Bridge of Clay(32)

* * *



—

She walked into the shop and her pockets were bulging.

The shopkeeper’s face lit up.

“You’re here!”

“Yes.” She was breathing heavily. Sweating soggily.

“You got a thousand dollars?”

“I have…” She took out the notes. “Nine hundred…and forty-seven.”

“Yes, but—”

Penny slapped her hands on the counter, making paw prints in the dust, her fingers and palms all clammy. Her face was level with his; her shoulder blades threatened to dislocate. “Please. I must play one today. I will pay the rest as the money comes—but I must try one, please, today.”

    For the first time, the man didn’t force his smile on her; his lips parted only to speak. “Okay then.” He waved and walked, simultaneously. “Over here.”

Of course, he’d directed her to the cheapest piano, and it was nice, the color of walnut.

She sat at the stool; she lifted the lid.

She looked at the boardwalk of keys: A few were chipped, but through the gaps of her despair, she was already in love, and it hadn’t yet made a sound.

“And?”

Penny turned slowly to look at him, and she was close to collapsing, within; she was the Birthday Girl again.

“Well, come on then,” and she nodded.

She focused on the piano and remembered an old country. She remembered a father and his hands on her back. She was in the air, high in the air—a statue behind the swings—and Penelope played and wept. In spite of such a long piano-playing drought, she did it beautifully (one of Chopin’s nocturnes) and she tasted the tears on her lips. She sniffed them up and sucked them in, and played everything right, and perfectly: The Mistake Maker made no mistakes.

And next to her, the smell of oranges.

“I see,” he said, “I see.” He was standing at her side, on the right. “I think I see what you mean.”

He gave it to her for nine hundred, and organized delivery.



* * *



—

The only problem was that the salesman didn’t only have atrocious hearing and a shambles of a shop—his handwriting was shocking, too. Had it been even slightly more legible, my brothers and I wouldn’t even exist—for instead of reading 3/7 Pepper Street from his own pen, he sent the delivery men to 37.

    As you can imagine, the men were miffed.

It was Saturday.

Three days after she’d bought it.



* * *



—

While one knocked at the door, the other two started unloading. They lowered the piano from the truck and had it standing on the footpath. The boss was talking to a man on the porch, but soon he shouted down at them.

“What the hell are you two doin’?”

“What?”

“We’re at the wrong bloody house!”

He went inside and used the man’s phone, and was muttering on the way back out. “That idiot,” he said. “That stupid, orange-eating prick.”

“What is it?”

“It’s an apartment. Unit three. Down there at number seven.”

“But look. There’s no parking down there.”

“So we’ll park in the middle of the road.”

“That won’t be popular with the neighbors.”

“You’re not popular with the neighbors.”

“What’s that s’posed to mean?”

The boss maneuvered his mouth into several shapes of disapproval. “Right, let me go down there. You two pull the trolley out. The piano wheels’ll die if we roll it on the road, and so will we. I’ll go and knock on the door. Last thing we need is taking it down and no one’s home.”

“Good idea.”

“Yes, it is a good idea. Now don’t so much as touch that piano again, right?”

“All right.”

“Not till I tell you.”

“All right!”



* * *



—

In the boss’s absence, the two men looked at the man on his porch: The one who didn’t want a piano.

“How’s it going?” he called down.

“A bit tired.”

    “Want a drink?”

“Nah. The boss prob’ly won’t like that.”

The man on the porch was normal height, had wavy dark hair, aqua eyes, and a beaten-up heart—and when the boss came walking back, there was a quiet-looking woman with a white face and tanned arms, out in the middle of Pepper Street.

“Here,” said the man; he came off the porch, as they shifted the piano to the trolley. “I’ll take an end there if you like.”

And that was how, on a Saturday afternoon, four men and a woman rolled a walnut-wooden piano down a sizable stretch of Pepper Street. At opposite corners of the rolling instrument were Penelope Lesciuszko and Michael Dunbar—and Penelope could have no idea. Even as she noticed his amusement for the movers, and his care for the welfare of the piano, she couldn’t possibly know that here was a tide to the rest-of-her-life, and a final name and nickname.

As she said, to Clay, when she told it: “Strange to think, but I’d marry that man one day.”