The Page the Landlord Never Read
“I don’t want to be a case,” Walt said quietly. “I have lived in this town for 41 years. I tuned the piano at First Methodist the week after the fire. I don’t want to be the man who sued his landlord. I want to be the man who tunes pianos. You understand?”
“Give me until Saturday,” I said.
“What’s Saturday?”
I picked up the pink paper again and found the line I had passed over the first time. “Mr. Brandt says here he’ll be doing a full interior walk-through of all four units on Saturday at 10. He’s coming back.”
“Then he can see the dog again.”
“He can see a good deal more than that,” I said.
I should tell you about my brother, since the man with the clipboard never asked.
Walt Meeks was a lineman’s helper at 30 when a disease with a long Latin name began taking his sight, the sides first, then the dark, then the middle. His wife could not stand the waiting and left the spring it got bad. It was the piano that saved him. Our mother had made us both take lessons in the front room of the farmhouse, and Walt, the boy who never wanted to practice, turned out to have an ear that could hear a half-step of wrongness through two walls. The state sent a man to show him how to tune.
Now, 34 years later, he tuned the pianos at 9 churches, the high school auditorium, the Legion hall, and the old upright in the back of the Dairy Barn that nobody had asked him to touch but that he tuned every Christmas anyway, on the house. When Tina Okerlund’s husband Morris died, Walt came to the funeral home before anyone had arrived and played the old hymns on a piano that had sat out of tune for 6 years, and nobody but Tina knew he had stayed up the night before putting it right.
He had walked the same route to town every morning for 14 years: out the front door, left on Elm, 212 steps to the corner by the school, across to Second Street, past Virgil Dillard’s barber shop, past the Okerlund bakery, past the library, around the bench where old Lowell Pickett sat all day with his hat on his knee. Bishop had walked it with him for 9 of those 14 years. Before Bishop there had been a dog named Duke. Before Duke, there had been a white cane and a great deal of fear.
I knew that route the way I know the Lord’s Prayer. And I knew something else, which the landlord did not, and which I turned over and over in my mind that night sitting at my own table with the lease in front of me.
I knew who walked it with him.
The lease was a long one. Walt had signed it in October, when the management company sent every tenant a “tenant update packet.” It was the first Walt had signed in 14 years, because Mr. Zimmerman, the old landlord, had never once asked for another. The old man had let Walt stay on a handshake after the first year, and then on nothing at all. Mr. Zimmerman had moved to Arizona for his lungs. He had sold the building to a company, and the company had sold it to Todd Brandt.