Part 3

CHAPTER 3 — Dayton

The hospital kept her four days. Jenna spent them learning how little a person could do and still be exhausted.

On the second day the doctor caught her sitting on the edge of the bed with her shoes on and her discharge papers in her hand, and he sat down in the plastic chair and talked to her the way people talk to a horse that keeps getting out of the fence.

“Two weeks,” he said. “Light work at most. No lifting. No chemicals. No twelve-hour shifts.”

“I have a job.”

“You have a job when your lungs work.”

“I have a daughter.”

The doctor looked at her for a moment. Then he took out his pen and wrote something on her chart.

“I’m clearing you for light work on Monday,” he said. “Sitting at a desk. Answering phones. That’s all. If you do anything heavier before the two weeks are up, you’ll be back here, and next time it’ll be worse and longer. Do you understand me?”

“I understand you.”

“Do you believe me?”

Jenna looked at her hands. They were cleaner than they had been in years. The hospital soap had taken the calluses off the tips of her fingers, and she hated that. The calluses were her father’s hands, and she had worked eleven months to lose them and four days to lose the rest.

“I believe you,” she said.

——

Her father had been a tuner in Dayton. Frank Walsh, sixty-two years in the trade, a man who could hear a fifth beat against a fourth from the next room and tell you which string was tired. He had a shop on Third Street with a bell over the door that he never oiled because he liked to hear it. He tuned for churches that couldn’t pay him, and school districts that paid him late, and once for a man who had a Steinway and a debt and paid in a set of tools that Frank used until the day he died.

He taught her on a wreck he’d pulled from a curb. A Story & Clark upright, walnut veneer peeled off like sunburn, missing forty hammers out of eighty-eight. He set it up in the garage and said, “Rebuild it. Don’t ask me how.”

She was nine. It took her two years. When she finished, he sat down and played the four chords he knew, and he cried a little, and then he told her the thing she carried for the rest of her life.

“Sign it.”

“It’s under the lid. Nobody’s going to see it.”

“Then it’s for you,” he said. “If you won’t sign your work, don’t let it leave the bench.”

She signed everything after that. A small looped mark, in pencil, in the corner of every hammer, every key, every action she rebuilt. It was a habit, and then it was a superstition, and then it was the only thing left.

Frank died the spring she turned twenty-five. That winter, Linquist Piano Works—where she had worked eight years, where she had moved from the bench to the floor and from the floor to running the rebuild line—announced it was closing. Forty-one jobs. A plant that had made pianos since 1919. The owners brought in a consultant, a young man from a firm in Chicago, who explained in a flat and reasonable voice that the market had changed and the building had value and the family ought to take the offer before the offer went away.

Jenna had sat in the third row with sawdust on her sleeves.

The consultant had taken questions for forty minutes and answered each one with a calmness that felt like a wall. When she stood up and asked whether anyone had asked the people who actually built the pianos, whether anyone had considered that the equipment was good and the market was there and the only thing missing was somebody willing to fight—he had looked at her, and he had said, “I understand this is emotional,” and he had moved to the next question.

She remembered his shoes. That was the thing she remembered most clearly. They were black and polished and perfectly clean, in a room where everyone else was covered in dust.

Eight years later, in a hospital bed in a city forty miles away, she said the name out loud to see how it felt.

“Trent Kesler.”

It felt like a splinter still in.

——

Walt came at noon with a thermos of soup he had made himself, which was mostly potatoes and apology. He sat in the plastic chair and ate nothing and watched her eat, which was Walt’s way.

“You going to take it?” he asked.

“I don’t know yet.”

“You ought to.”

“I’m not taking a job because my kid felt sorry for me in front of strangers.”

“That’s not why.”

“That’s the only reason it’s on the table.”

Walt set his cap on his knee and smoothed the brim with his thumb, twice, the way he did when he was deciding whether to say a true thing.

“Your father tuner down on Third Street? The one with the bell?”

Jenna looked at him.

“I worked at Linquist thirty-one years,” Walt said. “Nobody ever asks what the super did before he retired. I ran the floor. I ran it when you were still in the rebuild line with your hair tied up and your hands full of glue.”

“Walt—”

“I was in that room too. Third row, other side.” He looked at her steadily. “I heard what you said to him. I heard what he said back.”

Jenna’s eyes were burning, and it wasn’t the fever.

“You never told me.”

“You never asked, and I figured a woman who’s been knocked down that many times doesn’t need an old man reminding her where the curb is.” He shrugged. “But I’ll tell you the other thing, and then I’ll shut up. That shop on Ninth isn’t a charity. That old man isn’t a charity. He’s a man who looked at your work and saw your father in it. You can call that pity if you want. I call it a job.”

He picked up his thermos and screwed the lid on.

“And you should know,” he said, “that when the girl came home with that paper, she put it on your fridge. Under the magnet with the picture of your dad. She didn’t put it anywhere else.”

——

On Monday morning the doctor signed her out with a list of instructions and a warning she pretended not to hear. Walt drove her home. The apartment was clean, which meant Maisie had cleaned it, which meant Maisie had been worried in a way that made her fold towels.

The folded paper was on the fridge, under the magnet, exactly as Walt had said.

Jenna stood in her kitchen and read it three times. Then she took the phone off the wall and dialed the number in ballpoint ink, the rude hurried one.

It rang once.

“Hartley.”

“Mr. Hartley. This is Jenna Walsh.”

A pause on the line, but not a surprised one. “Miss Walsh. Your doctor—”

“Light work. He cleared me for light work. I’m coming in tomorrow morning.”

“Not one day before he says,” Graham said.

“He said. Eight o’clock.”

Another pause, longer. She heard something in the background—the sound of a piano, a single note struck and held and listened to until it died.

“Eight o’clock,” Graham said. “Ask for Claire at the front. She’ll have your code.”

“My code?”

“Door code. Everyone here has one. The panel logs who opens the door and when.” A dry pause. “Even me. My grandfather didn’t trust anybody, including himself.”

Jenna looked at the paper on the fridge, at the careful blue ink and the rude ballpoint number.

“Mr. Hartley. Before I come in. The man who called my daughter a charity case.”

The line was quiet for so long she thought it had dropped.

“Trent Kesler,” Graham said at last.

“Who is he to you?”

“My son-in-law,” Graham said. “My operations manager. And the man who has been trying to sell this building for two years.” A breath. “Why?”

Jenna ran her thumb along the edge of the note, back and forth, the way her father used to run a thumb along a hammer shank looking for a hairline crack.

“Because eight years ago he closed the shop I came from,” she said. “And I want to know whose idea it was that he come back.”