Jo Varga bought the Silver Dollar Saloon in Paradise Gulch, Nevada, at a county tax sale for nineteen thousand dollars, and on her first morning as owner she found a locked door at the top of the back stairs with her own childhood name painted on it in faded gold letters.
LITTLE JO.
She stood on the top step with a flashlight in one hand and her new ring of keys in the other and stared at it.
She had not been called Little Jo since 1964.
Jo was seventy-two. She had spent thirty-eight years as a cashier in the money cage at one of the big casinos in Reno, counting other people's money behind bulletproof glass. She could count a stack of hundred-dollar bills by feel faster than a machine. She could spot a counterfeit from across the room. She had seen men win a fortune and lose it before the coffee got cold.
She had never once in her life done anything as foolish as buying a saloon.
But she had been born in Paradise Gulch. And from the time she was eight until she was ten, on Saturday afternoons, she had played the piano at the Silver Dollar.
Paradise Gulch in the 1960s had been a copper town of about two thousand people, high in the sagebrush hills of central Nevada. Jo's father worked underground at the mine. Her mother cleaned rooms at the hotel. They did not have much, but they had an old upright piano in the front room that Jo's grandmother had brought from Hungary, and Jo had played it from the time she could reach the keys.
The Silver Dollar was on Main Street, across from the hotel. It had a long mahogany bar shipped around Cape Horn in 1879, a pressed tin ceiling, and a tinny old piano in the corner that sat unplayed.
The owner was a big, bald, kind man named Augie Marchetti.
One Saturday in 1962, Jo's mother had taken her along to the hotel, and Jo had wandered across the street and into the Silver Dollar and sat down at that old piano and started playing "Moon River."
Augie Marchetti had come out from behind the bar and listened to the whole thing with his arms folded. Then he said, "Kid, you want a job?"
For two years, every Saturday afternoon from two to five, Little Jo Varga had played piano at the Silver Dollar. The miners came in after their shift and drank beer and listened. They requested songs. Patsy Cline. Hank Williams. "Danny Boy" for the old Irishmen. "Moon River" for Augie, every time.
The miners paid in silver dollars. In those days in Nevada, the casinos and saloons still used real silver dollars, big heavy coins with Lady Liberty on the front, and the men would walk up and drop one in the big glass pickle jar on top of the piano when she played their song.
Augie never let her keep the tips. Not one.
"That's your college money, kid," he said. "I'll keep it safe. You'll get it when you're grown."
Then, in the spring of 1964, the mine closed.
Jo's father was laid off on a Thursday. By Sunday, the family was in their old Pontiac with everything they owned, driving to Reno. There was no time to go to the Silver Dollar. There was no time to say goodbye to Augie.
There was no time to get the jar.
Jo had gone back once, in 1985. The town was half empty. The Silver Dollar was still open, barely. A young bartender told her Augie had gone to Las Vegas to see his sister.
She had not gone back again until this fall. When she saw the tax sale notice in the Reno paper, she had told herself she was only going to look.
Augie Marchetti had died in 1997. The Silver Dollar had been closed ever since. The county had taken it for back taxes. The building had sat empty for twenty-nine years, its windows boarded, its mahogany bar under a quarter inch of dust.
Jo had stood in the doorway in October and looked at that bar. Then she had looked at the old upright piano, still in the corner, still in its place.
She had bid nineteen thousand dollars before she could stop herself.
Her daughter, Theresa, had driven down from Reno that week to tell her she was out of her mind.
"Mom, it's a ruin," Theresa said. "The roof leaks. There's no heat. There are bats in the back room."
"I know."
"The county inspector says if you don't fix the roof by March first, they'll condemn it and tear it down. Do you know what a roof like that costs?"
"About forty thousand dollars," Jo said. "I got three bids."
"You don't have forty thousand dollars."
"I know that too," Jo said.
Theresa looked at her mother for a long time.
"Then why?" she said.
Jo did not have a good answer. She looked across the room at the old piano.
"Because I owed him a goodbye," she said.
Now, on her first morning, she stood at the top of the back stairs in front of the locked door with her name on it.
She tried every key on the county's ring. None fit. The lock was an old brass one, the kind with a big round keyhole.
She went down to the bar and found a long flat-bladed screwdriver in the drawer behind the register, where Augie had kept his tools. She went back up and worked it into the gap by the hinges, carefully, the way her father had taught her to open stuck doors in the old company house.
The hinge pins were rusted. The first one came out with a groan. Then the second.
The door came away from the frame and leaned against her shoulder. Dust poured down. She set it aside and shone her flashlight into the room.
It was small, with one window, and very clean. Cleaner than anywhere else in the building. There was a single wooden chair. A small table. And on the table, in the beam of her flashlight, two things.
A stack of white envelopes, tied with a red ribbon. The one on top was addressed in a big, careful, old man's hand.
To Little Jo Varga. Wherever you are.
And beside the envelopes, catching the light, a big glass pickle jar, full to the brim and heavy with silver.