“Yes,” I said to the wife of Ryan, as gently as I could. “Thirty tow trucks, the city contract, and the whole company. Seven million, seven hundred thousand dollars.” She was still holding the Chicago envelope in both hands. Her father stood beside the piano with the dealer receipt, and his expression had shifted from admiration to something far more careful. Ryan sat on the arm of the sofa, pale as paper. In the corner, a little girl in a velvet dress had stopped turning the pages of a picture book and was watching us, wide eyed. “I did not tell Ryan,” I said, “because I wanted him to love an old man with grease under his fingernails. I am afraid I may have set the test too high.”
Ryan found his voice. It came out hoarse. “Dad, I can explain the piano. I was in trouble. The business had a rough year, and the lender called in a note. I needed forty two thousand dollars in three weeks.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “I sold it to the dealer in Omaha. I told myself I would buy it back as soon as I could. And then, when I did, I was so ashamed that I told the father of Karen I found it at an estate sale. I told you it went to the church. I just kept telling lies so I would not have to tell the first one.”
I let him finish. Then I crossed the room slowly, my knees complaining, and I lifted the lid of the Steinway. The ivory keys were yellow with age. I touched middle C, softly. The sound filled the room, deep and warm and slightly out of tune, and I closed my eyes. Linda played this piano every night for thirty one years. She played Chopin, mostly, and sometimes hymns, and on Christmas Eve she played carols while I made the cocoa. “Ryan,” I said without turning, “the money does not matter to me. You could have asked. I would have helped you. But this is your mother.”
A piano seen through a living room window led a tow truck man to the lie behind it and a Sunday song for four hands.
My voice broke on the word. I stood there with my hand on the keys and my back to the room. For a long moment, nobody spoke. Then I heard a small shuffle of feet, and the little girl, my granddaughter Emma, six years old, climbed carefully up onto the piano bench beside me. She looked at the keys, then at me, with the round gray eyes of Linda. “Grandpa,” she whispered, “are you sad?” I nodded. “A little, sweetheart.” She thought this over very seriously. “Daddy says this piano is very old. He says I am not supposed to touch it.” Her small finger hovered over the white keys. “Can I touch it?”
I swallowed hard. “Of course you can. Your grandmother would have loved that.” Emma pressed one key, then another. Then she looked up at her father, who was standing by the sofa with tears running down his face. She said, in the plain, practical voice of a six year old, “Daddy, why are you crying? It is a nice piano.” Ryan made a noise that was half laugh, half sob. He crossed the room and knelt on the carpet beside the bench, and he put his hand on the keys next to mine. “Dad,” he said. “Do you remember the song? The one Mom taught us? Chopsticks, with four hands?”
I remembered. Linda used to sit between us when Ryan was a boy, the two of us on either end of the bench, and teach us that silly song on Sunday afternoons with the sunlight in the window and the smell of pot roast from the kitchen. I put my big, rough, oil stained fingers on the keys. Ryan put his on the other end. And Emma, between us, plunked out the middle notes with one finger and giggled. We played it slowly, badly, and out of time. It was the worst performance in the history of the Steinway Company. It was also the best thing I had heard in three years.
When we finished, I turned to Ryan and spoke quietly, so only he could hear. “Here is what I want. You told St. Ambrose church you had given them a gift, and you never did. I want you to write them a check for twenty seven thousand dollars, the difference between what you sold the piano for and what you paid to buy it back. A scholarship in the name of your mother, for children who cannot afford music lessons.” Ryan nodded. “I will do it tomorrow.” I said, “And you will tell your father in law the truth, today, all of it.” He nodded again. “I will, Dad. Tonight.”
He did. I stayed for dinner, because the little girl asked me to, and over the lasagna I watched my son lay his mistakes on the table one at a time, like cards. His father in law listened gravely. When Ryan finished, the older man was silent for a while. Then he said, “Son, I have made worse mistakes. The difference is that I hid mine for twenty years.” He reached across the table and shook the hand of Ryan.
The scholarship was announced in January. Ryan gave the check to the pastor himself in the church basement, and the pastor, a heavy, kind man with a gray beard, hugged him for a long time. The Linda Kowalski Music Fund has since put eleven children in lesson rooms across Des Moines. In April, Ryan drove his daughter to the first recital, and I sat in the second row with a program on my knee, and when little Emma walked on stage in her patent leather shoes, and sat at a piano that was not too big for her, I felt the hand of Linda on my shoulder as clearly as I feel my own.
I kept the Steinway at the house of Ryan. It seemed the right place. On Sunday afternoons, I drive over in my pickup, and I sit on the bench with my granddaughter while she practices, and her father stands in the doorway with a dish towel over his shoulder, humming. Sometimes he joins us at the keys. The three of us play Chopsticks, slowly, badly, out of time, with the sunlight coming in the window, and Linda would have loved every wrong note of it. Some things you cannot tow away. They only wait in the living room until you come back for them.
