But she played every verse. And somewhere in the second one, from out in the yard, a man’s voice came in. It was Gus, low and a little flat, and then Orin on the other side of him.
By the third verse, the whole lawn was singing. Forty people, maybe more, on the grass in their good shoes, with the doors open and the sun coming through the haze. Katie Hendricks stood at the fence next to her grandfather, singing every word with her mouth wide open and her missing tooth showing.
Mrs. Tilden sang from her lawn chair with the thermos in her lap. Floyd sang with his hand flat on the piano’s side, as if he could feel it in the wood.
Grandma played the third verse with her eyes closed, and the whole house seemed to lean in to listen.
When the last chord faded, she took her hands off the keys and laid them in her lap.
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Nobody spoke. Then Grandma turned on the bench and looked out through the screen door at the crowd, at six men in ball caps standing in front of their trucks.
“Well,” she said. “That’s the first time that old thing has ever been played for company.”
Somebody laughed, and then everybody did.
“Who carried it?” she said.
Gus took off his cap. “Ramona, I’d say that was a church matter.”
“Who carried it?”
“Six of us,” Floyd said, “and me for three steps.”
“Hannah found the man,” Walt called from the fence. “The rest of us just lifted.”
Grandma looked at me for a long moment, with her hand resting on the keys and her eyes very bright.
“You never told me you heard it,” she said quietly. “All those summers.”
“No, ma’am.”
“I knew you did.” She patted the bench beside her. “The floorboards in that room are thin. I always meant to ask you what you thought.”
I sat down, and she showed me the first four bars of the bass line, and out in the yard somebody started pouring coffee.
What the town saw
I would like to tell you everything ended that afternoon, and it did not. It ended the way these things do, in small steady pieces over weeks.
Ingrid did not come to the homecoming. Nobody asked where she was. In a county that size, the empty place she left was as plain as the pale rectangle on the wall had been.
Uncle Carl got home from Nebraska on Sunday night. I was not there. I have the story from Gus’s wife, who had it from Carl himself, and it is short.
He pulled into his own driveway at nine at night and found a cigar box on the kitchen table with a legal pad beside it and a list of buyers in his wife’s handwriting. He read the list twice. Then he sat in his truck a long time before he went inside.
Monday morning he was in Mrs. Tilden’s yard at seven, hat in his hand, asking for the lamp tables back.
She gave them back for nothing.
It took him eleven days to work down that list. He drove it himself in the flatbed, in the middle of harvest, with half the county watching from porches. He asked every buyer, face to face, whether they would sell back what they had paid so little for.