Original fiction · Chapter 1 of 2
The Piano With One Sticking Key
I was halfway through writing “beyond repair” on the piano’s removal tag when a woman behind me asked how much I charged to tune one key.
“Depends on the key,” I said.
She leaned over the upright and pressed the D below middle C. It came back up slowly, making a sound like someone dragging a chair across the floor.
“That one,” she said. “The rest can go where they’re going.”
The community hall was closing on Friday. Its boilers needed replacing and the town had already moved the after-school program to the library. I’d been hired to sort through the instruments before the furniture auction. The piano had been there long enough for three generations of children to scratch their initials into the bottom edge of the bench.
The woman introduced herself as Mrs. Pearl. She’d cleaned the hall for thirty-two years, and she knew precisely which window leaked and which outlets could run a kettle without killing the lights. She also knew the piano had a space underneath the keys large enough for a cassette.
“If you open it,” she said, “would you look?”
I took off the front panel. A pencil rolled down onto my boot. Beneath the keyboard, wrapped in an order slip from a diner that had closed before I was born, was a clear plastic cassette. There were two names on the label. I could read only the bottom one.
Claire.
My name is Claire. I told her that, expecting a coincidence. She sat down.
“When you were little, your feet couldn’t reach the floor,” she said. “You used to tuck one inside the other to stop them swinging.”
I grew up in three towns. My father worked maintenance jobs, and my mother died when I was five. I remembered certain things about her at odd moments, such as the way she pressed the tip of her nose against mine to get me to laugh for pictures. Nobody had ever mentioned a piano.
“I think you were about four,” Mrs. Pearl said. “You had a winter coat with a zipper your dad couldn’t fix.”
That was true too. He used to zip it with a safety pin after the tab came off. It clicked against the metal teeth when I ran.
She told me my mother spent afternoons in the hall while Dad was working. Mrs. Pearl was taking her break when she heard the two of us laughing from the stage. My mother asked to borrow the tape recorder the hall used for council meetings. She wanted Dad to hear the tune I’d made up.
“Why was it in there?” I asked.
“Because you were four,” Mrs. Pearl said. “You told us it was the piano’s tape and it had to stay with the piano.”
The removal crew was coming the next morning. I took the tag off and set it on the bench. Mrs. Pearl reached into her bag for a portable cassette player. She’d brought fresh batteries in a little envelope from the grocery store.
The first thing on the tape was the bad D. I recognized its scrape through the tiny speaker. A child laughed. Then a woman said something I had spent most of my life wanting to hear again.
She said my name.
