Pam opened the door.
The barn was dim and cold and smelled of hay and old leather. The tack room door at the far end stood half open, with a yellow light inside.
She walked down the center aisle between the empty stalls. The piano music went on. Slowly. One wrong note, then another.
She stopped in the doorway of the tack room.
Sitting at their mother's old Kimball upright, in his good Thanksgiving sweater, with his back to her and his big lawyer's hands on the yellow keys, was her brother Greg.
He must have gone out the front door while Lisa was crying. She had not even noticed.
He heard her and stopped playing. He did not turn around.
"I know," he said. "I'm terrible. I haven't practiced in forty years."
Pam could not speak.
"Mama taught me," Greg said quietly. "When I was ten. Before you were old enough. I quit at fourteen because the boys at school said piano was for girls. I never played again where anybody could hear." He touched a key. "Except here."
"Here?"
Greg turned around on the bench. His eyes were red.
"I found it in 1991," he said. "The spring after Mama died. I was home from law school. I couldn't sleep. I came out to the barn at two in the morning to be by myself, and there it was." He looked at the piano. "I came out here every time I was home after that. Every Thanksgiving. Every Christmas. After the house went to bed. I'd sit here and play the only hymn I could remember."
He laughed. It was a cracked sound.
"Dad caught me once. In 2004. Christmas, about one in the morning. He came in to check on a heifer, and I was sitting here playing 'In the Garden' with the wrong note in the second line. He didn't say a word. He just stood in that doorway and listened, and then he went back to the house."
Pam sat down slowly on an overturned feed bucket.
"He never told me," she said.
"He never told me about you either," Greg said. "Not until 2019. When he wrote that will. He called me in Kansas City and asked if I still played. I said a little. He said, so does your sister. Every Sunday. And then he hung up."
They sat in the tack room for a long time. The wind pushed at the old barn. A cat came in and wound around Greg's ankles.
"So you know too," Pam said finally. "What's in the barn."
"I know too."
"Then why didn't you say it? At the table? You could have had the farm."
Greg looked at her.
"Because then I'd have the farm," he said. "And I wouldn't have you or Lisa. And I watched what that did to you in there, Pam. You knew the answer and you got up and walked out instead of saying it. I figured if you weren't going to say it, I wasn't either."
Pam put her face in her hands.
When they came back to the house together, Lisa was standing at the kitchen window with her arms folded, looking out at the barn.
"You went out there together," she said. Her voice was flat. "So you both know. And I'm the only one who doesn't."
"Lisa," Greg said. "Come with us. Please."
"Why?"
"Because you should see it," Pam said. "You should have seen it thirty-six years ago. We should have shown you. That's on us."
They walked her down to the barn, the three of them, in their coats, with Mr. Dutton following slowly behind with his cane.
Lisa stopped in the tack room doorway and saw the piano.
She did not say anything for a long time. She was fifty-seven, and when their mother died, she had been twenty-one and away at college, and she had come home for the funeral and gone back two days later, and when she came home at Christmas, the piano was gone from the front room. Her father had never told her where.
"I thought he sold it," she whispered. "I thought he sold Mama's piano and didn't even ask us."
"He couldn't sell it," Pam said. "And he couldn't look at it. So he put it out here. With the cows. Where he could visit."
Lisa walked over and put her hand flat on top of the old Kimball, on the dusty wood, where their mother's metronome used to sit.
Then she started to cry. Not the angry crying from the table. The other kind.
Mr. Dutton opened the sealed envelope in the tack room, standing by the piano, with the three of them around him.
He read it to himself first. Then he smiled, and read it aloud.
"What's in the barn is your mother. Whoever answers this knows that. If more than one of you knows, then you will have to share the farm, and you will have to share her. I hope it is all three of you. I hope you play together. Love, Dad."
Below that, in a shakier hand, there was one more line.
P.S. Greg, it's a B-flat in the second line, not a B. Your sister's been playing it wrong since she was eight too.
The farm stayed in the family.
The three of them signed it into a trust together the next spring, Greg drawing up the papers in Kansas City for free. The cropland was rented to a young farmer from the next section over. The house stayed open for holidays. Lisa, who had sold houses for thirty years, took the job of managing it, and found she liked driving out from Wichita once a month far more than she expected.
Pam kept the barn key.
On Christmas Eve, the Lindquist family went down to the barn after supper. All three of them, and their spouses, and their children, and their children's children, twenty-two people crowded into a tack room built for one man and a few saddles.
Pam sat down at their mother's piano. Greg sat down beside her on the bench.
Lisa stood behind them with her hand on Pam's shoulder.
They played "In the Garden," four hands, slowly, a little badly, the way two children play a hymn their mother taught them a long time ago.
In the second line, both of them hit the B-flat.
Out in the dark barn, one of the cows lowed, long and soft, the way cows do when they know somebody is home.