"It feels like my fault."
"Yeah, well. Feelings are liars about half the time." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Did your mom ever tell you about your Grandpa Walt?"
"He died when she was a kid. He had a heart attack."
"She was sixteen." My father looked at the piano. "He worked at the Quaker State refinery in Oil City. Big guy, loud, funny. Played the harmonica, not well. I never met him, of course, I didn't meet your mom till she was nineteen. But she talked about him. Back then she did." He was quiet for a second. "Back when we were dating, your mom used to play the piano. You know that? Did you know that?"
I shook my head, although in a way I'd known it, the way you know there's a room in a house you've never been in.
"There was an old upright in the basement of the Methodist church on Peach Street, where they had the dances, and sometimes after, when everybody was cleaning up, she'd sit down at it. She didn't play rock and roll or anything. She played these slow, pretty things. I don't know what they were. People would stop stacking chairs to listen. I'm not kidding you. Grown men would stand there holding a folding chair." He smiled. "That's half of why I married her. I figured, a girl who can make guys stop stacking chairs."
"Why did she stop?"
"I don't know." He said it plainly, like a fact he'd made his peace with. "One day she just did. Right around when we got married. I asked her about it once or twice and she said she'd lost interest, and the third time I asked she gave me a look, and I didn't ask a fourth time." He looked at me. "There's something there, between her and her mom, and between her and that piano. I've never known what it is. It's not my business to dig it up, Lib, and it's not yours, either, really. Even when it's hard. Even when you want to help."
"But Oliver keeps digging it up."
My father laughed, a short, surprised sound. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, he does. Can't exactly ground the cat."
He got up and went upstairs and knocked on the bedroom door, softly, and said, "Carol? It's me," and the door opened and shut. I heard their voices through the ceiling, low, and then not at all.
I sat with Oliver until it was dark and Sam came home smelling like the Kaczmareks' house, which smelled like pierogies and cigarettes, talking about Super Mario at a hundred miles an hour.