"Of course," he said. "Of course, ma'am. Take all the time you need." He fitted the front panel back on and latched it and closed the lid, and put his flashlight back in his bag, and put his galoshes back on at the door. Before he left he turned around and looked at the piano one more time. Then he looked at me.
"Whoever it was," he said, "they meant it. You don't wear down ebony by accident."
When he had gone, my mother went up to her room, and in a few minutes, I heard my parents' door click, and Oliver came down the stairs and sat on the bench in the dark and looked at the wall above the piano, where there was nothing but the little brown baskets.
* * *
My mother kept her address book in the drawer under the wall phone, with the rubber bands and the twist ties and the coupons for Isaly's chipped ham she never used. It was a small red book with a gold pen clipped to it, and the pages were soft from being thumbed. I'd never looked inside it before. I wasn't sure I was allowed to.
On Saturday morning, the twentieth of December, my father took Sam to the Millcreek Mall to see Santa, which Sam claimed he was too old for but went to anyway, and my mother went with them because she had shopping to do that she said I couldn't know about. I said I had a stomachache and wanted to stay home and read. My mother put her cool hand on my forehead and frowned and said there was ginger ale in the fridge, and then they were gone, and the station wagon's taillights went down Wolf Street in the gray snow light, and the house was mine.
I knew what I was looking for. At the funeral in October, while the grown-ups stood around the long table in the church basement eating ham salad on little rolls, there'd been an old woman who kept holding my mother's hands in both of her own and saying "Carrie, Carrie." She was the only person I'd ever heard call my mother that. She had a hairnet and a wool coat with a fur collar that smelled like mothballs, and when she bent down to me she'd said, "You're June's granddaughter. You've got her chin." Her name was Mrs. Kostelnik. She had lived next door to my grandmother for thirty-five years. She was the one who'd found her, that morning in October, and she was the one who'd taken Oliver home and fed him until my mother came.
She was under K in the red book, in my mother's small slanting handwriting. Edna Kostelnik, 1104 West First St., Oil City. And a number with an 814 in front of it.
I stood at the wall phone with the receiver in my hand for a long time. Long distance was expensive. Long distance was the kind of thing you did on Sunday nights after seven when the rates went down, standing in the kitchen with a timer going. A call to Oil City in the middle of a Saturday would show up on the bill in January, itemized, with the time and the number of minutes, and my parents would see it, and there would be a talk. And my father had just gotten his notice.
I dialed anyway. The rotary dial made its long whirring returns, 8, 1, 4, and I counted the rings. Four. Five. I was about to hang up.
"Hello?"