The girl came up the aisle while people were still filing out and asked if I was Stanley’s wife.
I said YES.
She was maybe ten, in a purple coat two sizes too big, holding an envelope in both hands.
“He told me to hand it over TODAY,” she said. “NOT ONE DAY BEFORE.”
Fifty-eight years married and I had never seen this child in my life.
I asked her how she knew him.
“He paid me up front,” she said, and she was out the side door before Dwight left the pew.
My son wanted to know what that was.
I lied to him.
The envelope stayed in my purse through the casseroles and my daughter-in-law washing the same platter twice.
Then the house emptied out and I opened it at the kitchen table.
His handwriting. The same crooked S he put on checks for sixty years.
“Marguerite, I should have told you this years ago. SIXTY-ONE YEARS back I buried something, and it has walked behind me every day since. There is a storage bay off the county road. The code is on the back of this paper.”
No key.
Just a receipt, PAID THROUGH NEXT MARCH, and a bay number in pencil.
I put my coat over the dress I buried him in and drove past Windham Falls in the rain, eighty-one years old.
The office was a trailer with a space heater going full blast.
The young man behind the counter pulled up the bay and quit talking.
“Ma’am, somebody’s been in there,” he said. “Same week every year.”
I asked him which week he meant.
He turned the monitor around, and it was the week of our ANNIVERSARY.
EVERY SINGLE YEAR. Fifty-eight of them, the last one in June.
Six weeks before he died.
The code took two tries because my fingers were shaking.
The door went up on cold concrete and a smell like old newspaper.
In the middle of the floor stood a crate TALLER THAN I AM, under clear plastic, a moving blanket folded on top.
Somebody had swept the floor around it.
I got the plastic back, and my legs quit under me. ⬇️
Bay 47
I went down on my knees on that concrete and the plastic came with me, all of it, one cold sheet.
What was under it was a piano.
An upright, walnut, the finish gone milky along the top where something had sat on it a long time. Somebody had laid a strip of felt over the keys and shut the lid down. A hymnal stood closed on the music rack with dust on it, and there was no dust anywhere else.
I sat there with my coat open and I laughed once and it came back at me off the walls.
Stanley never sang. Not in church, not in the truck, not one bar of anything in fifty-eight years. He would stand next to me on Christmas Eve holding the book open to the right page with his mouth shut.
I got a hand on the bench and got myself up.
There was tape on the underside of the bench. Masking tape, blue pen gone brown. MARCH 1968.
Two months before we were married.
Nine miles from my kitchen. And I did the bills at that kitchen table every month of my life.
Who plays it.
Ohio
My mother had a piano.
Ada Petrie, who taught me the left hand before the right because she said the left hand is the one that keeps its promises. She died in the spring of 1963 and my father did not touch a key after that and would not have playing in the house.
I played at the Grange hall instead. I played at two weddings and got six dollars for the second one.
Then in April of 1965 I came home from work and there were four dents in the parlor rug and nothing standing in them.
My father was in the kitchen with his hat on.
He owed money. He had owed it since before she got sick and he had been paying it in feed and in promises, and that spring the man wanted the money.
I asked him where it went.
“A church in Ohio,” he said. “They came and got it Tuesday.”
I asked which church.
“Ohio,” he said, and he went out to move the truck so I would not see his face.
I never learned that town’s name. I never asked again. It felt like asking would make it further away.
Stanley started coming around that summer. He had a job hauling and he had grease in the creases of his hands and he did not talk about his people. His father ran the feed and seed on Depot Street and there was a whole shelf of the world we walked around. When Dwight was nine he asked about the grandfather in the photograph and Stanley put his fork down.
“We don’t talk about your grandfather,” he said.
Nobody in that house ever asked twice.
The gray box
I got home at two in the morning still in the funeral dress and I went straight to the closet.
He kept a gray steel box on the shelf above his shirts. Check register, the deed, my ring from before the good one. He would put the box on the bed on the first of the month and I would find pen marks on the quilt.
Under the register there were stubs. Rubber bands around them by decade, and the rubber on the oldest one broke when I touched it.
Six dollars a month in 1968. Ten in 1975. Eleven, then nineteen when the county road went in, then thirty-one now.
I got a pencil and did it on the back of a grocery list because I could not hold the number in my head.
Eleven thousand two hundred and forty dollars.
Two winters we ran that house on the woodstove because the furnace was out and the quote was nine hundred. I took the cafeteria job at the school in 1979 and stood on that floor eleven years for shoes and Dwight’s braces. He wore the same brown coat until the pocket came off.
And every one of those months he wrote a check by hand for a room with a lid on it.
I sat on the floor of my own closet with his shirts hanging over me and I could not tell if I was angry or if I was jealous.
