"Your grandmother," Mrs. Kostelnik said, "played that note every night of her life since 1965. That I know of. Every single night, right before she went up to bed. I'd hear it through the wall in the summer when the windows were open. One note. Just one. I asked her about it, oh, years ago, it must have been twenty years ago now. And she told me it was for Carrie."
I held on to the phone cord. "For my mom?"
"Your grandpa Walt worked second shift at the Quaker State, you know. Three to eleven. When your mother was small, she couldn't sleep till her daddy came home. She'd lie up there awake, worrying, the way little girls do. So June made a game of it. When she heard Walt's Hudson pull in the drive, she'd go to the piano and play one note. And upstairs, your mother would call down, 'I hear you.' And that meant Daddy's home and everybody's safe and you can go to sleep now. June said she started it when Carrie was four years old. She said it was the first note of a song she'd made up for her, a little lullaby, and Carrie knew it so well that just the first note was enough."
I couldn't say anything. I was looking through the kitchen doorway into the dining room, and through the dining room doorway into the living room, where I could just see one corner of the piano and, on the bench, a curve of orange fur.
"And then Walt passed," Mrs. Kostelnik said. "You know about that?"
"His heart."
"At work. On a Friday night, in March. He never came home. There wasn't any car in the drive, there was a phone call instead, and June had to go down to the hospital, and your mother was sixteen and alone in that house all night." Her voice wavered. "After that, your mother wouldn't answer it anymore. June told me. She'd play the note at night, same as always, the time Walt used to come home, to say, we're still here, you and me. And upstairs, nothing. Carrie wouldn't say it. Not once. Not ever again. And a couple of years later she went off to Erie to secretarial school and met your father and that was that."
"But Grandma kept playing it."
"Every night," Mrs. Kostelnik said. "Twenty-one years. After Carrie moved away. After her hands got so bad she couldn't play anything else, she could still press that one key. I'd come over evenings at the end, last year or so, to help her with her pills and get her settled, and she'd make me wait while she went to the piano. And that cat would jump right up, honey, every night, like it was his job. Sit right on the end of the keys. And she'd press it, and he'd purr at her, and she'd say 'Goodnight, Carrie,' and then she'd go up to bed, and he'd follow her up and sleep at the foot. Except she didn't go to her own room first. She'd go stand in the door of Carrie's old room for a minute. With the cat. Every night."
Oliver goes to my parents' room after, I thought. Not to my father. To her.
"I asked her once," Mrs. Kostelnik said, "why she kept doing it, when Carrie couldn't hear it from Erie. And you know what she said? She said, 'Edna, somebody in this house has to keep saying it. In case.'"