“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.”
As you might expect, in a household of boys and young men, it wasn’t so much spoken that one of us was leaving. He just was.
Tommy knew.
The mule, too.
Clay had stayed the night at The Surrounds again, waking Sunday morning, with the box still in his hands.
He sat and reread the letter.
He held the lighter and Matador in the fifth.
* * *
—
At home he brought the box inside and put the Murderer’s sticky-taped address in, placed it deep beneath his bed, then quietly did his sit-ups, on the carpet.
About halfway through, Tommy appeared; he could see him from the edge of his sight, each time he came back down. The pigeon, T, was on his shoulder, and a breeze flapped Henry’s posters. They were musicians, mostly; old ones. A few actresses; young and womanly.
“Clay?”
Tommy triangled each time into sight.
“Can you help me later with his feet?”
He finished up and followed to the backyard, and Achilles was near the clothesline. Clay walked over and gave him a sugar cube, open hand, then crouched and tapped a leg.
The first hoof came up; it was clean.
Then the second.
When the job was done on all four, Tommy was hurt in his usual way, but there was nothing for Clay to do. You can’t change the mind of a mule.
To cheer him up, he took two more small white sugar cubes out.
He handed one over to Tommy.
The yard was full of morning.
An empty beanbag lay flat on the porch; it had slid off the ledge of the couch. In the grass was a bike with no handlebars, and the clothesline stood tall in the sun.
Soon Rosy came out from the shelter we’d built for Achilles at the back. She got to the Hills Hoist and started rounding it up, and the sugar lay melting on their tongues.
Near the end, Tommy said it:
“Who’ll help me with this when you’re gone?”
To which Clay did something that caught even himself by surprise: He grabbed Tommy by the scruff of his T-shirt, and threw him on Achilles, bareback.
“Shit!”
Tommy had quite a shock, but soon gave himself over; he leaned in at the mule and laughed.
* * *
—
After lunch, as Clay started out the front door, Henry held him back.
“And where the hell do you think you’re going?”
A brief pause. “The cemetery. Maybe Bernborough.”
“Here,” said Henry, grabbing his keys, “I’ll come with you.”
When they got there, they leaned forward, into the fence, they navigated the graves. At the one they wanted they crouched they watched they folded their arms they stood in the afternoon sun; they looked at the corpse of tulips.
“No daisies?”
They half laughed.
“Hey, Clay?”
Both were slouched yet stiff, and Clay now came to face him; Henry was affable as ever, but different in some way, too, looking out across the statues.
At first he just said, “God.” A long silence. “God, Clay.” And he pulled something out of his pocket. “Here.”
Hand to hand:
A nice big slice of money.
“Take it.”
Clay looked closer.
“It’s yours, Clay. Remember the bets at Bernborough? You wouldn’t believe how much we made. I never even paid you.”
But no, this was more, it was too much, a paperweight of cash. “Henry—”
“Go on, take it,” and when he did, he held its pages in his hand.
“Hey,” said Henry. “Oi, Clay,” and he met him, properly, in the eyes. “Maybe buy a Goddamn phone, like someone normal—let us know when you actually get there.”
And Clay, a smile, of scorn:
No thanks, Henry.
“Okay—use every bloody cent for a bridge then.” The wiliest of boyish grins. “Just give us the change when you’re done.”
* * *
—
At Bernborough Park, he did some laps, and after rounding the ruin of the discus net, he was given a nice surprise—because there, at the 300-meter mark, was Rory.
Clay stopped, his hands on quadriceps.
Rory watched with his scrap-metal eyes.
Clay didn’t look up, but smiled.
Far from angry or betrayed, Rory was somewhere between amusement for the oncoming violence, and a perfect understanding. He said, “I gotta give it to you, kid—you’ve got heart.”
And Clay stood fully upright now, first silent as Rory went on.
“Whether you’re gone three days or three years…You know Matthew’ll kill you, don’t you? When you come back.”
A nod.
“Will you be ready for him?”