I reached in and lifted it out, and I couldn’t breathe, because it was a photograph of my mother’s piano, and it was standing in somebody’s shop with a work light on it and a tag hanging off the music desk with my name written on the tag.
Folded behind the picture was a bill of sale, October, eleven hundred dollars, one upright piano, Kimball, serial number and all. And a repair invoice from Baumgartner Piano in Zanesville — new bushings, three hammers rebuilt, refelted, tuned twice — and a note in the corner in a stranger’s handwriting saying it would hold pitch by spring.
My mother taught piano in our front room in Coshocton for thirty-one years on that Kimball. When she died in 1996 it came to me, and in 2003 our son was seventeen and we owed the hospital in Columbus more than we made in a year, and I sold it out of our living room for six hundred dollars to a man who put it in a stock trailer.
I have never once talked about that day. Not to my sister, not to my children. Walt was standing in the driveway when the trailer pulled out and he did not say a word then either.
He found it. Twenty-two years later. It had gone from that man to a church in Dresden to a garage in Frazeysburg, and Walt tracked it by the serial number on a card my mother had taped inside the lid in 1968, which he apparently knew about, because he knew everything about me and told me almost none of it.
His note was in the bottom of that box, folded twice.
Ruthie — it’s paid for and it’s at the shop getting fixed and it’s yours in the spring. I know it isn’t a ring. I’ve watched you not look at that wall for twenty-two years. Don’t be mad at me for spending it. There wasn’t a thing on this earth I wanted more than to hear you play again. — Walt
I set that box up on a shelf and made sure he saw I was hurt over a ring. Three weeks later he was gone in his chair with the ballgame on and I sat in this house for eleven months not touching a scuffed-up little box from a secondhand shop.
The piano was at Baumgartner’s the whole time. They had it in the back under a quilt and they never called, because Walt had paid in full and told them not to call anybody but him.
My son and two of his friends brought it up the porch steps in April.
It’s on the wall where it was in 2003. The card in the lid is still there in my mother’s handwriting. I have played every day since, badly at first, and the neighbor woman came over the second week to ask if everything was all right, and I told her everything was all right.
The music box sits on top of it with the works still out. It doesn’t play a note. It never had to.