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The Last Bar
Episode 3 of 3 of A Hair Sharp by Paige Oberlin · free to read
Somebody had to finish the song Mr. Stockdale wrote for his granddaughter’s first birthday, and on the first Tuesday of December, with the church van booked for one o’clock, his son was sitting on the piano bench when I arrived.
Mr. Stockdale was in his chair, and for the first time since September he looked straight at me when I came in.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said. “It costs you.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I watched you drive away in October with the radio off.”
“I took lessons until I was twelve,” Duncan said. “I hated every one of them.”
“That’s normal. Nobody likes lessons at twelve. Most of my customers are people who quit at twelve and bought a piano at fifty to prove something.”
“What do they prove?”
“That they still hate it, mostly.”
“He hummed it for me. All weekend. The ending, too. He’s had it the whole time. His hands just couldn’t do it.” He spread his own on his knees. “Mine can’t either, very well.”
“Play me what you have.”
He played it on the closed lid of the keyboard, fingers tapping wood, because he was afraid to touch the keys before I was done. Four notes, then two chords. He got the third note wrong twice. His father corrected him from the window both times without looking up.
“That’s the whole ending?” I said.
“That’s it,” Mr. Stockdale said. “Nine years I couldn’t play four notes and two chords.”
I set up my mutes. I knew the rule. A piano gives back what you leave unfinished. If Duncan played the last bars into it, there would be nothing unfinished left.
“If he finishes it, it’s done,” I said. “It won’t play for anybody again. Not even for me. You’ll never hear your own hands on it.”
“I know,” Mr. Stockdale said.
“And if I tune it fast, it doesn’t start at all. You could keep it the way it is.”
He looked at his son on the bench. “I’ve kept it the way it is for nine years.”
I put the hammer on the A.
I tuned it slowly. I tuned it the way I had in September, like I meant it, and when I came out toward the treble I took my hand off the pin and stepped back.
It played.
The melody. The turn. The melody braver. Duncan sat beside it with his hands in his lap and his eyes shut, the way his father had sat in September.
It stopped in the same place.
The last key stayed down for a second. Then it came up.
Duncan put his right hand on the keys where the invisible one had been. He played four notes, badly, with a wrong one in the middle. He stopped and looked over at the window.
“Again,” Mr. Stockdale said. “Softer on the third one.”
He played it again. Then the left hand, slow, two chords, the second one held until it was nothing.
I could hear the clock in the kitchen.
Mr. Stockdale had his eyes shut. Duncan did not turn around. He kept his hands on the keys until the sound was all the way gone, and then he took them off and put them on his knees, like his father did.
“That’s how it goes,” Mr. Stockdale said, when he could.
“I played the third one wrong.”
“You played it fine. I wrote it wrong. It sounds better your way.”
I played my chord. The piano was a piano.
At one o’clock the church van backed into the driveway. Duncan went out to meet it. I watched through the window while he talked to the driver with his hands in his vest pockets, and then the van backed out again empty.
“What did you tell him?” Mr. Stockdale said.
“That it’s not for sale. That it’s going to my house, and you’re coming over Sundays to tell me what I play wrong.” He looked at me. “There’s a wall in my living room that’s sixty inches. I measured it twice.”
The rest of that day and half of Wednesday, every note in the world was a quarter step low. I moved my four appointments, did not cash anybody’s check, and did not mind it.
In January, three weeks after the movers brought it into Duncan’s front room and it had time to settle, I tuned it again, fast, and nothing happened.
I left it a hair sharp.