The Piano (Paul Angstrom Stories) #1 Read online

  * * * * *

  When it was over, the most sensible thing would have been to sell the house. Judith didn’t want it, and Paul didn’t want it either, but just because it made fiscal sense didn’t mean it made emotional sense and so instead he hung onto it, like he was teaching himself a lesson, even if he could never figure what the lesson was.

  It was 1974, four years into marriage to Liz – his second wife – when Paul finally decided he had enough being taught the ungraspable lesson. It all started when Liz stood at the kitchen sink one evening, looked out the window at the branches scraping the house, and concluded the oak tree between the house and drive needed some trimming before one of those branches smashed through the window and showered somebody with broken glass. As Liz was most likely to be doing dishes, or anything else, in the kitchen, she determined she was most likely to be showered and since she refused to be killed or injured over something so silly, she made up her mind what was to be done.

  “I don’t think it needs to come down,” she said, after surveying the tree and going off to explain it to Paul. “But it definitely needs to be trimmed.”

  Paul did not disagree.

  Though Liz decided what was to be done, she left Paul to marshalling the plan into action, arranging for the various estimates from the contractors and nearly choking on his tongue when he had them, sure he was the victim of highway robbery.

  “I can’t believe anybody in good conscience would charge $200 just to trim some damn branches off the side of a tree,” he groused, spreading the estimates across the dining room table. “What on god’s earth do they think they’re doing? Brain surgery?”

  “It’s really not that much money, Paul,” Liz said.

  “My father would have to work a month to make $200 when I was a kid,” he said. “It’s a lot.”

  “Never mind your father,” she said. “Just pay the men and be done with it.”

  He looked at her, slightly befuddled.

  “It worries me how you can be so cheerful in the face of extortion,” he said. “Don’t you mind being stolen from?”

  “Quit being dramatic, Paul,” she said. “You’re paying men to do a job and this is the going rate.”

  “I’m not being dramatic – I’m aghast,” he said. “There’s a difference.”

  “You understand the tree’s a danger? To me?” she said. “Aren’t I worth $200 to you?”

  “You know you are.”

  “All right, then if I’m worth it, pay the money and be done with it,” she said. “Just think about me when you write the check and it’ll make you feel better about it.”

  He was thinking of her, but just because he was thinking of her did not mean he was willing to be taken advantage of and so, after careful consideration, he declared, “I’ll do it myself.”

  Liz had a laugh over that, easily finding humor in the thought of a man who earned his living from sitting on his rear end all day suddenly fancying himself a skilled woodsman – which is what he came to fancy himself, the lawyer-woodsman – but she could laugh like a hyena all she wanted and it would not be enough to break his determination. So, rather than pay the $200 he made a trip to the hardware store, where he considered all the models of chainsaws and brush trimmers on display, spending hours at it until finally he decided what he wanted in one and purchased a second-hand job out of the classifieds in the Gazette.

  “No sense buying new, when second-hand will do just fine,” he explained.

  “Of course not,” Liz said.

  “You know we’re not made of money, Liz.”

  “You keep saying that, yet you have this house,” she said. “You couldn’t have always been so cheap.”

  “Things were different then,” he said.

  “Couldn’t have been that different,” she said, but didn’t need it explained that Judith, the spendthrift first wife, was the difference.

  Up the tree, in the harness, sweating and covered in saw dust – Liz insisted on the harness, too young, she said, to be a widow – and the dead limbs arrayed on the ground below him like soldiers dead in the war, Paul had a fair bit of pride in himself. Liz might’ve made her jokes about his delicate hands before, but she wouldn’t make them now. But just a quickly as he felt it, pride passed when he looked across and saw that cupola atop the house staring back at him, the piano inside, top up, mocking him.

  For years he’d hated that piano but was unable to do anything about it. He couldn’t give it to Judith, because she didn’t want it, and even if she or anybody else did want it, they couldn’t have it anyway. The piano was Rapunzel in the tower, without the hair to climb down, so it just sat there, forever.

  “It’s up there,” he impotently told himself as his hatred grew. “And it’s staying there.”

  Chain saw in hand, though, impotence passed.

  * * * * *

  Liz was in the kitchen washing the dishes from lunch when Paul passed through. She had her back to him and didn’t notice anything beyond the smell of fresh sawn oak and sweat that drifted in after him. She did not turn around.

  “How’s it going out there?” she said, though she could perfectly well see the tree branches littering the ground from right where she was. “You making any progress?”

  “Great,” he said. “Everything is just great.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep, I still have all my fingers,” he said and held them up.

  “Well good, let’s keep it that way, all right?” she said. “I’m not interested in taking you to the emergency room today.”

  “Will do.”

  Upstairs, Liz’s daughter Grace was laying on the bed in her room. She was eight then, a year older than Benji, and was dressed in a pink tutu and singing along with a Beatles record she had on a little record player set up under the window.

  “Paul?” she said, stopping to look at him when he passed, toting the chainsaw with him.

  “Yeah, Gracie?”

  “You know you got a chainsaw, dontcha?”

  “I do,” he said.

  “In the house?”

  “That’s where I need it,” he said.

