My mother had come out of the kitchen drying her hands on a dish towel with roosters on it. She looked at the piano for a long moment. Then she pointed at the wall of the living room between the front window and the doorway to the dining room, where the television had been until that morning, when my father had moved it into the corner by the recliner.
"There," she said. "Against the inside wall. Not near the window. The cold's bad for it."
My father raised his eyebrows at me over the top of the piano, a small private look that meant See? She knows things about it. I filed that away too.
They rolled it the last few feet on its little brass casters, which squealed against the wood floor and left two pale lines that my mother would later try to buff out with Pledge. When it was settled against the wall, Gus wiped his face with a red bandanna and slapped the top of it with his palm.
"Somebody play something," he said. "Christen it."
Sam lunged forward, and I let him go, and he opened the fallboard with a bang and smashed both fists down on the keys. The sound was enormous. It filled the room and the hall and went up the stairs, a terrible muddled roar, and under it there was something else, a kind of ringing, like the after-sound of a bell.
"Sam." My mother's voice was sharp enough to stop him mid-swing. "Close it, please."
"I was christening it."
"Close it."
He closed it. Gus laughed uneasily and said he should get the truck back to his brother-in-law. My father walked him out. My mother stood in the living room with the rooster towel in both hands and looked at the piano the way you'd look at a dog you'd been told was friendly but hadn't decided about yet.
"Mom," I said. "Can you play?"
"No," she said. Then, after a second, "Not anymore." Then she went back to the kitchen, and I heard the water running in the sink for a long time without any dishes being washed.