"It does that," I said. "Come here. Don't touch anything."
He came and stood beside the bench. He took his hand out of his pocket and opened it, and there it was, on his palm, the way the box had been on his palm in the Santa line. Clean. No potato. A white knight an inch and a half tall, with a long, slightly mournful face and a curving mane cut in narrow ridges and two small upright ears, both intact, standing on a round turned base.
I took it from him. I held it up to the work light clipped to the piano. I turned it all the way around. I checked both ears with my thumbnail.
"I used a Q-tip and a little hydrogen peroxide," Oren said. "And then I worried that was the wrong thing and looked up how to clean boxwood at four in the morning on my break. And then I used a little olive oil. Which a man in a woodworking forum said was a mistake. So I'm sorry if I ruined it."
"You didn't ruin it." My voice did something. I cleared my throat. "It's perfect. It's better. It looks like it's been somewhere."
"It's been in an ICU and a bowl of mashed potatoes."
"That's more than most knights can say." I closed my hand around it. "Thank you."
"You said that already. At the mall."
"I'm saying it again."
"Okay." He stood there with his hands back in his pockets. He looked at the guts of the piano, all the long gleaming strings and the felt hammers lined up like a choir. "So what are you doing? To it."
I showed him. I don't know why, exactly. I don't usually show people; most people don't want to know, and the ones who say they do get bored after about four minutes. But I showed him the pins and the strings, and how each note in the middle of the piano has three strings, and how you mute two of them with a little rubber wedge and tune the third, and then bring the others to it one at a time until the three of them sound like one. I showed him how when two strings are almost but not quite in tune with each other you hear a kind of beating, a wah-wah-wah in the sound, and how you move the pin a hair's breadth with the hammer and the beating slows, wah, wah, wah, and then stops, and the note opens up like a flower.
"Do it again," he said.
I did it again, on the A below middle C. Wah-wah-wah. Wah. Wah. And then the clean note, hanging in the gold room.