The Piano That Paid for College

Steve has worked at the Caterpillar plant in East Peoria for twenty-eight years. The bills get paid and there is not much left over. The furnace had gone out in February. We had a little over two thousand dollars in savings and a retirement account we could not touch without paying through the nose.

“Two thousand doesn’t do it,” Steve said. “It’s a nice gesture. It doesn’t do it.”

“I know.”

“You could ask him again.”

“He told me to stay out of it. Twice.” I turned my coffee cup around on the table. “And I can’t keep putting Rowan in the middle. He already thinks he’s the extra one.”

Steve didn’t say anything for a while. Steve is a man who thinks with his hands, and he was rubbing his thumb over a nick in the table where our son had dropped a hammer when he was seven. Then he looked over my shoulder, through the doorway, into the living room.

I didn’t have to turn around to know what he was looking at.

“No,” I said.

“I didn’t say a word.”

“You were thinking it.”

“I was thinking,” Steve said carefully, “that it’s been sitting in that corner for seventeen years and nobody has played it since the day it came in the house.”

I went in there after he went to bed. I turned on the lamp by the window and took the lace runner off the lid and folded it. I lifted the fallboard over the keys, which I had not done since the tuner came in October.

The keys were yellowed like old teeth. Some of the low ones had worn smooth where Celia’s left hand used to sit. I touched middle C, just barely, and the note came out of that piano so clear and so sad that I had to put my hand over my mouth.

I sat on her bench a long time. I thought about her coffee can of wedding money, and how she used to say she would put that boy through any school in the country if she had to teach lessons until she was ninety.

She didn’t get to. She didn’t get to do any of it. And her piano was sitting in my living room getting dusted every Saturday while her son priced loans on a library computer.

I closed the fallboard. I put the lace runner back. And in the morning I called the music store in Bloomington and asked what a used Yamaha baby grand was worth.

The man on the phone said it depended on the condition, but somewhere between five and twelve thousand dollars, and he said a woman in my own town had been asking around for one for her studio.

Her name was Nancy Albrecht. She taught piano out of a big white farmhouse on the north end of Eureka, and half the children in the grade school had sat on her bench. She was about sixty-five, a widow, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and the calm of a woman who has heard ten thousand wrong notes.

She came over on a Thursday afternoon after her last lesson. She stood in my living room in her cardigan and looked at the piano for a long time before she touched it.

“This was Celia’s,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“You knew her?”

“Everybody who played knew her. She subbed for me one summer when I had my gallbladder out. The children wouldn’t stop talking about her.” Nancy put her hand flat on the lid. “I’m sorry, Jana. I didn’t know this was the one you were selling.”

“It has to go to somebody who’ll play it.”