* * *
—
She walked into the shop and her pockets were bulging.
The shopkeeper’s face lit up.
“You’re here!”
“Yes.” She was breathing heavily. Sweating soggily.
“You got a thousand dollars?”
“I have…” She took out the notes. “Nine hundred…and forty-seven.”
“Yes, but—”
Penny slapped her hands on the counter, making paw prints in the dust, her fingers and palms all clammy. Her face was level with his; her shoulder blades threatened to dislocate. “Please. I must play one today. I will pay the rest as the money comes—but I must try one, please, today.”
For the first time, the man didn’t force his smile on her; his lips parted only to speak. “Okay then.” He waved and walked, simultaneously. “Over here.”
Of course, he’d directed her to the cheapest piano, and it was nice, the color of walnut.
She sat at the stool; she lifted the lid.
She looked at the boardwalk of keys:
A few were chipped, but through the gaps of her despair, she was already in love, and it hadn’t yet made a sound.
“And?”
Penny turned slowly to look at him, and she was close to collapsing, within; she was the Birthday Girl again.
“Well, come on then,” and she nodded.
She focused on the piano and remembered an old country. She remembered a father and his hands on her back. She was in the air, high in the air—a statue behind the swings—and Penelope played and wept. In spite of such a long piano-playing drought, she did it beautifully (one of Chopin’s nocturnes) and she tasted the tears on her lips. She sniffed them up and sucked them in, and played everything right, and perfectly:
The Mistake Maker made no mistakes.
And next to her, the smell of oranges.
“I see,” he said, “I see.” He was standing at her side, on the right. “I think I see what you mean.”
He gave it to her for nine hundred, and organized delivery.
* * *
—
The only problem was that the salesman didn’t only have atrocious hearing and a shambles of a shop—his handwriting was shocking, too. Had it been even slightly more legible, my brothers and I wouldn’t even exist—for instead of reading 3/7 Pepper Street from his own pen, he sent the delivery men to 37.
As you can imagine, the men were miffed.
It was Saturday.
Three days after she’d bought it.
* * *