The Piano That Paid for College

She sat down on the bench and lifted the fallboard and played a scale, then a few bars of something bright that I didn’t know. She listened with her head tipped to the side like a woman hearing a baby breathing in the next room.

“It’s been well cared for,” she said. “Somebody’s been tuning it.”

“Every fall.”

“It shows.” She closed the fallboard gently. “I can pay eight thousand. I’ll have it checked over by my technician, but I can see what it is. I’ll pay the movers myself.”

Eight thousand dollars. I had told myself on the drive home from work that I would take anything over six. I should have been relieved. Instead I felt like I was signing something away that I would never get back, which I was.

“Are you sure?” Nancy asked. She was watching my face. “You don’t have to decide today. I’ve waited two years for the right piano. I can wait a little more.”

“I’m sure,” I said, before I could say anything else.

“May I ask what it’s for?”

So I told her. Not all of it. Just that Celia’s boy was going to college in the fall, and there wasn’t enough, and Celia would have wanted her piano to carry him there.

Nancy didn’t say anything for a minute. Then she nodded once, and she took her checkbook out of her purse and wrote it right there on the lid of the piano, and she tore it out and handed it to me.

“Would you like me to play something before I go?” she asked. “Something of hers?”

“No,” I said. “Not yet. I don’t think I could stand it.”

She understood. She put her hand on my arm on her way to the door, and that was all.

The movers came the following Tuesday at nine in the morning. Two young men from Peoria took the legs off that baby grand, turned it on its side and strapped it to a piano board like a patient on a stretcher. I watched the whole thing from the kitchen doorway. I thought I owed her that much.

Nancy had asked if I wanted to keep the bench. I said no, it went with the piano. Celia’s sheet music was still inside it, and I couldn’t bear to look through it, and I couldn’t bear to throw it away either.

When the truck pulled out, I went back into the living room. The corner by the window was empty for the first time in seventeen years. There were three deep dents in the carpet where the casters had sat, and a lighter square of carpet where the sun had never reached.

I knelt down and put my fingers in one of the dents. And then I sat on the floor in my work clothes and cried until I had to call the school and tell them I would be in after lunch.

I did not tell Myron. I did not tell Rowan. I took Nancy’s check to the bank in Eureka and had them cut a cashier’s check for eight thousand dollars made out to Rowan Wexler, and I put it in a white envelope in my top dresser drawer, under my good slips, and I waited for graduation.

Steve asked me once, around the middle of May, whether I was going to tell Myron before the day.

“No,” I said.

“He’s going to find out right there in front of everybody.”