understand the subject, but dogged memorizing and Mrs. Torranceâs encouragement helped me pass the exams, and now I heard Mrs. Torrance ask, âHow are your cations and your anions, Steven?â
âAll my ions are okay,â I said.
She seemed to think this was very funny.
I worried about Mrs. Torrance. She has a slight trembling in her hands, and with her interest in atomic particles, it seemed to me she ought to wonder what was going on in her lungs. She took my arm, and held her cigarette out to one side. She and Mr. Torrance often had me up to their apartment to eat hand-packed ice cream from a gourmet dessert shop on Piedmont Avenue. We would watch videos on nuclear accelerators or baseball games, which were almost exactly the same subject, as far as I was concerned, and load up on butterfat.
âI grew up with a Steinway,â she said.
âOh really.â I really wanted to be polite, but I was very concerned about my fatherâs piano.
âI hated it.â
This seemed very much unlike Mrs. Torrance. âYou donât like music?â I asked.
âI hated the lessons,â she said.
I knew how she felt, recalling my fatherâs look of anguish when I splashed yet another chord on the little Casio keyboard.
The manager, Liz Compton, marched across the tidy, bright green lawn and stood with her arms crossed. She was angular and unpretty, but so full of energy she radiated a sort of sexiness, if you like nerves.
âThe elevator stuck again,â said Liz, âor I would have been here sooner.â
âIs anyone trapped?â Mrs. Torrance asked.
âNot the last time I checked,â said Liz. My father attracts women like Lizâalmost as smart as my mother.
More men showing up on our balcony, holding their arms out to the piano several stories down, as though to encourage it.
âSix men and none of them know what theyâre doing,â said Mr. Torrance, an unlit Pall Mall waggling in his lips.
âTripping on their dicks,â said Liz, the sort of thing my mother would say.
Mrs. Torrance drew hard on her cigarette, maybe a little offended at Lizâs manner and wanting to put a little smoke between her and such talk.
I tried to offer the opinion that they looked strong enough for the job, and Mr. Torrance gave a rumbly smokerâs chuckle, winking at Liz, maybe flirting in an antique fashion, right in front of his wife. âItâs leverage that matters,â he said.
My dad joined the piano movers up on the balcony, a hand to his mouth. He caught sight of me and waved, his hand out like a traffic cop, as though to caution me not to spread my wings and fly up to join them.
The winch made an unsettling, wasplike keen. Without comment, all of us moved away from the lawn, leaving the rope holders plenty of space.
âYour poor father,â said Liz. âHe really looked forward to this.â
The piano was developing a definite hitch in its position, an unmistakable cant. The winch whined, hauling the piano higher, and then too high, the piano creeping upward beyond where my dad was, leaning forward.
We all shrank back even farther, all the way to the tennis court fence.
You couldnât see the mammoth piano slip, but you could see a tendency, like when you know a row of books is going to topple.
This Bechstein beauty my dad had his heart set on was about to do a breathtaking plunge, all the way to the empty place near a half dozen retired people. And I found myself curious as I backed away from ground zero. How far would the piano keys scatter?
The winch was suddenly silent, and the piano slipped down, inch by inch. This made it possible for my father to reach out, straining over the side of the balcony, and touch the brass tip of one leg. He touched it with the pads of his fingers, but this little barely existent nudge was enough to move the quilted piano around in the beginning of a slow countercircle.
Dad reached that
Rebecca Hamilton, Conner Kressley