Part 7

CHAPTER 7 — The Turning Point

After Diane left, Graham sat down heavily at the bench and did not move for a long time. Claire stood with her back against the wall. Maisie had not moved from beside the window chair, her book closed in her hands, watching the adults the way a child watches weather.

“I fired her in front of her daughter on his word,” Graham said. “I looked at three hammers with no name on them and I believed the man with the smile.”

“Dad.”

“And then she pulled the action in front of the client and proved it anyway.”

“Dad.” Claire’s voice was gentle now. “Go fix it before Saturday.”

Graham looked up. Then he looked at Maisie, who was still standing very still, and something in his face changed.

He crossed the room and crouched down in front of her so that their eyes were level, and it cost him something to do it, bending those old knees on the workshop floor.

“Maisie. I’m sorry for what you saw today. I’m sorry I said your mother was done. I was wrong, and I did it in front of you, and that’s the worst part.” He paused. “I’m not going to fire your mom again. Not ever.”

Maisie considered this. “You promise?”

“I promise.”

“Then get up,” she said. “You’re too old to be down there.”

Graham got up. Claire made a sound that was almost a laugh, and pressed her fingers to her mouth, and looked away.

——

That night Jenna did not go home. She called Walt and asked him to take Maisie, and Walt, who understood the arithmetic of a woman and a broken piano, said only, “I’ll get her to school in the morning. You eat something.”

She ate a sandwich from the corner deli and drank two cups of bad coffee and turned on the lamp over the bench, and she began.

The work was enormous, and it was exactly the work she had done all her life, and she was good at it. She rebuilt the twenty-two dead hammers from the shanks up, because the shanks were good and only the felt was gone, and Jenna did not throw away a good shank out of pride. She soaked and shaped new felt and hammered it onto the mold and cut it to the right weight. She glued and clamped and set them in the drying rack in rows. By two in the morning she had rebuilt eleven. By four she had seventeen. At five-thirty Graham came in, in his shirtsleeves with his sleeves already rolled, and found her at the bench with her hands black with glue.

“You went all night.”

“I did.”

“You shouldn’t have.”

“I know.” She set another hammer in the rack. “But the piano doesn’t care what I shouldn’t have done. It only cares whether I did it.”

Graham took off his jacket and hung it on the hook and sat down at the bench beside her, and he picked up a hammer shank and a knife and reached for the felt, and said, “Show me the weight you’re cutting.”

And for the next hour the two of them worked side by side in silence, an old man and a woman, rebuilding a piano older than both of them, and it was, Jenna thought, the closest thing to a church she had been inside in eight years.

At six the sun came up over the alley and laid a long gold stripe across the bench. And Graham, without looking up, said, “Jenna. That name. Sutter Development. That’s not the first time I’ve heard it in connection with Trent.”

“What do you mean?”

“The firm that closed your shop. You said a consultant from Chicago. That was Sutter.”

Jenna’s knife stopped. “You’re sure?”

“I called Diane’s office this evening and had them pull the file on Sutter. I wanted to know who I was signing with, back when I thought I might actually sign.” He set the hammer down. “It’s the same firm. Trent didn’t come to my family eleven years ago by chance, Jenna. He came because he closes things. That’s what the firm hired him for. He finds a company that’s a little soft, wedges himself into the family, and waits for the right moment to sell the building out from under the people who love it.”

Jenna stared at the bench. Eleven years. He had been in this family eleven years, and he had been waiting.

“Why didn’t he close the shop years ago?”

“Because there was still a Hartley with his hands on the bench. My old technician retired five years ago. Since then it’s been me and whatever contractors I could get, and I haven’t been able to keep up the rebuild work, and the shop has slipped. He’s been watching it slip.” Graham looked at the piano. “If it weren’t for the Asheford contract coming up for renewal, and me being too proud to hire anyone good enough to threaten him—”

“He’d have already done it.”

“He thinks he already has.” Graham picked up the hammer and the knife again. “He thinks nobody can rebuild this action in three days. He’s wrong. But he’s not going to sit still and watch. Whatever we do between now and seven on Saturday, he’ll try to stop it.”

Jenna looked at the rows of rebuilt hammers. Eleven done. Eleven to go.

“Then we don’t tell anyone where I am,” she said. “And we keep the crate locked, and the door log open, and one of us stays in this room every hour until Saturday.”

Graham nodded slowly. Then he reached into his pocket, took out a ring of keys, and set them on the bench between them.

“These are the only keys to the back door lock besides yours. I’ve carried them thirty years.” He pulled one off the ring. “Take the crate key. Keep it on you. Don’t set it down, not once, until that piano sings.”

Jenna took it. It was small, and cold, and heavier than it looked.

“And Jenna.” Graham met her eyes. “When it’s done—when the piano sings on Saturday—I want to know who signed the report that closed your shop. I want a name in writing. Because when I’m finished with Saturday, I’m going to use it.”