The Piano Six Men Carried Home

Mrs. Tilden at the fence

Mrs. Tilden, eighty-four, had watched the whole sale from a lawn chair at her fence next door with a thermos, and she did not wait to be asked.

“Red Ford pickup, flatbed trailer behind it,” she said. “He tied it down proper, with straps and a blanket. There was a name on the door. Hendricks something. It said welding.”

A name and the word welding was a thread, and my whole life I have been a person who pulls threads. I spent that afternoon at my kitchen table with a county phone book.

On the fourth call, a little after six, a woman answered in a dish towel voice, the kind that sounds like it has been wiped over a thousand dinners.

“Hendricks Welding and Repair, but Walt’s out in the shop and he won’t come in till he’s done. Is it about a job?”

“It’s about a piano.”

There was a pause. I heard a pot lid.

“Oh,” she said. “That. He’s been so pleased with himself. Why don’t you come out Sunday after dinner? He’ll want to show it off.”

Grandma, asking

I visited Grandma that evening at the care center on the edge of town. They had put her in a recliner by the window with a lap blanket, and she was in her blue cardigan, the one with the missing button.

She looked small. She had always seemed to me like a larger woman than she was, and this was the first time I had noticed her wrists.

“How’s the house?” she said.

I had practiced my face in the car, and I used it now. “Fine. I watered the geraniums.”

“They’re past, don’t you think? Ed always said bring them in by the tenth.”

“I’ll bring them in tomorrow.”

“Did Ingrid come by?”

“She’s working on the hall for the walker.” That was not a lie.

Grandma nodded slowly. Then she looked at her hands, at her knuckles, thick and spotted and square.

“I’ve been thinking about my piano,” she said.

My heart did something odd.

“That middle C sticks,” she said. “Humidity. I’ve been meaning to have Mr. Foss come out and look at it before it gets worse. Do you think you could find his number? It’s in the little book by the phone.”

“I’ll find it.”

“I don’t play so well anymore.” She said it plainly, with no self-pity at all. “But I do like to sit there. Is that foolish? In the morning, a little before the others are up.”

I put my hand over hers. I could not trust my voice for a few seconds.

“It’s not foolish, Grandma.”

“Ed used to say it was the only time of day I wasn’t talking.” She smiled. “He’d stand in the doorway with his coffee, and not make a sound.”

I understood then that I had not been the only one who knew.

I made up my mind in that chair. She had a pin in her hip and her blood pressure had been up all week, so I would not tell her. I would get the piano back, and she would never need to know that it had left.