He spends two hours on it in the living room while the ranch goes about its business outside and Maisie sits on the couch watching him work with the focused attention she brings to things she finds genuinely interesting.
I stay out of it.
I have learned that Gerald works better without an audience and Maisie counts as approximately four audience members on her own.
The ranch is quiet in the late afternoon when Gerald packs up his kit and tells me the piano is in better shape than it looks. He says it will hold its tune well in the Texas climate if I keep the humidity consistent.
He gives me three recommendations for humidity control, all of which I write down, then drives back toward San Antonio with the unhurried satisfaction of a man who has done his job properly.
Maisie appears at my elbow.
"Are you going to play it?" she asks.
"Later," I say.
"Tonight?"
"Maybe."
She accepts this and goes back to whatever she was doing before Gerald arrived, which involved Rowdy and something in the south pasture that I've chosen not to investigate too closely.
The afternoon moves through its final hours. The ranch crew wraps up the day's work, the horses get their evening checks, the familiar end-of-day sounds settle over Silver Mesa like something familiar and good.
Laney finishes the last of the pasture rounds and comes past the ranch house on her way to the cabin. I catch her at the porch steps.
"Come inside for a bit," I say.
She looks at me. Reads something in my expression. "Everything okay?"
"Everything's fine." I hold the door. "Come inside."
She comes inside.
The living room is warm in the evening light, the bookshelves arranged by preference, not height, the photographs on the walls, the lived-in quality that has replaced the showroom feeling of the first week. It looks like a home now. It finally feels lived in.
The piano sits against the far wall.
Laney stops when she sees it.
Not because it's surprising. She knew it was being tuned today. She stops because of the way it looks in the evening light, the dark wood catching the warm lamp glow, the keys clean and ready in a way they weren't before.
She looks at it for a moment. Looks at me.
"Sit down," I say.
She sits on the couch with her boots still on and her hat in her lap and the expression of someone who is waiting for something without knowing exactly what.
I sit at the piano bench.
It has been twenty one years since I sat at a piano bench. I know this exactly because I counted backward from the conversation at Whiskey River and landed on a specific afternoon in my father's house when I was seventeen years old and put the lid down for the last time.
Twenty-one years.
My hands know where to go before my head catches up.
I start with something simple. Something I played so many times at seventeen that it lived in my fingers rather than my memory.
A piece that doesn't require reading music or conscious recall, just the muscle memory of a boy who practiced three times a week for five years because he loved it before anyone convinced him he shouldn't.
