The piano in the studio above Haskell's Hardware was a 1919 upright with a walnut case, one cracked ivory on the F above middle C, and a temper. Josie Caldwell's grandmother had taught three generations of Cane Hollow children to play on it, and when she passed, she left it to Josie along with the studio, the lease, eleven students, a metronome shaped like a pyramid, and one piece of advice: Keep it in tune, honey. An out-of-tune piano makes a child think she has no talent.

So Josie kept it in tune. Twice a year, in April and September, when the weather turned and the old wood swelled or shrank, she called the number on the yellowed card thumbtacked by the door. E. Tolbert, Piano Tuning & Repair. A man with a slow, polite voice answered and said he'd be through Cane Hollow on the Tuesday after next, and could he come by in the morning.

Josie worked at the county library in the mornings. Afternoons were for students, evenings for supper with her mother on Sundays and a TV dinner the rest of the week. She'd tell Mr. Tolbert the key was under the mat, and he'd come and go, and when she climbed the stairs at one o'clock the piano would sound like it had been to church. There'd be an invoice on the bench, forty-five dollars, in a neat blocky hand. She'd mail a check to a post office box in Knoxville. That was the whole relationship. In three years she had never laid eyes on the man.

She pictured him as sixty or so, with a cardigan and a toolbag and bifocals on a chain. It had never occurred to her to picture him any other way.

~*~

That April, after the tuning, she sat down to warm up before her one-thirty student and played a C major scale, and stopped on the first note, and played it again.

Middle C. It sounded different. Not wrong. Different, the way a room sounds different after somebody has moved the furniture. Clearer. Brighter. As if the note had been standing a little off to the side for years and had finally stepped into the middle of the picture.

She played it again. Then she stood up and, for no reason she could name, lifted the lid of the piano.

There, tucked against the tuning pins, folded once, was a note on the back of an invoice.

Miss Caldwell —

Your middle C has been flat since at least 1996. I think I've been making it worse. Somebody, long before me, put a shim under one of the tuning pins, and I've been tuning around it instead of fixing it, because it was the easier thing to do. I'm sorry. I fixed it today, properly. I hope you can hear the difference.

I left the D above it alone. It's a hair sharp, but it has character, and I suspect your grandmother liked it that way. I'd hate to take it from you.

— E. Tolbert

P.S. Somebody has written "Josie was here, 1976" in pencil on the inside of the lid. I didn't touch that either.

~*~

She read it three times standing up and once more sitting down. Then her one-thirty student arrived, a nine-year-old named Mary Beth with a loose tooth and a Clementi sonatina she had not practiced, and Josie had to put the note in the pocket of her cardigan and be a piano teacher for four hours.

It stayed in her pocket all afternoon. She kept touching it, the way you touch a key in your pocket to make sure it's still there.

She hadn't known about the pencil on the lid. She'd been seven in 1976. She had no memory of writing it. But the handwriting, when she went back and looked, was hers: big loopy letters, the J backwards. Her grandmother must have seen it and left it there all those years. And a stranger with a toolbag had seen it, and understood that it mattered, and left it too.

And he had heard the D. Nobody ever heard the D. Her grandmother had always said that D was the piano's way of clearing its throat before it said something important. Josie had never told anybody that, because it was the sort of thing that sounded silly out loud.

~*~

That night she sat at her mother's kitchen table with a cup of decaf and wrote him back on a sheet of the library's good stationery, and tore it up, and wrote him again on plain paper, and tore that up too.

"Who are you writing to?" her mother asked, coming in for the sugar bowl.

"The piano tuner."

"Did he overcharge you?"

"No, Mama."

Her mother looked at the torn paper on the table, and then at Josie, and then, being a wise woman, went back to the living room without another word, though Josie heard her chuckle all the way down the hall.

In the end she kept it short. She was afraid if she wrote more than a few lines she would say something foolish.

Dear Mr. Tolbert,

I heard the difference before I'd played three notes. Thank you. And thank you for leaving the D alone. My grandmother used to say it was the piano clearing its throat. I've never told anyone that before, so please don't think I'm peculiar.

I was seven when I wrote on the lid. I'd forgotten it was there. I'm glad you found it.

Enclosed is my check for forty-five dollars.

Sincerely, Josie Caldwell

She read it over. Then, before she could change her mind, she added a line at the bottom:

P.S. What does the E stand for?

She mailed it on her way to work the next morning, to the post office box in Knoxville, and spent the rest of the week telling herself that a busy man with a hundred pianos to tune would never answer a letter like that.

On the following Monday, there was an envelope in her mailbox with a Knoxville postmark and neat blocky handwriting on the front. She stood at the bottom of the hardware store stairs and held it without opening it for a full minute, feeling her heart go allegro, which was ridiculous, and which she let it do anyway.

~ to be continued ~