I sat very still.
"Anyway," he said. "I'm going to go home now and sleep for nine hours, which is a personal record. If the knight turns up, Delbert has your number. And so do I."
He put two twenties on the table, which was too much, and when I tried to give him money he said, "You can get the next one," and then he heard what he had said and colored very slightly along the cheekbones, and stood up and put on his orange hat and went out into the snow.
I sat in the booth for a long time, looking at my grilled cheese. Then I paid for a slice of pie I didn't eat either and drove home, and Mrs. Okabe-Lund met me at the bottom of the stairs with another loaf of banana bread and said, "You look thin and also like somebody died," and I said, "Nobody died, I just lost a horse," and she nodded as though that made perfect sense and gave me the bread anyway.
At eight-fifteen that night my phone buzzed. It was a picture. It took a moment to understand what I was looking at. It was a dinner plate, a big blue one, and on it was a heap of mashed potatoes, and in the middle of the mashed potatoes, standing up perfectly straight like a tiny mountaineer on a summit, with a little dollop of potato on the tip of one ear, was a white knight.
Under it, Oren had written: SO.
And then: I took a nap at Hen's because I'm an idiot and couldn't make it home. Woke up for dinner. Bo pulled my hat off my head to see if I was bald under it (I'm not). Something fell out of the cuff. Directly into the potatoes. It must have been in the fold since the snowdrift. I have been wearing it on my head for 30 hours. I wore it to work. I wore it in the ICU. I wore it while I searched the snowdrift for it.
And then: Hen says I'm not allowed to give it back until I explain the whole thing to her. She has a lot of questions. She also wants you to know she's in the picture this year after all, in spirit, and she's sorry about the vomit.
And then: It's fine. One ear has a little potato on it. I'll clean it with a q-tip. I'm a medical professional.
I was laughing so hard I had to sit down on the outside stairs in the snow. Mrs. Okabe-Lund opened her door downstairs and looked up at me and said, "Is the horse back?" and I said, "The horse is back," and she said, "Good," and closed the door.
He brought it to me on Monday, the twenty-first, at the Fox. I had told him I'd come get it wherever he was, but he said he was curious what a piano technician actually did all day, and I said all day was overstating it, but if he wanted to watch me tune a nine-foot Steinway for the symphony's Messiah, he could come at three, and I'd tell the stage door guy to let him in.
The Fox is an old art deco movie palace on Sprague that the symphony saved from the wrecking ball in the nineties, and in the afternoon with the house lights at half it is one of the most beautiful rooms in the world, all gold and green and silver, with a sunburst on the ceiling and murals of stylized pine trees on the walls. The piano sat in the middle of the bare stage with its lid up and its fallboard off, and I was sitting at it with my tuning hammer and my mutes when Oren came out of the wings with his hands in his jacket pockets and the orange hat in one of them, looking around like a man who has wandered into a cathedral by mistake.
"Wow," he said, and his voice went all the way to the back of the balcony and came back, and he flinched.