The Note He Left Open

### Nessa

Iria did not ask about the piano the next morning. She came upstairs with two cups of tea and put one beside the cabinet records, where I was trying to match my mother’s dates to the inventory slips. The tea had too much milk. Iria drank hers anyway, reading over my shoulder until the handwriting blurred into the page.

The mailbox sat behind her. I caught myself checking it whenever the attic went quiet, then stopped. Iria had asked Milo a question and let it go. That was the point. I didn’t want my curiosity to turn her waiting into another kind of pressure.

We spent the morning with my mother’s papers. There were notes about the shop roof and a list of books she meant to send for repair. Iria sorted them into piles by year. She was better at it than I was, perhaps because she had spent so long having other people’s accounts of her life put in the wrong order.

When the mailbox opened, the sound was small: a click and a scrape of metal. Iria looked up from the table. I didn’t move. She set down the paper in her hand and crossed the attic alone.

The letter had her name written on the outside. Milo’s hand was easy to recognize now, though I had never seen it make a list or sign a form. Iria held the envelope at its edges, then sat in the chair by the round window before she opened it.

I returned to the cabinet records. I could hear the paper unfold. I kept my eyes on my mother’s dates.

### Milo

I read her letter twice before I went to the back room.

*I want to know what it sounds like, if you want to tell me. You don’t have to finish it for me. You don’t have to make it mean anything.*

The office had emptied by six. Pella had left a note on my desk about a misfiled property boundary, with a question mark big enough to count as a reprimand. I put it under the blotter and took my coat to the room where the piano stood.

I had thought I’d write a description. The first sentence came out too tidy, so I crossed it through. Then I sat down and lifted the piano lid.

The piece began with my left hand moving between two low notes. Not a tune, exactly. More like the sound of someone walking a familiar street without looking at the shop windows. The right hand came in after a few measures, climbing four notes and returning to the second. I’d played it often enough to know where the keys were without thinking. My fingers knew the part that came next, too. I just never trusted it.

I played the opening once. On the second pass I missed a note. I stopped, found it, and started over. The room held the sound close. It wasn’t a grand room for music. The piano had a stubborn key in the middle and a faint rattle somewhere beneath the music stand. I liked that it didn’t pretend to be better than it was.