Mr. Haines took a little flashlight out of his bag and looked inside for a long time without speaking. Then he sat down on the bench and played a scale, quietly, up and down. Then some chords. Then a little piece of something, a waltz, that made the room suddenly feel bigger, and made my mother, standing in the doorway to the dining room, put a hand on the door frame.
He stopped. He played one note, over and over: E-flat, just above middle C.
"This one," he said. He looked up at my mother. "Ma'am, do you know about this one?"
"Know what about it?"
"Come and look."
She came, reluctantly, and stood beside the bench, and he held the flashlight close to the key so we could see. I came too and leaned in under her arm. The ivory on the white keys was yellow with age, the color of old teeth, and the black keys were a dull worn ebony, but the E-flat was different. It was worn smooth and shiny in the middle, almost glassy, with a shallow dip in it, a little hollow, like the step of an old staircase where people have walked for a hundred years.
"I've worked on pianos for forty-one years," Mr. Haines said. "You see wear on middle C, sometimes. On the keys in the middle where the beginners play. But I've never seen one key worn like that by itself. Somebody pressed this key, ma'am. Just this one, and not the ones around it. Thousands of times. Maybe tens of thousands." He shone the light down into the piano, onto the hammer for that key, and the felt on its tip was grooved and packed hard, darker than its neighbors. "Somebody played this one note every day for a long, long time."
My mother didn't say anything. I looked up at her face and it had gone completely still, the way the surface of water goes still just before it freezes.
"It was my mother's piano," she said finally.
"Well, she kept it beautifully," Mr. Haines said gently. "It's a lovely instrument. Very lovely. I'd be glad to give you four hundred for it, and I'd see it went to a good home. I'd need to replace that hammer, and probably re-bush the key. But I'd—" He stopped, because my mother had sat down suddenly on the arm of the couch.
"Mom?" I said.
"I'm fine." She pressed her hand flat against her breastbone. "I'm fine. Mr. Haines, I'm sorry. Could you—would you be able to come back after Christmas? I think I need a little time."