The Piano on the Porch in the Rain

Why I did not make the obvious phone call

I know what some people would have done. I have heard women say it in the church kitchen a hundred times about a hundred smaller things. Call the police. Call a lawyer. Go in there and tell her what’s what.

But it was my father’s house. It had been his house since 1977, and when Mom died it stayed his, and when he married Renee eleven years ago it became hers too. The piano was in it. Whatever I thought about that piano, a sheriff’s deputy was not going to stand on that porch and tell my father’s wife what she could do with the furniture in her own home.

And my father could not tell anybody anything. He had gone down in the garden four days before, on a Wednesday, with a hoe in his hand. The stroke took most of his right side and most of his words. He could squeeze with his left hand. He could say yes and no, and sometimes my name. That was all.

The neurologist had sat with me in the hallway and told me plainly. The next two weeks mattered more than any weeks of his life. Keep him calm. Keep him rested. Do not bring trouble into that room.

So I could not ask Dad. And I would not carry this to him. Not while he was lying there learning how to hold a spoon again.

I went down the steps and sat in the car with the glasses and the slippers and the wet sheet of music in my lap. Lily took out one earbud.

“Mom? Why is Grandma Karen’s piano outside?”

“Because Renee doesn’t want it anymore.”

Lily looked at it through the windshield wipers for a while. She had taken lessons on that piano every Thursday since she was six. She was twelve now, all legs and opinions, and she did not cry easily.

“It’s going to get ruined,” she said.

“I know, honey.”

“Can’t we just take it?”

“It weighs about five hundred pounds,” I said. “We can’t lift one end of it.”

I called my husband first. Jeff drives for the grain co-op, and that week he was hauling corn east to a terminal in Indiana. He picked up on the second ring, and I could hear the road behind him.

I told him. He did not say anything for a while, and I could picture him with both hands on the wheel.

“She can’t do that,” he said finally.

“She can, though. It’s her house.”

He breathed out. “I’m six hours away, Meg. I’m sorry. I can’t get there tonight.” Then he said, “Call Hal.”

“Hal Pettit? It’s Sunday night.”

“Call Hal,” Jeff said. “That’s what those men are for. Call him and tell him exactly what you told me.”