The Piano Six Men Carried Home

“Grandma plays it.”

“When?” She said it gently, the way you speak to a child who has said something sweet and untrue. “I’m here every Sunday. I have never once heard her touch it.”

That was true. I knew it was true, and I also knew why, and I stood there with my mouth open and could not figure out how to say it to a woman holding a cigar box full of my grandmother’s life.

So I will say it here.

When I was a girl, I spent every summer at this house. I slept in the little room at the top of the stairs, with the window cracked for the breeze, and every morning before five, before anybody else was up, I woke to a hymn coming up through the floorboards.

It was always one hymn. It was played slowly and very softly, with the soft pedal down, so that it would not carry past the walls.

I never told her I heard it. It felt like something I was not supposed to know. Even after Grandpa Ed died, four winters ago, I would come to stay a weekend and wake in the dark to the same few bars, and I would lie still and listen.

Nobody played that piano for company. She played it for the house, and for him.

Ingrid could not have known. Ingrid slept in her own bed in town.

The only call I could make

I want to be plain about why I did not do the obvious thing.

I could have called the sheriff. In Dunmore County that means a deputy named Delbert who coached my cousin’s softball team, and he would have come and stood in the yard and looked at a woman who had been given a key to the house and told to get it ready for an old woman’s return.

Grandma had said that, in front of me, in the rehab hallway. “Ingrid, you go ahead and tidy up for me, dear. Whatever you need to.”

Tidy up. She had never once said sell.

But Ingrid had her blessing and her key and a cigar box of money, and the whole thing would have turned into a family matter the minute a deputy’s car came up the drive. It would have become the kind of story that gets told at the funeral lunch for twenty years.

And the money was already spent, in the sense that matters. A man had paid for the piano and had gone home with it. A piano does not come back because someone makes a phone call. It comes back when you find the man.

I asked one more question, quietly. “Does Uncle Carl know?”

“He’s hauling milo to Nebraska all week. I didn’t want to bother him with a little thing.” Ingrid put the lid on the cigar box. “He’ll be glad, honestly. We’ll have enough for the shower.”

I said, “I’ll water her geraniums,” and I did, with a coffee can, while strangers carried away my grandmother’s roasting pans.