  “For what?” she said, her interest piqued.

  “Just a little woodwork,” he said.

  “In the house?”

  “Sure,” he said. “It’s where the wood is.”

  “Oh.”

  “You wanna see?”

  She said she did and so followed him up the attic stairs and then around the corner and up the stairs to the cupola, where the sun was shining in, as bright as any day ever was.

  “Maybe we should open the windows,” he said, and set the chainsaw aside.

  “Why?”

  “Because, Gracie, it’s gonna get dusty.”

  “All right,” she said and smiled brightly – her smiles were always bright – and she did as suggested, pulling up all the shades and opening the windows, letting the breeze ripple through.

  “All right, now stand back,” he said, when he lifted the chainsaw again. “And cover your ears – it might get loud.”

  * * * * *

  He took the piano apart in several pieces. First, he halved the lid lengthwise, cutting it in two long strips, first down the middle, then along the hinge, which was appropriately a piano hinge. After he cut them, Grace went to work heaving the pieces out the window as far as an eight year old girl could, taking time to admire the arc of each as they fell to the ground.

  The keyboard followed the top, flung into the air with the keys scattering about like teeth lost in a fist-fight. Then he took out its torso, following around the outline of the cast iron spine that kept the whole thing from folding up – as he cut through the strings, they plinked and plonked loudly in protest – and finally, he crippled it beyond all repair, taking out the legs in one fell swoop.

  “And now the bench,” Paul announced, when that was all that remained. “It goes too.”

  Even though Liz had been doing the dishes s
he hadn’t paid much mind to the sound of the saw, certain it was outside – after all, while it was in the house, the sound was muffled enough it just as easily could have been outside, and so she thought it was – until she realized it wasn’t pieces of the tree falling from the sky.

  Outside to investigate, she marveled at the debris, not sure how this could have happened and how they came to be there, until she looked up and saw Gracie brushing piano keys off the window ledge and watching them tumble off the roof and spill to the ground.

  “Hi mom,” she yelled and waved once, as if it wasn’t unusual at all what she was doing.

  Liz returned the wave, but said nothing.

  Later, at dinner, after the job was done and the saw rested on the workbench in the garage and Paul had a shower to rinse off the grime and sawdust, Liz asked about the brush in the yard leftover from the tree, what was to be done with it.

  “Neighbor has a chipper-shredder,” he said. “Gonna let me borrow it – I’ll owe him a beer.”

  “And the piano?” she said. “Will that go through the shredder, too?”

  “Haven’t decided,” he said. “Probably not, though. Maybe a fire. That seems best.”

  “Whatever you do with it, you can’t leave it lay all over the lawn like that,” Liz said. “People will think we’re maniac’s living here.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll handle it.”

  “If you say so,” Liz said and shrugged. Then, “Say, while you’re at it, would you take down that sign in the front?”

  “I like the sign, mom,” Gracie said, picking at her dinner.

  “Well, I don’t,” Liz said. “What does it even mean? Beechwood?”

  “I don’t know,” Paul said.

  “If we have a fire, I want marshmallows,” Grace said. “Can we have hot dogs and marshmallows?”

  “Of course we can,” Paul said. “Of course we can.”

  * * * * *

  Judith did manage one last look at the piano before it met its ultimate end. It was her baby, aftar all, the thing she’d been most stubborn to get when they were together and Paul thought it only fair she clap eyes on it one last time and so he left it in a heap in the yard until the next time she brought Olivia and Benji for the weekend.

  Paul could see her from the front window when she came, pulling up in her Buick and climbing out to look over the pieces and the sign atop it, as the children stomped off to the house. Coming out, he wanted to needle her over it, to get a reaction from her, but when he did, she said little. He wasn’t sure what sort of reaction he expected, but whatever it was, it was not apathy.

  “A bit wasteful, don’t you think?” was about all she said.

  “I agree,” he said. “I always thought the piano was wasteful.”

  She did not argue this point, instead used Olivia’s sudden reappearance and complaints about how unfair it was Grace took her old room, and how it proved Paul did not love her, to leave.

  “You probably wish you never had me!” she bellowed, as Judith drove away. “You probably wish I was never born!”

  “Sometimes that’s true,” he muttered and sent her inside, where she could engage in her histrionics without the entire neighborhood acting as an audience.

  Instead of following and trying to convince her he did love her, Paul stalked off to the garage, dug out the gas can, carried it back to the pile and splashed the contents everywhere, until it was empty. When lit, the piano made a lovely fire, bright orange and burning hot, perfect for Grace and Benji, both of whom gladly cooked hot dogs on sticks over it, and then marshmallows for smores, while Olivia spent the evening – and her life – pouting.

  Also by J.L. Hohler III

  Fiction

  While You Were Here

  Peck: A Novel

  Young Adult Novels

  Short Stories

  Special Editions and Other Stories

  The Paul Angstrom Stories

  Vacancy

  Parenthood

  Novellas

  The Lake House

  Collections

  Underground Sensation: The Complete, Uncut Compendium of The fabled, Intentionally Little-Known, Sometimes Offensive, Often Controversial But Always Readable Blind Monkey Times