…the whole inside of that piano was lined with photographs.
Dozens of them, fixed careful against the soundboard, facing inward — every one of us. My mother as a baby. My uncle in his baseball uniform. My cousins, my aunt, weddings and christenings and school pictures, sixty years of this family, mounted where no eye would ever see them. Except one. Grandma’s, from the bench, if she opened the lower panel — which, the tuner realized, she must have, gently, again and again, for decades.
She wasn’t playing to a room. She was playing to us. Every Sunday of my whole childhood, she sat down and sent her music straight into the faces of everyone she loved, so the notes would pass through all of us at once.
And there was a letter, tucked in a little sleeve, addressed to me.
“Karen,” it said, “you’ll notice the water ring on the lid. I put my teacup there every Sunday, right over your picture inside, because you lost your mama so young and I couldn’t hold you every week the way I wanted. So I held your photograph with the music instead. You were always the one on the other side of this wood with me — the one who sat and listened and didn’t fidget. That’s why the piano is yours. The rest of them measure it in what it costs to move. You’ll know what it’s worth.”
The tuner, a man who’d opened a thousand pianos, just stood back with his hat in his hand.
It’s restored now. I play it every Sunday. And I have added one photograph to the row inside — of Grandma, at these very keys, facing all of us at last.
They measured that old piano by what it would cost to move — never once opening it to find the sixty years of Sundays Grandma had spent playing, note by note, straight into the faces of everyone she loved.