April came and the piano tuner didn't, and on Sunday morning in Pine Hollow, the church piano sounded wrong.
Arthur Gaines heard it from sixty miles away.
He was sitting in his recliner in Zanesville with his feet up and a blood pressure cuff on the table beside him, the way his cardiologist wanted, when the phone rang at 9:40. It was Pastor Sam Greer, calling from the sanctuary of Grace Methodist.
"Arthur, I'm sorry to bother you at home. Lorraine says the piano's off. She can't put her finger on it. I can't either. But it's not right, and Easter was last week, and we've got the spring hymn sing on the twenty-fifth." Sam paused. "Is there any chance I could just hold the phone up to it? Would that even help?"
"Hold it up," Arthur said.
Arthur was seventy-eight. He'd been tuning pianos since 1968, when he came home from the Army and apprenticed with an old German named Fritz Albrecht who'd tuned for the Zanesville symphony for forty years. Arthur tuned by ear.
Always had. He owned an electronic tuning device, a gift from his daughter, and he used it as a doorstop.
For thirty-two years, every April, the week after Easter, he'd driven down to Pine Hollow in his old Buick with his tool case on the back seat. He tuned the church piano at Grace Methodist and the old Baldwin at the elementary school. Then he went around town to the houses.
Fourteen pianos, give or take. It took him three days.
He knew every one of them by its voice. The school Baldwin, pounded by sixty years of third graders.
Lorraine Doyle's little spinet. And June Whitaker's old Kimball upright, which he hadn't tuned since 2019.
June used to sit on the sofa and hum along while he worked, and bring him pound cake on a china plate. The spring after she died, Earl had called and asked him, very politely, to skip their house from now on.
This year, in March, he'd gone into the hospital for a heart valve. It went fine. But his doctor said no driving until May, and no long days on his feet until June.
So April had come, and Arthur hadn't.
Over the phone, he heard Lorraine Doyle sit down at the bench. She played a C major chord. Then a hymn, the first verse of "Blessed Assurance."
Arthur closed his eyes.
"Stop," he said. "Sam, put me closer. By the treble end."
Lorraine played the hymn again.
"The A above middle C has dropped," Arthur said. "Not much. Maybe a quarter of a tone. The whole middle of the piano's slipped down behind it, because it was a hard winter and the furnace in that church runs hot and dry. And the F above that has a damper that's sticking. You hear how it keeps ringing after she lets go? It's been doing that for a year. I meant to fix it last April and ran out of time."
There was silence on the line.
"Arthur," Sam said finally, "that's the most amazing thing I've ever heard."
"It's not amazing. It's my job," Arthur said. "I'm sorry I'm not there to do it."
On Monday, Pastor Sam called a piano service in Columbus.
They were very nice. They could send a tuner down in two weeks.
They charged a hundred and sixty-five dollars per piano, plus a trip charge for the drive. The sticking damper would be extra.
Sam wrote it down. Then he went to the church office and opened the file drawer marked Building and Grounds, and pulled out Arthur's folder to see what they'd paid him last year.
It was a thin folder. Arthur's bills were handwritten on a little carbon-copy pad, one sheet every April, going back to 1995. Each one said the same thing, in Arthur's careful printing.
Grace Methodist, Pine Hollow. Tuning. $5.00.
Sam went through every one of them twice. Then he went down to the diner, where Ruth Ann was having her coffee, and laid them on the table in front of her.
"Five dollars," he said. "Every year. Since 1995."
Ruth Ann looked at the bills. "For the church piano?"
"For every piano. I called the school secretary. Five dollars. I called four of the families he tunes for. Five dollars, every one of them. They all thought it was because he was a sweet old man who liked coming to Pine Hollow." Sam sat down heavily. "Ruth Ann, a man can't live on that. His gas costs more than that."
That evening, Sam called Zanesville again.
Arthur listened while Sam explained. Then he was quiet for a long moment.
"Sam," he said, "I was paid properly. Every year. I never had any complaint."
"By who?"
"By the church. I always assumed." Arthur shifted in his recliner. "Every May, a few weeks after I came down, a money order would come in the mail. Postmarked Pine Hollow. Enough to make up my full rate for every piano in town, and a little over for gas. No letter. No name. Just the money order, made out to me, and two words on the memo line. For Grace."
"Arthur," Sam said slowly, "the church has never paid you one cent more than five dollars. I've got the books right here."
Arthur didn't say anything.
"Then who," he said at last, very quietly, "has been paying me for thirty-two years?"