"I said you'd ruin it," he said. "You were ten. I was fourteen, and I was a jerk, and you were the only person in this family who ever stood up to me. And then you left. And I said it was because you were selfish. And I said a lot of things after Dad's birthday, Greta, to Joelle and to Mom and to anybody who would listen, and a lot of them were worse than what you said at the party, they just weren't in front of the Lutherans." He wiped his face with the dish towel. "And you were right about the store."
I stared at him.
"Not the corpse part," he said. "That was mean. But I'm closing the showroom in March. I'm selling the building on Sherman to a guy who's opening a brewery. Dad doesn't know yet. I'm going to tell him after New Year's." He took a breath. "I'm keeping the shop in the back. The repair shop. Rebuilds, restorations. There's more work than I can handle, honestly, old pianos from people's grandmothers, there's people driving them over from Missoula. I just can't do the technical work like you can. I never could. I was going to call somebody in Seattle." He looked down at the knight in his hand. "I wasn't going to call you. I figured you'd say I told you so."
"I would never say I told you so."
"You would absolutely say I told you so."
"I would say it once," I admitted. "Quietly. And then I'd come over on weekends and help you rebuild a Mason and Hamlin for a lady from Missoula."
He laughed then, really laughed, and behind him the door opened all the way and Liv shot out of it in her socks and a velvet dress and flung herself onto me so hard I nearly went over the porch rail into the snow, and my mother was in the doorway with her hands over her mouth, and my father behind her saying, Is that Greta? Is that Greta? in the voice of a man who had perhaps hoped for this and not admitted it, and Torben put his free hand on the back of my neck the way he used to when I was small and we were crossing a street, and steered me in out of the cold.
I will not tell everything about that night. Some of it was hard. My mother cried and then was angry and then cried again, and my father didn't say much, which is how my father has always said a great deal. Joelle hugged me in the kitchen for a long time and then held me at arm's length and said, "You look terrible. Eat something," which was so much like Mrs. Okabe-Lund that I laughed and couldn't explain why. There were Swedish meatballs and lefse and the green Jell-O salad nobody likes and everyone eats. At some point Liv found the Santa picture in my bag, and held it up and said, "Who's the man with his arm out?" and every adult in the room went quiet and looked at me.
"That's Oren," I said. "He's the one who caught it."
"Is he your boyfriend?"
"I've known him for five days."
"Is he going to be your boyfriend?"
"Liv," said Joelle.