“It shows. Unlike these two useless— Oi! This way!”
And there, right there, she looked over, and the man from number thirty-seven gave her the crease of a collegial smile, then tucked it back inside him.
* * *
—
At the apartment, though, with the piano in place by the window, Michael Dunbar didn’t stay. She asked what she might give him as a gift for helping, whether wine or maybe beer, or wódka (had she really said that?), but he wouldn’t hear a word of it. He said goodbye and left, but when she played she saw him listening; her first experimental notes. The piano still in need of retuning.
He was out by the line-up of garbage bins.
When she stood to look closer he was gone.
* * *
—
In the weeks that followed, there was definitely a sense of something.
They’d never seen each other till the day of the piano, but now it was happening everywhere. If he was in line at Woolworths with toilet paper under his arm, she was at the next checkout with a bag of oranges and a packet of Iced VoVos. After work, when she walked onto Pepper Street, he would step from his car, further up.
In Penelope’s case (and this embarrassed her) she would often wander around the block a few times, purely for the handful of seconds it took to walk by the front of his house. Would he be on the porch? Would the light be on in the kitchen? Would he come out and ask her inside for coffee or tea, or anything at all? There was a synergy to it, of course, given Michael and Moon, and the walks through long-ago Featherton. Even when she sat at the piano, she often checked; he might be by the bins again.
* * *
—
As for Michael, he resisted.
He didn’t want to be back there anymore, where all was good but ruinable. In his kitchen he thought of Penelope, and the piano, and his haunted halls of Abbey. He saw this new woman’s arms, and the love in her hands, helping the instrument down the road…but he could make himself not go to her.
* * *
—
Eventually, months later, in April, Penny put jeans and a shirt on.
She walked up Pepper Street.
It was dark.
She told herself she was ridiculous, that she was a woman, not a girl. She’d traveled thousands of miles to get here. She’d stood ankle-deep on a wine-dark toilet floor, so this was nothing, nothing in comparison. Surely she could breach the gate and knock on a man’s front door.
Surely.
She did.
* * *
—
“Hallo?” she said. “But I think…I hope you remember me?”
He was quiet and so was the light; the space behind him in the hallway. And there again, that smile. At once surfaced, then lost. “Of course I do…the piano.”
“Yes.” She was getting flustered and it wasn’t English forming in her mouth; each sentence was exactly that—its own small punishment. She’d had to plant her own language in the middle and work her way around it. Somehow
she managed to ask if he might like to come and visit her. She could play the piano, that is, if he liked the piano, and she had coffee and raisin toast and—