The old man at the piano stopped in the middle of Fly Me to the Moon, folded his hands, turned around on the bench, and reached into his jacket for a yellowed Carnegie Hall program.
Mr. Lou, he said, you said somebody has to tighten the strings. Let me tell you what a man who tightens strings gave me.
I played Carnegie Hall in 1961, the old man said, and held up the program with his own name printed inside it. Then life went hard, and I lost everything, and for thirty years I did not touch a piano. I was living in a shelter in Pawtucket. Last November, a piano tuner gave up his whole weekend, for free, to restore a broken-down upright in that shelter, because somebody told him an old man there used to play. He sat me down at it. First time in thirty years. I wept like a child. That tuner gave me back the only thing that was ever really mine.
The banquet hall had gone silent. Joey had gone still.
Lou said somebody has to poke at pianos, and the man he mocked gave a broken old pianist back the music he had lost for thirty years.
The restaurant had hired the old man to play for our anniversary, and Joey had no idea until the pianist stopped mid-song and turned around. Mr. Abrams plays again now, every week, at that same shelter, on the piano Joey saved.
I am Joeys father. He helped his mother cut the cake and said thanks for coming, Uncle Lou, and took the joke, because a man who has given another man back his music does not need a car wash owner to tell him his hands are wasted. Lou, the self-made man, had nothing to say, which was a first.