My grandmother’s piano sat in our family’s living room for forty-one years. It was an old upright with a chipped ivory on middle C and a water ring on the lid that nobody was allowed to mention. When Grandma June passed last spring, her will was short and clear: the house went to my mother, her savings were split between her three grandchildren, and the piano went to me.
I was the only one who ever played it. Every Sunday from the time I was six, I sat on that bench next to her while she tapped the rhythm on my shoulder. When I moved into my own apartment, she made me promise I’d take it “once I had a floor strong enough.”
In September, I finally signed a lease on a ground-floor place with real hardwood. I called my mom, excited. “I’m ready for the piano,” I said. “I booked movers for the twelfth.”
There was a pause. Then she said, “Oh, honey. About that.”
My younger brother, Tyler, had been living with Mom since his divorce. According to her, he’d “needed the space” for a home gym, and the piano had been “taking up the whole wall.” So two weeks earlier, without telling me, they’d sold it.
“To who?” I asked.
“Some man from an online listing. He paid cash. It was only four hundred dollars, Claire. It’s not like it was worth anything.”
I remember holding the phone away from my face because I didn’t trust what I’d say. Four hundred dollars. For the only thing Grandma had ever specifically left to me.
“It was in the will, Mom.”
“Wills are about money,” she said. “Nobody goes to court over furniture. Tyler needed the room, and you didn’t have a place for it. I didn’t think you’d make it into a whole thing.”
When I drove over that weekend, the living room looked wrong. There was a squat rack where the piano had been and a rubber mat covering the faded rectangle on the carpet. Tyler didn’t even look up from his phone. “It was just sitting there,” he said. “You never came to play it anyway.”
That one hurt, because it was partly true. I’d been busy. I’d been saving for the apartment. I’d told myself there would always be another Sunday.
I asked for the buyer’s information. Mom said she’d deleted the messages. Tyler said he “didn’t really remember” the guy’s name. All they had was a blurry photo of the listing: Old upright piano, free to good home, $400 OBO, must pick up.
I sat in my car in their driveway for a long time. Then I opened the photo again and zoomed in on the corner of the picture, where the lid was propped open. Taped inside, exactly where Grandma always kept it, was an envelope I had never been allowed to touch.
It had my name on it.
