"It is very cold."
"I hear it's going to snow on Christmas."
"I hear that too."
We stood there. The line moved up one family. The little girl in front of us had moved on from horses to whether the horses could live in her bedroom.
"Our family has a piano store," I said. "In Coeur d'Alene. Sorvik Piano and Organ. My grandfather started it in 1968 after he moved out from Minnesota, and then my dad ran it, and the plan, since I was about six years old, was that my brother and I would run it together when my dad retired. Torben would do the business and I'd do the instruments. I'm a piano technician. I tune, I rebuild actions, I regulate. I'm good at it. I'm better at it than anybody in eastern Washington, and I'm not being modest because I'm not a modest person."
"I'm getting that."
"Five years ago I left. I took a contract with the symphony here in Spokane and I started my own business, and I told everybody it was because I needed to grow, which was partly true, and it was partly because the store was dying. Nobody buys pianos anymore. People buy keyboards on the internet that they play for six weeks and then put in the garage. My dad didn't want to see it and Torben didn't want to see it, and I could see it, and I couldn't stand it. And at Dad's birthday, Torben stood up and gave a toast about how the store was going to be around for another fifty years, and he'd just taken out a second mortgage on his house to keep it going, which I hadn't known, and I'd had three glasses of wine, and I stood up after him and said—" I stopped.
Oren waited.
"I said that he was keeping a corpse on life support because he was too much of a coward to ever do anything else with his life. And that Grandpa would have been ashamed of him." I looked at the floor, at the scuffed white tile and a smashed piece of candy cane. "In front of his wife. And his daughter, who was six. And my parents. And about forty people from the Lutheran church."
Oren didn't say anything for a moment. Then he said, "Was it true?"
I looked up. Nobody had ever asked me that. My mother had asked how I could, and my father had asked why I'd done it on his birthday, and my sister-in-law, Joelle, had asked me, very quietly, in the parking lot, if I had any idea what that had cost Torben to hear. Nobody had asked if it was true.
"The part about the store was true," I said. "The part about him being a coward wasn't. He's the bravest person I know. He's just brave about the wrong things."
"Which part about Grandpa?"