CHAPTER THREE A — THE POSTCARD IN THE RAIN

The morning after my visit to the post office, I remembered a postcard from a piano parts supplier in Toledo.
The supplier normally sent me a handwritten reminder when a shipment was ready for collection.
My next shipment contained replacement hammers for the community center piano, which had begun sounding dull in its middle register.
I called the supplier and asked whether the card had been posted.
The owner, Mr. Brennan, answered with the kind of certainty that comes from doing one job for forty years.
“My wife stamped it herself,” he said.
“We put it into the outgoing tray on the third.”
“Did the shipment go elsewhere?”
“No, it’s waiting for you here.”
I explained that the reminder never arrived.
He offered to send another,

then stopped when he heard how tired I sounded.
“Have you missed other things?” he asked.
I said yes.
“Then don’t wait for the post to tell you what you already know about the shipment,” he said.
His ordinary kindness nearly made me cry.
I drove to Toledo that afternoon through a light rain and collected the parts myself.
At the shop, Mr. Brennan showed me how he sorted every order into numbered drawers.
He offered a paper invoice and a second copy for my records.
“I don’t want somebody else’s mistake to leave you without a piano,” he said.
The drive home took two hours longer because a crash had closed the main road.
By the time I reached Arlen, Wren had called six times.
She was at the rehearsal room with three classmates,

waiting for me to arrive.
June had told them I had canceled the session.
I had done no such thing.
I phoned Wren from the parking lot and asked her to stay inside with the other students.
When I entered, Felix was sitting at the piano trying to improvise a marching tune.
He stopped immediately and apologized for touching the instrument.
“You should always play a piano if it needs playing,” I told him.
Then I asked where they had heard rehearsal was canceled.
Dev pointed to a note taped beside the entrance.
It had June’s name printed beneath a short announcement about a scheduling conflict.
I photographed the notice for the board and removed it from the door.
The children watched me with the peculiar seriousness young musicians reserve for adults who might break a promise.
“Did we do something wrong?” Wren asked.
“No,” I said.
“I went to collect the parts for the piano because the reminder never reached me.”
Felix looked at the box in my hands.
“Does that mean we can fix the ugly notes?” he asked.
“Some of them,” I said.
“The rest belong to us.”
We worked on the instrument until the custodian turned off the corridor lights.
Dev held a flashlight while I checked the worn action.
Wren sorted the replacement pieces into the order I requested.
Felix tried to keep the other students quiet, with limited success.
It was one of our happiest rehearsals, and we had barely played a note.
On the way out, I saw June standing beneath the awning across the parking lot.
She did not wave.
I lifted the box of parts so she could see why I had gone away.
She turned and walked toward her car.
At home, I placed Mr. Brennan’s duplicate invoice into a folder.
I added the canceled rehearsal notice beside it.
The stack of missing correspondence had become a stack of things I could still prove.
I began to understand that proving a fact and restoring what it cost were different kinds of work.