Ingrid was counting singles into a cigar box when I pulled into Grandma’s yard that Saturday morning, and I knew before I got out of the car that something was wrong with the front of the house.
The lawn looked like a church rummage sale had been dropped on it. Folding tables ran from the porch to the mailbox, and a dozen strangers were turning over my grandmother’s things like they were produce.
I had driven out to water the geraniums on her porch. It was the second Saturday in October, bright and cool, and the maples along the county road had just begun to turn.
Ingrid is my Uncle Carl’s wife. She is fifty-eight, and she has been in our family for thirty-one years, long enough that nobody thinks of her as an in-law anymore. She keeps the church directory. She brings a casserole to Grandma’s house every Sunday after service.
Through the screen door, across the front room, I could see the wall where the piano belonged. The wallpaper there was a different color from the rest, a pale yellow rectangle, the shape of something that had stood in the same place for sixty years and was not standing there now.
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The front room was bare. The rugs were gone, and the lamp tables, and the plant stands. The recliner Grandpa Ed had died in was gone too, with four little dents in the carpet where it had been.
And in the corner, nothing. Just four clean squares of floor where the casters had sat.
I came back out and stood at the card table.
“Where’s the piano, Ingrid?”
She did not stop counting. “Oh, that. It sold first thing. Eight o’clock, before I even had the tables up.”
“Sold.”
“Seventy-five dollars.” She said it brightly, like she was proud of the price. “I only put the tag on it Friday night. It was blocking the hall, Hannah. You know it was. Where was the walker going to go?”
I looked at her hands. She was still smoothing singles, one by one, all faces up.
I should say what I felt, because later it matters. I did not feel anger. Anger comes with heat, and what I felt was cold, as if somebody had opened a freezer door inside my chest.
My grandmother, Ramona Krueger, is eighty-six years old. She bought that upright piano in 1962 with a winter of egg money, and she carried the money to Salina in a Folgers can, because she did not trust a bank to hold it while she decided.
She played it at her own anniversary dinners in the church basement. She played it for my mother’s baptism. She played it for her husband’s funeral lunch, with her back straight and her hands steady, and she did not miss a note.
She had been in rehab for nineteen days. She had fallen on the back step in September, carrying scraps out to the barn cats, and the surgeon in Salina had put a pin in her left hip.
She was coming home the following Saturday.
“Who bought it?” I said.
“Some man with a truck and a trailer. I didn’t ask his name, I just took the cash.” Ingrid finally looked up. “Honey, I know what you’re thinking. But nobody has played that piano in years.”