—
While one knocked at the door, the other two started unloading. They lowered the piano from the truck and had it standing on the footpath. The boss was talking to a man on the porch, but soon he shouted down at them.
“What the hell are you two doin’?”
“What?”
“We’re at the wrong bloody house!”
He went inside and used the man’s phone, and was muttering on the way back out. “That idiot,” he said. “That stupid, orange-eating prick.”
“What is it?”
“It’s an apartment. Unit three. Down there at number seven.”
“But look. There’s no parking down there.”
“So we’ll park in the middle of the road.”
“That won’t be popular with the neighbors.”
“You’re not popular with the neighbors.”
“What’s that s’posed to mean?”
The boss maneuvered his mouth into several shapes of disapproval. “Right, let me go down there. You two pull the trolley out. The piano wheels’ll die if we roll it on the road, and so will we. I’ll go and knock on the door. Last thing we need is taking it down and no one’s home.”
“Good idea.”
“Yes, it is a good idea. Now don’t so much as touch that piano again, right?”
“All right.”
“Not till I tell you.”
“All right!”
* * *
—
In the boss’s absence, the two men looked at the man on his porch:
The one who didn’t want a piano.
“How’s it going?” he called down.
“A bit tired.”
“Want a drink?”
“Nah. The boss prob’ly won’t like that.”
The man on the porch was normal height, had wavy dark hair, aqua eyes, and a beaten-up heart—and when the boss came walking back, there was a quiet-looking woman with a white face and tanned arms, out in the middle of Pepper Street.
“Here,” said the man; he came off the porch, as they shifted the piano to the trolley. “I’ll take an end there if you like.”
And that was how, on a Saturday afternoon, four men and a woman rolled a walnut-wooden piano down a sizable stretch of Pepper Street. At opposite corners of the rolling instrument were Penelope Lesciuszko and Michael Dunbar—and Penelope could have no idea. Even as she noticed his amusement for the movers, and his care for the welfare of the piano, she couldn’t possibly know that here was a tide to the rest-of-her-life, and a final name and nickname.