She stared at the house, beige dust in front from where her father had squealed off. Okay? Her father was going to prison and thought she was a wretch.
“He might plead,” she said loudly. “My dad. My mom just told me.”
“Lex and Forty-third,” Scot said. “Your dad might what? Sorry, the connection’s bad.”
“Plead. Plead guilty. I don’t know what you know, if you know, about the investigation. The indictment. But he’s going to plead guilty. It might mean prison.” Her voice was getting increasingly bitter. “My father in prison. Nice, right? The host committee of the Bal is going to be psyched about that one.” For once, she wanted to talk about it. “Did everyone know? Does everyone know? I know Camilla says indictments are no big deal, but Scot, the idea of my dad in prison. He’s not that tough, my dad, and prison, and my mom has never worked, and she’s going to be alone, and it’s going to be such a mess. And the money, Scot. I don’t know what to do about the money.”
“Ev?” Scot blurted.
“What?” She needed to hear that he loved her, that he would help her.
“Evelyn? Hello? Hello?”
“Scot. Scot?”
“There, I can hear you now. Sorry. I lost you there. So who did what?”
Evelyn’s face constricted. “You didn’t hear any of that.”
“No, sorry. What’s going on?”
Her eyes were still trained on her house; her mother hadn’t bothered to shut the front door. “Never mind,” she said, after an empty silence.
“No, I’m sorry, tell me.”
“It was nothing. It is nothing.”
“Something with your father?”
She walked to the front door and saw her mother sitting on the stairs. “No. Nothing. I have to go.” Evelyn pressed end.
“Who was that?” Barbara asked.
“No one. Camilla,” Evelyn said.
“Have you told her your father can’t do her party?” Barbara said. “The party he was so flattered by?”
“God.” Evelyn pressed her head against the cell phone and made it jam into her head “No, I know. I’m just—just give me a minute.”
“So many phone calls to make, and things to do,” Barbara said. “I remember that. Life. It used to be so short, Evie. Is that what yours is like? When I see the pictures of you, I think maybe it is. When the days went by in a whirl and the nights weren’t long enough, and we were frantic with excitement for the next party. I can’t grasp, now, how it all seemed like that. Can you imagine, wishing the next day would hurry and arrive? Now I wish it would hurry and pass. Life gets so long when you grow old.”
“You’re not old, Mom,” Evelyn muttered without much conviction, still pressing her head into the phone.
“What’s my obituary going to say, Evelyn?”
“What?”
“Don’t say ‘what’; you sound like a duck. I’ve spent all my life raising you and tending to your father, and what’s my obituary going to say?”
“Mom, you’re not dying.”
“Mother and wife; that’s a single line. Resident of Bibville; that’s two.”
Evelyn swallowed, watching her mother stare up at the ceiling. She wasn’t wrong.
Dully, Evelyn turned and with heavy legs walked into the piano room. The one thing Evelyn could do over the muted roar in her head was play. If she could get her fingers to move over “Somewhere” she felt like she could get her mind away from this.
When she walked through the door this time, though, she saw the cabinets first, which should have been blocked by the piano. It took a moment for her to understand that the piano was gone. The only sign that it had ever been there was a rectangular patch on the floor where the rug had been.
“Mom? Mom?” Her voice was an octave higher than usual. She ran back to the foyer. “Mom, where’s the piano?”
Her mother hadn’t moved. “Evie,” she said. “Along with a plea deal would be millions in restitution. The firm is suing him separately. And the legal bills are just astronomical. The Steinway dealer had an inquiry from an auction house.”
“You sold it?”
“We didn’t have a choice.”
All those mornings of songs. All those late afternoon sunshine-drenched sessions. All the pieces she had mentally set aside as ones she would play with her own daughter, showing her the fingering and the pressure and imagining how patient she would be with the girl. Gone. She didn’t get to play it one last time. Didn’t get to tell it what it had meant to her. The smooth ivory and the shiny black keys and the heavy pedals and the cool wood, and the songs she could coax out of there and the times her mother had played and Evelyn had sat in the sunshine and been happy.
“It’s not just the piano,” Barbara said quietly. “It’s the house. Sag Neck.”