All stories › Fantasy › A Hair Sharp › Episode 1
First Tuesday
Episode 1 of 3 of A Hair Sharp by Paige Oberlin · free to read
The tuning hammer was already on the pin when the piano started playing by itself.
I had just finished the middle octave and was coming out toward the treble, slow, the way I liked to. I took my hand off. The keys went on moving, a left hand and a right hand that were not there, and the old upright filled Mr. Stockdale’s front room with a piece I had never heard.
It was not a famous piece. It was somebody working something out. A melody, a turn, the melody again a little braver. Then, in the middle of a phrase, it stopped. The last key stayed down for a second and came up on its own.
Mr. Stockdale was in his chair by the window. He had not moved. His hands were in his lap, the right one curled the way it had been curled since the stroke.
“Did you hear that?” I said.
“I heard it.”
“Mr. Stockdale, I didn’t play that.”
“I know you didn’t. I did.” He looked at the keys. “Nine years ago. The night before my stroke. I never got to the end of it, and that’s the only reason it’s still in there. A piano gives back what you leave unfinished. Nothing else.”
I sat on the bench with my mutes in my apron pocket and did not know what to do with my hands.
I had tuned pianos for twenty years. I had heard them buzz and rattle and tell me about every humid summer they ever sat through. I had never heard one remember.
“It does that for you,” he said. “I had a man from the music store for six years. It never once did it for him. He was always in a hurry. It only starts when you go slow.”
“Why me?”
“You touch it like you mean it.” He nodded at the hammer. “Finish. Leave it a hair sharp. It warms up.”
“Mr. Stockdale, nobody needs a piano tuned every month. Twice a year is plenty for a piano that gets played. This one doesn’t get played.”
“That’s why I need it every month,” he said. “I want to hear it.”
I thought he meant the tuning.
I finished. I checked my unisons and my octaves and played the chord I always played at the end, and the piano was just a piano.
I found out the price when I left his house.
A car went by with its radio up, and the music was flat. Not out of tune the way a bad singer is out of tune. Flat all the way through, every note a quarter step low, like the whole world had sagged.
In the van I hummed an A. It came out of me wrong too.
I got out my fork, the steel one I had carried since school, and struck it on my knee and held it to my ear.
It was flat. A tuning fork could not go flat. It was a piece of steel. I sat in a grocery store parking lot and struck it six times, and it was flat every time, and I understood that the fork was fine and I was not.
I had four pianos booked for Wednesday at a hundred and twenty-five each. I called and moved all four.
At three o’clock Wednesday afternoon, the same hour I had left Mr. Stockdale’s house, the world snapped back up to pitch in the middle of a song on the radio. I had to pull over because I was laughing.
A day. Five hundred dollars. That was what it cost to hear a man’s last unfinished night.
The first Tuesday in October I made myself go back, because he had paid in advance through December, and because I wanted to know.
His son answered the door. Duncan Stockdale was about my age, in a fleece vest, with a tape measure clipped to the pocket. He looked at my tool case the way people look at a bill.
“You’re the tuner,” he said. “He has you come every month. For a piano nobody plays.”
“He likes it in tune.”
“It’s a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month, and he’s on a fixed income.” He stepped aside to let me in anyway. “It won’t be for much longer.”
“Duncan,” his father said from the front room. “She’s working.”
“Why not?” I said.
Duncan held up the tape measure.
“Because the apartment doesn’t have room for it.”