Dear Miss Caldwell,

The E stands for Eli. Nobody has asked me that in a long time. Most people call me "the piano man," which I have learned to live with.

I don't think you're peculiar. I think your grandmother was right. Every old piano has one note like that, a note that isn't quite in line with the others and is better for it. Most tuners are taught to fix them. My father taught me to ask first. He's the one who tuned your grandmother's piano for twenty years before me. He used to say she was the only customer who ever made him coffee and then stood over him to make sure he didn't touch the D.

Enclosed is your receipt. You don't need it, but my father would haunt me if I didn't send one.

Eli

~*~

She wrote back. Of course she wrote back. And he wrote back to that, and by the middle of May, without either one of them saying so, there was a letter going one direction or the other almost every week.

He wrote about pianos, mostly, at first. The Baptist church in a town over the ridge where he'd opened the case and found a mouse nest made entirely of shredded bulletins. The school piano that had been painted bright orange by a well-meaning art class in 1974. The piano in a nursing home outside Maryville, where an old woman who no longer knew her own daughter's name sat down while he was packing his tools and played a Chopin nocturne straight through without a single mistake, and then looked up at him and asked if he'd come about the furnace.

I sat in my truck in the parking lot for a while after that, he wrote. I don't know why I'm telling you. I haven't told anyone else.

Josie read that letter on her lunch hour, in the library's back room, and had to go splash water on her face before she went back out to the desk.

She wrote about her students. About Mary Beth, who still hadn't practiced the Clementi but had lost the tooth. About the high school boy who took lessons in secret because his football coach would never let him hear the end of it, and who could play Scott Joplin like his fingers were on fire. About the library, and the lady who checked out the same Zane Grey novel every single month and swore each time she'd never read it. About her grandmother, a little. About her father, who'd left when she was nine, not at all, at first, and then, in a long letter in July that she almost didn't mail, quite a lot.

He answered that one by return mail. It was only a few lines. She kept it in her cardigan pocket for a week.

~*~

They never sent pictures. She thought about it once or twice and decided against it, and he never asked. She knew he was thirty-four, because he'd mentioned it. She knew he had a mutt named Dewey, because the dog had eaten one of her letters and he'd had to write and ask what was on the second page. She knew he could play exactly one piece, a very bad "Für Elise," because he'd confessed it, and that he could tell by ear when a piano had been sitting too close to a heat register, and that he hummed while he worked, because he said the humming helped him hear.

She did not know what he looked like. She found, the longer the summer went on, that she didn't care, and that this surprised her.

Once, in August, in the thick wet heat, he wrote her a practical letter. Your piano will be sharp by now, he said. All that humidity swells up the soundboard and pushes the strings tight. Don't worry about it. It'll settle when the air dries out, and then I'll be there to put it right.

She read that last line about fourteen times.

~*~

The letter that came at the end of August was very short.

Dear Josie,

I'll be through Cane Hollow the second Tuesday in September, same as always. Nine o'clock, if that suits.

You don't have to be there. The key under the mat has always worked fine.

But I'd like it if you were.

Eli

~*~

She asked Mrs. Dalrymple for the Tuesday morning off. Mrs. Dalrymple, who had run the county library since the Truman administration and knew everything, looked at her over her glasses and said, "Is this about the letters from Knoxville?" and Josie, who had not told a living soul, went red to the ears. Mrs. Dalrymple said, "Take the whole day, dear," and went back to stamping books.

On Monday night she did not sleep much. On Tuesday morning she put on her blue dress, and then took it off and put on her ordinary skirt and cardigan, because she did not want him to think she had dressed up, and then put the blue dress back on, because she had.

She was at the studio by a quarter past eight. She dusted the piano, which did not need dusting. She took the key out from under the mat and put it in her pocket, so there would be no mistaking it. She sat down on the bench, and played the D above middle C, very softly, twice, and listened to the piano clear its throat.

At five minutes to nine, she heard a truck door shut down on the street.

She heard the hardware store's bell jingle, and old Mr. Haskell say something, and a man's voice answer, slow and polite, a voice she'd heard on the telephone twice a year for three years without ever really listening to it.

She heard footsteps on the stairs. They were not in a hurry. And, very softly, coming up with them, she heard somebody humming.

The footsteps stopped outside the door. There was a pause, the kind of pause a man might make if he'd bent down to look under the mat and found nothing there.

And then, gently, three times, somebody knocked.

~ to be continued October 1 ~