I turned the key in unit 118 and rolled up the door, bracing for heartbreak, and heard, of all things, the faint memory of music, and the light fell on an old upright piano, restored to beauty, and beside it two stools, and sheet music open, and a wall of photographs of Harold and a little girl at the keys.
I stood in that doorway with my hand pressed to my chest.
I knew that piano. It was my mothers, the one I learned to play on as a girl, the one we thought was lost when the family home was sold decades ago.
The little one the desk girl mentioned was our granddaughter Annie, and Harold had tracked down and restored my late mothers piano, the very one I learned on, and had been secretly teaching Annie to play it, so that the music that ran through my family would carry on into another generation.
Harolds letter sat on the piano bench. He wrote: Old girl, you gave up playing when your mama died and her piano was sold, and I watched the music go out of you, and it broke my heart. So I found her piano. It took me years. I had it restored, good as new. And I have been teaching our Annie to play it, because that child has music in her the way you did. I wanted to surprise you, to sit you down and have Annie play your mamas piano and give you back the music you lost. I am sorry I did not get to see your face. Please, let Annie play for you. Let the music come home.
I wept at my mothers piano, restored by my husbands love, waiting to fill my life with music again.
Him and the little one. My Harold had spent his Saturdays bringing the music back to our family, teaching my granddaughter on my mothers keys.
Annie, when I brought her to the unit the next Saturday, sat down at that piano, and she played for me. A simple piece, halting and sweet, on my mothers keys, and it was the most beautiful thing I ever heard, three generations of my familys music alive in one little girls hands.
I could not let that piano sit in storage. I brought it home, where my mothers piano belongs, in my own front room.
Annie comes over every Saturday now, and she plays, and I have started playing again too, my fingers remembering what my heart never forgot. Sometimes we play together, four hands, three generations, on the keys my mother gave me.
My daughter still did not know why her father spent Saturdays away. Now she knows he was bringing the music home. Him and the little one. He gave me back my mothers piano, and my granddaughters music, and the song that had gone silent in me for years. My Harold. He knew that the sweetest thing he could leave me was not in any lockbox. It was music. And it plays in my house every single day now.