Part 11

CHAPTER 11 — The Deepest Loss

The weekend was quiet, and quiet was the most dangerous thing of all, because in the quiet Jenna had time to think about what she had nearly lost, and what she still might.

Maisie took sick on Sunday afternoon.

It started with a cough, and by evening it was the same wet, frightening sound Jenna had heard in her own chest in the hospital, and by ten o’clock the fever was a hundred and one. Jenna sat on the edge of Maisie’s bed in the dark and held a cool cloth to her forehead and felt her whole body go cold with a fear that had nothing to do with pianos or gala.

“Mom,” Maisie whispered. “Am I going to the hospital like you?”

“No, baby. No hospital.” Jenna’s voice was steady and her hands were not. “It’s just a cold. You just got a cold and it scared me, that’s all.”

“You got scared?”

“I got very scared.”

Maisie reached up and put her small hot hand on her mother’s cheek. “Don’t be scared. I’m tough. I’m like you.”

Jenna sat very still and let herself cry, once, quietly, with her daughter’s hand on her face, and then she pulled herself together and got the fever down with children’s Tylenol and a lukewarm bath and by two in the morning Maisie was asleep and the fever had broken.

It was then, sitting in the dark of the small apartment with her daughter’s breathing gone soft and regular, that Jenna understood the thing she had been refusing to understand.

She had spent eight years believing that the thing she lost at Linquist was a job. It wasn’t. What she lost was her father’s trade—the feel of a good hammer in her hand, the right to sign her work and have it matter, the certainty that she was the kind of person who finished things properly. She had taken the job at Linquist and she had worked and she had built, and then a man in clean shoes had closed it all with a report, and she had believed, in some deep and wordless way, that it had closed because she wasn’t enough. Because there was something wrong with her, some weakness a smarter man could see.

The whole thing with the piano—the hiring, the firing, the rebuilding in three days—had been about proving something to a man who had humiliated her eleven years ago. And that was a hollow thing. Trent Kesler had closed her shop, and would close her shop again if he could, and no piano would ever undo that.

But there was another thing, and it was the thing she had almost missed. Walt had seen her work at Linquist. Her father had seen it. Graham had seen it. And a cleaning woman who fixed a piano on her kitchen table and marked it in pencil where nobody would ever look—that woman had done a good thing, over and over, for a hundred and five years’ worth of strangers’ piano keys, and the value of it had nothing at all to do with whether Trent Kesler thought she was enough.

She looked at the fridge, where the folded paper still hung under the magnet with her father’s picture. *The bench waits for Jenna Walsh.*

She had spent her whole adult life waiting for someone to open a door and tell her she was allowed to walk through it. And now an old man had opened it, and she had walked through, and she had fixed the piano, and her daughter was sleeping and alive, and everything else—the money, the sale, Monday morning—was just one more thing that people did.

Maisie stirred in her sleep. “Mom?”

“I’m here.”

“Is the piano fixed?”

“It’s fixed, baby. It sang last night.”

“Good.” Maisie turned her face into the pillow. “Nobody’s arguing now.”

Jenna sat with that all the way to morning. At six she called Walt, and asked him to stay with Maisie while she went to the shop at eight.

“You going to that meeting?” Walt asked.

“I’m going to that meeting.”

“You going to fight the man who closed your shop?”

Jenna thought about it. She thought about the report that had a name on it, and the way the value of a thing could be written down by people who never touched it. She thought about what she had to say, and to whom, and what she was willing to trade to get it said.

“No,” she said at last. “I’m going to tell the truth. Fighting is what he does. I’m going to do the thing he can’t do.”

“And what’s that?”

“I’m going to sign my name to my work,” Jenna said.