It is October now, thirty years on, and I'm writing this at my own kitchen table in Pittsburgh with my daughter asleep upstairs.
My father did get called back to GE, in April of 1987, when an order came through from a railroad in Brazil. He worked there another nineteen years and retired with a gold watch he never wore and kept in its box in his sock drawer. We were all right that winter, the way my mother had said. Sam sold his Transformers tape dispenser to Jeremy Kaczmarek for three dollars. My mother called Mr. Haines the day after Christmas and told him she was keeping the piano, and he said, "I thought you might, ma'am," and in February he came back, on his own time, and replaced the hammer felt on the E-flat and re-bushed the key and tuned the whole thing, and would not let my father pay him. "Professional courtesy," he said, though none of us was a professional anything. "Between people who look after old instruments."
I went to the music room on the first day back after vacation and told Mr. Dombrowski everything. He listened with his apple in his hand and didn't eat it. When I was done, he took his huge glasses off and wiped them on the lining of his brown corduroy coat for a long time, and then he put them back on and said, "Well, Miss Haskins. Now you know." And that spring he started giving me lessons, Tuesday and Thursday during study hall, on the scarred Baldwin with the Wildcats sticker, for free.
Oliver lived four more years. He never stopped going to the piano at night. But after that Christmas Eve, the ritual changed, a little, the way rituals do when they're handed from one person to another. He would press the E-flat, just before midnight, and from upstairs my mother would call down, not loud, just loud enough, "I hear you." And he'd come up the stairs with his tail hooked like a question that had been answered, and go into my parents' room, and sleep at the foot of the bed on her side. Every night. My father said it was the most reliable thing in the house, more reliable than the furnace, more reliable than GE.
When he died, in the spring of 1991, curled on the radiator cover in the dining room in a patch of sun, my mother buried him in the backyard under the lilac, wrapped in one of my grandmother's dish towels. That night, at 11:52, she went down to the piano herself and pressed the E-flat, once, and stood listening to it fade. From my room I called down, "I hear you, Mom," and after a moment, in the dark, I heard her laugh.
She plays every day now. She's sixty-seven, and her hands are getting stiff the way her mother's did, but she plays. The Story and Clark is in her living room in Millcreek, against an inside wall, not near the window, because the cold's bad for it. She plays Chopin, and hymns, and Stephen Foster, and, when her granddaughter visits, she plays Carrie's Song, from the soft-cornered pencil pages, which she keeps in the bench, in a folder, with a blue letter bordered in forget-me-nots.
My daughter is four. She can't sleep when her father works late at the hospital. She lies up there in the dark and listens for his car.
I don't have a piano. I have a little Casio keyboard I've kept since college, and I set it up on the kitchen counter, and when I hear his car turn into the drive, I go and press one key. An E-flat. Just above middle C.
And from upstairs, every night, a small voice calls down, at the top of her lungs, so the whole house can hear:
"I hear you!"
And everyone is home. And everyone is safe. And all of us can sleep.