Eleven thousand two hundred and forty dollars, and not one dollar of it ever came home.
The bank at ten
Dwight came Tuesday to take me to the bank about the accounts.
He is fifty-six and he cuts my meat at the table without being asked and he tells me not to drive after dark. At the funeral he stood at the door and shook every hand and thanked people by name. Arlene, his wife, washed the platter twice at that sink and did not once look up at me.
In the car he asked what the girl in the purple coat handed me.
I asked him about June instead. He had told me he took his father to the VA in June.
He watched the road.
“We didn’t go to the VA,” he said.
He drove him out the county road. Stanley made him wait in the truck the first twenty minutes and then had him come in and hold the light. Dwight swept the floor because his father could not bend, and folded the blanket, and pulled the plastic down over the top of it.
I asked how long he had known.
“Since I was thirty,” he said.
Then he said the other thing, the way you set a plate down when you know it is going to break.
In July, three weeks before the funeral, a man drove up from Portland and looked at it and offered twenty-four hundred dollars. Dwight had the man’s card in the visor.
“He asked me not to tell you until it was sold,” he said.
The fallboard
I went back out there Wednesday morning by myself.
The bay smelled the same. I put my purse on the floor and I took the felt off the keys and folded it and set it on the bench, because I did not want to be the second person in that family to leave a mess for somebody.
The ivory was yellow along the top octave. There was a chip out of the E above middle C.
My mother chipped that with her wedding ring in 1958 and told my father a chair did it.
I lifted the fallboard and let it stand up.
Inside the lid, in the middle, in pencil, in my father’s hand, the way he marked every tool and every ladder he ever owned so a borrower would bring it back.
A. PETRIE.
I sat down on the floor.
The bench lid took both hands. Sheet music inside, my mother’s, the Schirmer books with the tan covers, and under them an envelope gone soft the same way the funeral one was.
One sheet of paper. Vetter Feed and Seed, Depot Street, with the phone number that only had four digits.
April 1965. Against the account of Clarence Petrie, one piano, taken in settlement.
Signed Roy Vetter.
And under that, a second line in a younger version of the handwriting I had been reading my whole life.
RECEIVED OF STANLEY VETTER, ONE PIANO, 180 DOLLARS, PAID IN FULL.
The moving blanket
Dwight found me there at noon. My car was out front and the door was up.
He came in and saw the paper in my lap and he started talking and did not stop for a long time.
He said the man from Portland would come Saturday. He said twenty-four hundred was more than it was worth with the case like that. He said the Grange Street apartment has an elevator and a laundry on the same floor and no porch step, and he said porch step twice.
He said he paid the deposit in August.
I asked him what day in August.
He put his hand on the blanket and folded it in half and did not answer, and that told me it was before the funeral.
Then he told me the rest of what his father said in the truck that day in June, and he said it like it was mine to have.
“He said if you ever saw it you’d only see what it cost.”
I stood up and I gave him the paper.
I watched him get to the second signature. He read that line three times. His mouth came open a little the way it did when he was a boy and got a thing wrong in front of people.
I told him who Roy Vetter was to him. I told him his grandfather took that piano off my father over a feed bill and his father bought it back with everything he had three months before he asked me to marry him, and could not ever hand it to me without handing me that name.
“So he rented it a room,” I said.
Dwight said his father was a good man.
I said I know what he was.
I walked to the trailer and used their phone and called the movers out of the book on the counter. Six hundred and forty dollars, Friday, two men, and they take the front door off the hinges to get it in. That is the porch money. The step has been cracked since the ice.
Dwight stood outside by his truck with his arms down while I typed the code and brought the door down.
October
The piano is in the front room where his chair was.
The chair went to the church sale and a woman I do not know gave ten dollars for it.
I go in and out the side door now with the cane, because the step is still cracked and will be till spring, and I have gotten used to the yard from that angle.
Dwight did not come for six weeks. Then a Sunday in October his truck was in the drive and Arlene came up the walk with the platter and neither of them said a word about any of it, and he ate two helpings and washed the pans.
My left ring finger has not straightened since a car door got it in 1971, so the reach is gone and I play everything a little wrong, in the middle of the keyboard where the sound is still good.
The girl came Thursday. Purple coat, still too big, up the walk with her chin down.
Her name is Josie. She lives on the other side of the cemetery and she had six dollars left of what he paid her and she wanted to know if she had to give it back now.
I told her to keep it and asked if she wanted to hear the thing I was working on.
She stood in the doorway with her hands in her sleeves through the whole first page.
Then I moved over on the bench and told her to put her thumb on the white one by the chip.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who still has their mother’s things in somebody else’s house.
For more tales of unexpected revelations and the quiet lives people lead, you might enjoy reading about the time my brother told a banquet full of people about me or the story of my husband’s secret bus rides.
