumpet case under my arm, my heart pounding like a nervous teenager. Theo opened the door in his pajamas, holding two drumsticks, and he grinned so wide that I felt ashamed of every sharp word I had written. Inside, in a bright living room, Dolores sat by the window with a blanket on her knees. Her hair was white and thin, but her eyes were the same warm brown I remembered from a stage forty-eight years ago.

Dolores looked at me for a long time. She did not say my name. But when Theo sat at his small drum kit and tapped out the opening beat of our old closing number, her fingers began to move on the blanket. I lifted the trumpet and played the first line, rusty and cracked. Dolores’s eyes widened. Then she smiled, and she began to hum, softly, the melody she had sung every Saturday night for six years.

Dolores’s daughter, Marisol, came out of the kitchen with tears running down her face. She told me they had moved here to be near a care clinic, and that nothing had reached her mother in two years except that rhythm. Theo had found the record in a box and practiced every dawn, because mornings were when his grandmother woke confused. I apologized to all three of them, and Marisol only laughed through her tears and said she was grateful for the noise.

From the next morning on, I opened my window at six, and Theo and I played together across the fence, a boy on drums and an old man on trumpet, while Dolores hummed on her porch. The neighbors came to listen, and soon the whole lane was gathering at dawn with coffee. We played at the church fair that spring. Dolores sang one line, and the whole crowd went quiet. I have never again written a complaint, only a thank you note, which I left in their mailbox.