"Hey," he said.
"Hey."
"You came."
"I said I would." She came over and stood beside the piano, on his right. "What are you doing? Right now?"
"Setting the temperament. The middle octave. Everything else gets tuned off of it, so it's got to be right." He struck the key again. "This is A. Four forty. You hear that?"
She heard it. Faintly. In her right ear, like a sound coming from the next room.
"I hear it," she said.
He looked at her for a moment. Then he reached into the pocket of his corduroy jacket, which was hanging on the back of a folding chair, and took out a small steel fork, like a dinner fork with only two tines, and held it up.
"Can I try something?" he said. "You can say no."
"What is it?"
"It's a tuning fork. I use it to check myself. Every tuner's got one." He turned it over in his fingers. "Mr. Ullrich, in Fort Wayne, he had a customer once who was going deaf. Older lady, played the organ at her church in New Haven. And he showed her a thing you can do with one of these. A doctor showed him, he said. It tells you whether it's the nerve or something else. I don't know if it's true. But if you want, we can see."
Cass looked at the fork for a long moment. Then she said, "All right."
He struck the fork against his knee, so that it rang, and he held it next to her left ear. She heard nothing. A faint pressure of air. Then he took it away and, before it stopped ringing, set the stem of it very gently against the bone behind her left ear, the hard knob of bone there, and pressed.
And she heard it.