The Piano Six Men Carried Home

The empty driveway

Ingrid’s gray Buick did not come up the drive that afternoon.

I had half expected it. I had been braced for her to stop at the bottom of the steps in her Sunday coat and look past me at the open door. Four o’clock came, and then five. The only car that turned in was Mrs. Tilden’s grandson, delivering a pie she had baked for the occasion, with a note that said Welcome Home in a hand like a schoolteacher’s.

Walt stayed until the last strap was coiled. He stood by his flatbed with his cap in his hand, looking up at the porch the way a man looks at a job he is proud of.

“Katie wanted to come,” he said. “I told her tomorrow’s not for us.”

“She can come anytime.”

“I’ll tell her you said so.” He put the cap back on. “You tell your grandmother the C sticks.”

“I will.”

“Ten times,” he said, and drove home.

I sat on the porch swing until it got dark, with the envelope of what was left of my truck money in my lap, listening to the old house settle. I thought about Ingrid, and I was not angry. I was tired in a way I had not known a person could be.

Saturday

Saturday was warm for October, seventy degrees by ten o’clock, with a thin high haze that turned the sun to a coin.

The care center van pulled into the yard at a quarter past, and the aide, a kind young woman named Celeste, lowered the lift. Grandma came down it in a wheelchair with her purse in her lap and a paper cup of lemonade in her hand.

She looked at the farmhouse. She looked at the porch, the swing, the geraniums I had carried in and then carried back out for the day because I couldn’t stand the empty hooks.

“My, it’s good to see it,” she said.

Celeste walked beside me up the ramp Otis had built Thursday night, and said quietly, “Your aunt came by the center last week. She asked the therapist a lot of questions about the bathroom.”

“What kind of questions?”

“About the tub. The sides are high, and Mrs. Krueger can’t lift her leg over yet. The therapist told her that without a walk-in shower, she couldn’t bathe at home.” Celeste shrugged. “Your aunt wrote the price on the back of her hand.”

I stopped on the ramp for a second.

I did not say anything, but I understood then what the cigar box had been for. It did not make Ingrid right. It made her a woman who could do a hundred good things and could not stop for one question.

“Who’s here?” Grandma said.

She had seen the trucks.

They were parked along the county road, on both sides, nose to tail, down past Mrs. Tilden’s fence. Gus’s white Chevy. Grant’s. Orin’s. Otis’s. Larry’s. Floyd’s old Buick with the cane lying across the back seat. Walt’s red Ford, with Tracy in the cab and a little girl with a ponytail leaning out the window.