I held it out. She looked at it for a long time without taking it, and I watched her read the two words on the front. For Carrie. I watched her know the handwriting. Then she took it, very carefully, with both hands, the way you'd take something that might spill.
"Where did you get this?"
"In the piano. Behind the front. Where the music goes. Mrs. Kostelnik said Grandma told her to tell you. She said she told you at the funeral, but you didn't hear."
"You talked to Edna?"
"I called her. Long distance. On Saturday. It was fourteen minutes. I'll pay for it. I have nineteen dollars from babysitting the Novaks."
My mother made a sound I'd never heard her make, half a laugh and half something else. She didn't open the envelope. She held it against her chest, flat, with both hands over it.
"Come here," she said, and moved over on the bench, and I sat down beside her. The bench was cold through my nightgown. Upstairs, my father snored.
"I'm not going to be able to read this right now," she said. "Okay? I'm going to read it. I promise you. But not right this second. I need to tell you something first, and I think if I read it first I won't be able to." She took a breath that shook going in. "Did Edna tell you about the note?"
"She said it was the first note of a song. Grandma played it every night when Grandpa came home. And you'd call down, I hear you."
"That's right." My mother looked at the keys. "Every night of my life. I'd lie in bed and listen for his car. He drove a 1951 Hudson Hornet, green, and it had a hole in the muffler, so you could hear it turn off Seneca Street a block away. And then Mama would go to the piano, and I'd hear it." She reached out, slowly, and touched the E-flat with one finger. She didn't press it. She just laid her fingertip in the little worn hollow. "This note. Just this one. And I'd yell, I hear you, at the top of my lungs, and I'd hear my dad laughing in the kitchen. Every single night."
"Mrs. Kostelnik said he died at work."