All stories › Fantasy › A Hair Sharp › Episode 2
Measured Twice
Episode 2 of 3 of A Hair Sharp by Paige Oberlin · free to read
The apartment Duncan had found for his father did not have room for an upright piano, and he said so twice while I set up my mutes.
“Fifty-seven inches,” he said. “The wall is fifty-four. I checked.”
“You could stand it in the living room.”
“There isn’t a living room. There’s a room.” He sat on the arm of the couch. “It’s a nice building. They have a van to the grocery store. He fell twice last winter in this house.”
“Once,” Mr. Stockdale said, from the window.
“Twice, Dad. You only told me about once. Mrs. Kinney next door told me about the other one. She found you by the mailbox.”
“I was resting by the mailbox.”
“For an hour?”
“It was a nice day.”
I put the hammer on the first pin of the temperament octave and tuned the A the slow way, listening to the beats get further apart until they stopped. Duncan watched me like the bill was getting longer.
“Somebody from the church wants it,” he said. “They’ll pick it up the first of December. That’s your last time, I guess.”
“The first of December is a Tuesday,” Mr. Stockdale said.
“So she comes in the morning and they come in the afternoon.”
I kept my eyes on the pins. I was thinking about Wednesday. Four more appointments. Another day of the whole world sitting a quarter step low.
I could have gone fast. I went slow. When I finished the temperament and started out toward the treble, it began.
Duncan was off the arm of the couch before the third bar. He stood in the middle of the rug with his hands open, like somebody about to catch something.
It played the same as before. The melody, the turn, the melody braver. Then the stop, in the same place, on the same key.
Nobody said anything.
“What was that,” Duncan said finally. It was barely a question.
“It does that,” I said. “When I tune it slowly. Only for me.”
“That’s Dad.” He turned to his father. “That’s you. That’s how you play. You do that thing with your left hand.”
Mr. Stockdale was looking at the floor.
“I know that song,” Duncan said. “I don’t know it. I know it. How do I know it?”
“You heard it through the wall,” Mr. Stockdale said. “The month you stayed here, before Hattie was born.”
“You didn’t come to her first birthday,” Duncan said.
“I was going to play it there. That was the present. I couldn’t get the ending.” He lifted his right hand an inch off his knee and let it fall. “And the night after that I couldn’t get anything.”
I set my hammer on the music desk. I had heard a lot of things in a lot of front rooms. I had never wanted so badly to be in the van.
“Nine years,” Duncan said. “You let me think you didn’t come because of Lynn. Because you said she talked too much at Thanksgiving.”
“She does talk too much at Thanksgiving.”
“Dad.”
“I didn’t come because I couldn’t hold a fork.”
Duncan sat down on the couch, all the way this time.
I packed up slowly. When I got to the door, he followed me out onto the porch and pulled it shut behind him.
“Does it ever play the end?” he said.
“It can’t. The piano only gives back what somebody left unfinished. That’s all it has.”
He looked at the window, where his father was a shape in a chair.
“What does it cost you?” he said. “He said it costs you something. He wouldn’t say what.”
“A day,” I said. “From the time I leave this house until the same time tomorrow, every note I hear is a quarter step flat. I can’t tune. I moved four people. Five hundred dollars.”
“Every time?”
“Twice now.”
“You don’t have to come back,” he said. “I can tell him you quit.”
“He paid through December.”
“I’ll pay you through December not to come.”
He got his wallet out right there on the porch. I told him to put it away. He did not put it away, so I went down the steps and got in the van, and he stood there holding it out at nobody.
On Thursday a check for five hundred dollars came in the mail, with a note in Duncan’s handwriting.
THEN SOMEBODY HAS TO FINISH IT.