"Must sell," I said.
"Must sell," my mother said, not looking up from the dish she was drying.
"Where's Oliver going to go?"
"Oliver lives here. Oliver is not going anywhere."
"I mean at night. When he wants to play it."
"He'll stop," my mother said. "When it's gone, he'll stop. Cats forget things. That's the one mercy about them."
Sam, at the table with his Cocoa Puffs, said, "I don't want Grandma's ghost to get sold," and my mother put down the dish towel and went out the back door onto the porch in her slippers, without a coat, in twenty-degree weather, and stood there with her arms crossed until my father went out and brought her back in.
Three people called. One was a man who wanted to know if she'd take a hundred and fifty, and my mother said no and hung up on him. One was a woman from Fairview who asked a lot of questions about the bench and then said she'd think about it and never called back. The third was a piano technician named Mr. Haines, who restored old uprights and sold them out of a shop in a converted garage on West Twenty-Sixth Street, and who said he'd come by on Tuesday evening and take a look.
I hated him before he arrived. I had decided he would be oily and fat and smoke cigars. Instead he turned out to be a small, neat old man in a tan raincoat and galoshes, with a gray crew cut and a black leather bag like a doctor's, and he shook my hand when my mother introduced me, and he said "How do you do," and took off his galoshes at the door without being asked.
"Well, now," he said, when he saw the piano. "Well, now. Look at you."
He didn't play it right away. He walked all around it first, as much as he could with it against the wall, and ran his hand along the top, and crouched to look at the casters. He lifted the top lid and propped it, and opened the front panel above the keys, unhooking two little brass latches I hadn't known were there, and lifted it off and set it carefully against the couch. Inside, the piano was a city. I'd never seen it. There were the hammers in a long row, each one a little felt-tipped mallet on a wooden stem, and behind them the strings, hundreds of them, copper-wound at the low end and bright steel at the high end, stretched over an iron frame painted gold, with the words STORY & CLARK, CHICAGO stamped into the iron in a curling script. It smelled of dust and old wood and something sweetish, like the inside of a cedar chest.
Oliver, who had been sleeping on the radiator cover, raised his head.