“Do not open anything,” I told Teodor, and I borrowed the car of my neighbor, Mr. Pollard, and drove to Cuyahoga Falls with my cardiologist pills rattling in my pocket. The shop was a long garage behind a yellow house, smelling of felt and glue and lemon oil. There stood my Baldwin, bottom board off, its walnut shining under a work lamp like it had been waiting. Teodor, a young man with kind eyes and a leather apron, held out both envelopes. “I am sorry about the carpet dents, Mr. Kerrigan,” he said. “I would not have bought it if I had known.”
I opened mine standing beside the keys. The paper smelled faintly of her lavender hand cream. “My dear Emmett,” Clare had written in her careful teacher cursive, “if you are reading this, our daughter has finally sold my piano. Do not be angry. I have known since Shannon was nine that she would sell the family quilt if the price was right, and I love her anyway. Do not you let her win a lesson she needs to lose. Teodor Vasquez tuned this piano for me last year, and he is an honest man. You may trust him with whatever happens next.”
I looked up. Teodor was blushing. “She called me last spring, Mr. Kerrigan,” he said. “She was frail. She asked me to tape those envelopes behind the soundboard and promised to explain someday. I did not know she would pass before I could. When your daughter sent the Marketplace post, I was so surprised I drove up with the trailer the same day.” He had known his own buying of the piano was part of her plan. He had bought it only to keep it safe, hoping that someone like me would call.
A key taped inside a Baldwin piano and a letter from his late wife brought the music back to a house in Akron, and taught his daughter what it was worth.
I drove home with the second envelope on the seat beside me, and I did not open it. I put it on the kitchen table and waited. Shannon came down at four, sweaty from the treadmill, and I handed it to her. “Your mother left this for you, inside the piano.” She frowned, then sat. The envelope was heavy. She tore it, and a small silver key slid out onto the table with a clink, along with three folded pages. Craig drifted in from the garage, rubbing his neck, and stood behind her chair, reading over her shoulder, as he had always done with papers.
Shannon read aloud, haltingly. “Dear Shannon. If you are holding this, you sold my Baldwin. I forgive you. But here is how it works. The key opens box 118 at the Highland Square branch of the bank on West Market. Inside is everything I saved from forty years of piano lessons, forty four thousand dollars in cash and bonds, and my mother pearls. It is for you, and for your children, and I wanted you to have it. But I could not give it to a daughter who would sell her mother to pay a truck loan. So here is the condition. Bring the piano home.”
Her voice stopped. She turned the page. “Shannon, I have watched you in a hurry all your life. I think you were afraid that if you slowed down, you would feel how much you missed me, as I miss you. Sit at the bench for ten minutes. That is all. Your father is a patient man. Let him teach you what he knows. I will be listening, as always. Love, Mom.” Shannon laid the page on the table and put both hands over her face. Craig said, very quietly, “Shan, I will sell the truck.” She nodded, without taking her hands down.
Then Craig cleared his throat, and I understood the truth of the measuring tape and the card from Barberton. The sale had been his idea, he said. He had asked the question about the will because he hoped the piano belonged to no one. He had told Shannon that I would never miss it, that old men get used to anything. He looked at me with wet eyes. “Emmett, I was drowning, and I took the easy way. I am sorry.” I told him I understood being afraid of money. I also told him apologies are best carried on a truck bed to a good home, and he nodded.
We drove back to Cuyahoga Falls the next morning, all three of us, in the little Pollard car. Teodor had already tuned the Baldwin, and he refused to take a dollar of profit, only the twelve hundred dollars he had paid plus the cost of his trailer. Craig paid him in cash from the sale of a truck he had loved. The movers who brought it home were the same company from Barberton whose card I had found on the counter, and the owner, hearing the story, carried the piano himself and set each foot of it precisely into the four old dents in my carpet.
The treadmill went back to the store. Shannon held the receipt for a long time before she signed it. Then she sat down on the bench, as Clare had asked, and played the only song she remembered, the opening of Für Elise, with two wrong notes and one right one. I stood behind her with my hand on her shoulder. In the box at the bank, we found the money, the pearls, and one more small note. It said, “Emmett, play something for me.” I pulled a chair next to the bench and did not trust my voice to answer.
By Christmas, the front room belonged to music again. Shannon took lessons from Teodor on Tuesdays, and the neighbor children came back on Saturday mornings, and Craig found work with the moving company in Barberton, which seemed a fair joke. In the evenings I sat in my chair by the window with the morning sun blocked once more by that dear walnut case. Some nights I rested my hands on the keys, just rested them there, the way Clare used to. And some nights, when the house was quiet, Shannon rested her hands beside mine.
