Part 8

CHAPTER 8 — The Plan in Motion

By Friday morning, three rebuilt hammers lay in a row, three more stood clamped in the rack, and Juno Walsh had not slept in thirty hours. The hours by the bench had fused into one long gray seam: the smell of hide glue, the soft click of the knife against the shank, the lamp burning longer than any lamp should.

She worked in shifts with Graham, who had gone home for four hours and come back in clothes that looked slept in. They kept the shop locked. They took calls on the office line but wrote nothing on the board. On Friday night they brought Walt and Maisie over, and Maisie sat at the counter doing her multiplication tables while the two of them moved through the action one hammer at a time.

“Ninety-three minutes,” Graham said once, peering at the metronome they weren’t using. “You’re ahead.”

“I’m not ahead.” She set a hammer into the stack. “Nineteen done. Three left. But then there’s the regulation and the voicing, and the voicing is what takes the time. It doesn’t matter if the hammers are rebuilt if they don’t sing the same thing.”

Walt, at the counter with his coffee, said without looking up, “She’ll get it. She got her hands from her dad.”

Graham looked at him. “You knew Frank Walsh?”

“Worked three buildings over from his shop for twenty years. He tuned for a school near Linquist. Every spring he’d come through my floor with his kit and raise hell because somebody’d put a radiator in the practice room.” Walt smiled. “He’d of hired you, you know. He’d of looked at your hands and hired you on the spot.”

Saturday came up clear and cold. By four in the afternoon Jenna had all twenty-two hammers rebuilt and set, and she was into the regulation. She had the action in the piano, and she was at the bench with a strip of felt and a small brass tool, adjusting the let-off one key at a time, listening with her head tilted like a bird’s.

At five, the phone on the office line rang. Claire answered it. She came back with her face changed.

“That was Dave Sutter. Sutter Development. He says he’s had a conversation with my husband and he’s prepared to make a formal offer Monday for the building and the shop, at a number that makes the last one look like a joke.” She set the phone down. “He wants a meeting at eight Monday morning. He says he’s bringing an appraiser and a lawyer.”

Graham did not look up from the piano. “Let him bring whoever he likes. The gala is at seven tonight. There won’t be a shop to sell by Monday if that piano sings.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Then there’s nothing to sell anyway, because Crestline will own the contract and this building will be worth four walls and a roof.” He set his tool down. “Which is why we’re not going to be distracted this afternoon. Jenna. Play the middle. All of it.”

Jenna played the middle of the keyboard, all the way up and down, slowly, and for the first time in three days the piano answered her.

The dead notes were gone. The tone was round and even, and it held, and it did not fall away or go hollow. It was not perfect yet—she could hear the top octave leaning a little bright—but it was a piano again.

Graham let out a breath like a man setting down something heavy.

“Now voice it,” he said.