I unwrapped the felt to see what she had left riding on the strings, and I set her note down real slow, because it was the kind of thing that makes a grown man go quiet.
Wrapped in that felt, resting on the harp where it would ride along with the music without ever buzzing, was a single piece of sheet music, yellowed and soft, a love song from the forties. And her note explained it.
“My husband bought me this piano the year we married,” she wrote, “and the first thing he ever played on it was this song. He played it badly. He played it every anniversary for fifty-one years, a little better each time, until the year he could not anymore. I have kept the music inside the piano ever since, so that even when the house is quiet, the song is still in there, waiting.”
The last line was the ask.
“Before you sell my piano on to a stranger, please sit down and play this song once, all the way through, however badly. A piano should not leave a house without hearing its favorite song one more time.”
An old woman, knowing her family would sell the piano she loved for sixty years, hid a love song inside it and asked a stranger to play it once, so the last thing that instrument did in her house was sing the song her husband courted her with.
I do not really play. I move pianos, I do not perform on them. But I sat down on that bench in that empty room, and I picked out that old love song one slow note at a time, all the way through, badly, the way her husband first did.
I have moved pianos for ten years. I have never once cried on a bench until that afternoon.
And then I could not sell it. I tried. I could not do it.
So I found the granddaughter who had sold it to me to free up a room, and I asked about the family, and it turned out there was a great-granddaughter, nine years old, just starting lessons, in a house with no piano because nobody thought she would stick with it.
I delivered that upright to her for exactly what I paid, which she could afford, with the love song still tucked in the felt on the harp. I told the little girl what it was and what her great-grandmother asked. She promised to learn it.
The piano did leave that first house. But it did not leave the family, and it did not leave without its song, and somewhere right now a nine year old is learning to play the tune an old man courted his wife with, badly, and getting a little better every time, exactly the way it is supposed to go.