The Piano on the Porch in the Rain

The men of Thursday morning

Every Thursday at six in the morning, eight or nine men meet in the fellowship hall of our church with a pot of coffee and a box of long johns from the Casey’s. They read a chapter, and they argue about it, and then they go to work. My father had gone for twenty years. Jeff went when he was not on the road.

Hal Pettit had led that group longer than anybody could remember. He was seventy-four. He farmed corn and beans on the blacktop north of town until his knees gave out, and now his son ran the ground and Hal ran the Thursday group and the church’s lawn mower.

He answered on the fourth ring. I could hear the television.

“Hal, this is Megan Strand. Dennis’s girl.”

“Megan.” The television went off. “How’s your dad?”

“He’s holding on. Hal, I need help, and I don’t know who else to call.”

I told him. I tried to keep my voice level. I told him about the sign and the rain and the three hundred dollars, and I told him I did not want a fight, I only wanted it out of the rain before it was ruined.

He was quiet for a second. Then he asked me two questions.

“Is it a full upright or one of those little spinets?”

“Full upright. A Kimball. Nineteen fifty-eight.”

“Does she want it gone, or does she just want it out of the living room?”

“She wants it gone.”

“Then it’s not stealing to take it off her hands,” Hal said. “Give me an hour. Don’t stand out there in the rain. Go sit with your girl.”

While we waited

I did not go home. I parked across the street in front of the Hendersons’ and sat with the engine running and the heater on low.

Lily asked me how Grandma Karen got the piano. She had heard it before, but she wanted it again, and I wanted to tell it.

My mother bought it in 1979 at a farm sale south of Bushnell. She was twenty-six. She paid one hundred and forty dollars for it, which she had saved from selling eggs at the end of the lane for most of a year.

My father borrowed a hay wagon and three of his buddies to bring it home, and they dropped one corner coming up these same porch steps, and there was still a dent in the left leg from it.

She played it every evening after the supper dishes. She was not a great pianist. She was a good one, the kind who plays the same twenty hymns until they wear a groove in the house.

She taught me at four years old, on her lap, with her hands over mine. “In the Garden” was her favorite. She played it the night before every one of my piano recitals, and she played it the morning I got married, and the last time she played it was two weeks before she died.

That was fourteen years ago this past March.

After she was gone, Dad could not stand the quiet. He had never played a note in his life. That summer he taught himself “In the Garden” with one finger, and then two, and then with both hands in a slow, stiff way, and he played it most nights before bed. I used to hear it through the phone when I called.

“Did Grandpa play it for Renee?” Lily asked.

“I don’t know, honey,” I said. “I suppose he did.”

At seven thirty, with the sky going dark purple behind the elevator, headlights came around the corner by the Methodist parsonage.