The Piano Six Men Carried Home

A few wouldn’t, and he paid those more than they had paid. Nobody said a harsh word to him. They didn’t have to.

The recliner Grandpa Ed had died in came back last of all, with its four little dents. He carried it in alone and set it down in the exact spot, and he did not say anything to me either. He did not have to. I saw how he looked at the piano.

At the end of that week, Grandma asked Carl to carry her key back from town, and he did.

After that, the Wednesday supper had a new sign-up sheet in the fellowship hall with another woman’s name at the top, and the church directory passed to Mrs. Lund, who has kept it better than anyone expected. Ingrid stayed away from church for six Sundays. People noticed, and they were kind about it, and she knew they noticed.

I took no pleasure in that. I have never wished her harm. She loved Grandma in the only way she knew how, which was by acting first. I only hope that next time she asks.

Mr. Foss came out on Tuesday and took the front off the piano, and the felt hammers lay in their rows like small white teeth.

He eased the C, and tuned all eighty-eight keys, and said it was a good instrument, solid, better than most he saw. Carl paid him a hundred and fifty dollars out of his own pocket, and Grandma sat in her chair the whole time he worked, so that nobody could say it had been done behind her back.

The shower got built, and that was the part nobody expected. Gus told it around church as a need, not a scandal. By the third Sunday a box in the fellowship hall marked Ramona’s Shower held nine hundred dollars, Grant priced the tile at cost, and Larry, Otis, and Orin framed the stall in one weekend. Walt welded the grab bars and would not say what it cost.

On the first morning she used it, Grandma stood in the bathroom doorway in her blue robe and declared it the finest bathroom in Dunmore County. Then she asked me whether I had remembered to bring in the geraniums.

I had, by then.

Walt would not take a cent of my four hundred. It turned out he had bought Katie a keyboard with it anyway, and she brings it to Mrs. Foss’s on Thursdays, and plays the same hymn Grandma does, one note behind.

Last week, a little before five in the morning, I was staying over in the room at the top of the stairs. The window was open to the cold and the dark.

I woke to a hymn coming up through the floorboards. It was slow and soft, with the pedal down, for no one but the house.

I lay still and listened, and when the middle C stuck, I heard her stop and let it come back up and go on.

This time I did not feel I was hearing something I wasn’t supposed to know.

I stayed in the bed until the sun was up. Nobody said a word.