Original fiction · Chapter 2 of 2
The Last Note
“Claire,” my mother said on the tape. “If you play that note one more time, it’s going to fall out and roll home without you.”
The child played it again. Mrs. Pearl laughed next to me before the woman on the tape did. I’d forgotten that laugh completely. Then I remembered listening for it from the hallway at home, when I’d gone to bed but was still waiting to find out if my parents had forgiven each other for something.
The piano tune was four notes. My mother played the first three, and I added the last. She started too high once and I told her she had ruined it. She said she’d probably be able to go on living, then started again where I’d asked.
I pressed stop. I didn’t want the tape to end while I was still looking at the player.
Mrs. Pearl told me she’d tried to find Dad after my mother died. The two of us had moved before the hall held its Christmas dinner. She kept meaning to ask somebody at the town office for our address, but at the time the hall had a basement flood and her husband needed rides to work. By the time she found Dad’s name in the phone book, the number had been disconnected.
“How did you find me now?”
“You put your name on your van,” she said. “And you still tuck one foot behind the other when you sit.”
I looked down. I was doing it.
The next morning, I asked the auction manager to give us until noon. I called the library. They had room in the old reference area if we could get the upright through the service entrance and if someone would come back to maintain it. I measured the piano, then drove over and measured the door twice. We had two inches to spare.
Mrs. Pearl supervised the move with her hands in her coat pockets. When the movers tilted the piano back, another pencil slid out. One of the men picked it up and went to put it on top.
“Better give me that,” she said. “I’ll be the one getting it out next time.”
I took the sticking key apart the following Thursday. A splinter inside the keybed had been rubbing the side of the wood. It took me about twenty minutes to smooth it down and get the action back together. Mrs. Pearl was right. The job was simple enough once I’d opened the thing.
Before she left, she asked if I wanted to hear the end of the tape. I put it in the player and sat on the bench with her. There was a scrape, the sound of someone moving a chair, and my mother asking Mrs. Pearl if she wanted a cup of tea. Then there were twenty or thirty seconds of the two of them discussing what to do about a jammed kitchen drawer.
I listened to the whole conversation. When the tape clicked off, there was a little girl waiting by the bench, her mother behind her with a stack of library books.
“Can I try?” the girl asked.
I moved over. Her feet swung clear of the floor. She played the D three times, softly, as if she’d been given permission to knock and was waiting to see who answered.
