Part 3 — Inside The Piano
Karen sat in her car in the driveway with Ellens envelope in her lap. Steve told me later that he watched from the kitchen window as she opened it, read the first line and bent over the steering wheel.
The first line read, My dearest Karen, if you are reading this, then the piano has found a new home, and I want you to know I am not angry. It is only wood and strings. What matters is what is inside the envelope.
The letter went on for four pages. Ellen wrote about the winter Karen was six, when she had a fever and could not sleep. Ellen sat at the piano at three in the morning and made up a lullaby, note by note, until her daughter drifted off to sleep on the couch.
She had written the lullaby down on staff paper and kept it for more than forty years. It was folded into the envelope, along with a cassette tape labeled Karens Song, Spring 1991, in Ellens hand.
My wife hid her love letter in the one place a daughter would find it only when she was ready to listen.
Karen came into my room that night and knelt by my chair. Her face was swollen from crying. She said, Dad, I am so sorry. I thought it was furniture. I did not know it was Mom talking to me.
I told her I did not need a speech. I only needed the piano home. She nodded, took her phone, and called Gus Kowalski. He answered on the first ring. He said, Karen, the piano has not left my truck yet.
Gus refused every dollar she offered. He drove the Baldwin back to the house the next morning and set it in the corner, right over the four dents in the carpet. He tuned it for free that afternoon, with a small smile and a cup of black coffee.
That evening, we found an old cassette player in the attic. Steve held the tape, and Karen pressed play. A soft hum came out of the speaker, then Ellens voice, young and tender, singing a made up lullaby to a sleepy six year old.
Nobody spoke for a long time. Steve reached for Karens hand, and I put my hand on the closed lid of the piano, where Ellens fingers had been for fifty one years.
Steve moved his recliner to the other wall without being asked. He said the corner had always belonged to Ellen, and no recliner could argue.
Karen started lessons the following week with a retired teacher from the church. She is clumsy, and she plays the lullaby with two fingers, but she plays it every evening after dinner, and I sit beside her and listen.