The Tuner's Hands

Cass had been tuning pianos for twenty years, and in all that time she had never once had to fight a festival crowd to get to a client's front door. Yet here she was, forty-three years old, hauling her kit down the back of a lane that smelled like salt and frangipani, dodging a man carrying what looked like an entire paper float on his head. The port loose had shut down the whole waterfront street. Half of Pulau Seraya was out there drumming and shouting, and the museum's main doors were blocked by a wall of tourists three deep.

So she went around the side, the way Maddy had told her on the phone Tuesday. "Just push the green door, it sticks a little, don't be shy with it," Maddy had said, and she had not been shy with it, and it had still taken her two shoves and a shoulder.

Inside, the noise dropped off like someone had closed a door on the whole island. The Wings of Seraya museum was one of those buildings that made no sense on paper, two old wooden aircraft fuselages joined by a glass atrium, big enough to hold five antique planes and a grand piano in the middle like it had grown there. Cass stopped a second to let her ears adjust. Then she heard it. Not drums. Beeping. A tiny electronic chirp, over and over, coming from her piano.

Her piano. The one she was here to tune. Somebody had clipped a small microphone to the lid and was crouched under it on a folding stool, running cable along the floor like it was the most natural thing in the world.

"Excuse me?" she said.

The man turned around and she almost dropped her kit. She knew that face. Older now, sure, a little gray coming in at the temples, but she would have known it anywhere. Gabriel Brandt, from design school, twenty years ago. They had shared a drafting table two semesters and argued about everything else.

"Cass?" He grinned like they were still twenty-two. "No way. They sent you?"

"Nobody sent me anywhere. I have a booking." She set her kit down harder than she meant to. "What are you doing to my piano?"

"Your piano?" He looked genuinely delighted, which made it worse. "Wow. Okay. Hi to you too. This is mine, actually, well, the installation is mine. I'm doing a sound piece for the festival, resonance triggered, the piano's vibrations drive the floating speakers you can see up there." He pointed at a half dozen pale discs hanging from the atrium ceiling like lazy jellyfish. "The mics pick up the strings, the software reads the frequencies, the speakers answer. It's going to be beautiful."

"It's going to be nothing, because that piano is a quarter tone flat and I have less than four hours before the museum opens its doors for the port loose viewing." She was already unsnapping her kit. "The microphone comes off."

"Whoa, whoa." He stepped in front of the lid, hands up. "The mic stays. That is the entire purpose of the piece. It needs to hear the instrument."

"It needs what?" Cass laughed, and it came out sharper than she planned. "Gabriel. I need silence to tune. Actual silence. You cannot have a speaker system chirping at me while I'm setting unisons, and I cannot have someone's art project attached to the instrument I'm responsible for. What if a clip slips and scratches the finish? What if a cable pulls a pin?"

Maddy appeared from somewhere behind a propeller, and Cass remembered her from the phone call, small, brisk, twenty-eight and clearly having one of those days where the island refuses to cooperate. "Okay, okay, both of you, I can hear you from the office and Andres could probably hear you from the dock," she said. "Cass, this is Gabriel, he's our guest designer. Gabriel, Cass is our tuner, she comes every season."

"We've met," they said at the same time, and then glared at each other for it.

Maddy looked between them like a woman watching weather roll in. "Oh good. Old friends. That always goes smoothly."

"Study partners," Gabriel said. "Twenty years ago. She used to erase my lines."

"She used to draw over mine with a marker," Cass said. "In ink. On a group project."

"It looked better and you know it!"

"Gentlemen. Ladies." Maddy held up both hands. "Can someone explain the actual problem to me in plain words?"

Cass took a breath and counted to three, the way she did before quoting prices to difficult clients. "The problem is simple. That piano has to be tuned. Tuning needs quiet. His installation makes noise, and he wants to keep equipment clipped to the instrument while I work. Both things cannot happen at the same time."

"So we sequence them," Maddy said. "Cass tunes first, Gabriel sets up after?"

"Two hours of tuning, then I need at least two to calibrate," Gabriel said, and for once he sounded like a professional instead of a show-off. "Maddy, the doors open at six. The floats launch at seven. If I miss the calibration window tonight the piece is dead until next year's festival."

"And if I rush the tuning," Cass said, "every visiting pianist who touches that instrument next month will hear buzz in the upper octaves, and my name is on the invoice."

Maddy closed her eyes briefly. "Why does everything on this island have to happen today?" she muttered. Then she straightened up. "Fine. Compromise. Cass tunes now, starting immediately, and Gabriel, you do your setup across the atrium, everything except anything that touches the piano, in total silence, on battery, no chirping. When she's done you get the instrument and whatever time is left."

"That could work," Gabriel said slowly.

"It could," Cass admitted, because honestly it could, and the sooner she started the sooner this whole afternoon was over. "But I want it in writing that if anything of yours touches that piano before I give the word, I walk, and the museum can explain to the cultural board why the festival piano sounds like a honky tonk."

"Deal," Maddy said fast, before Gabriel could argue.

"Deal," he echoed, and stuck out his hand like they were sealing something bigger than a scheduling arrangement.

Cass shook it. His grip was warm and he held it a half second longer than necessary, and she told herself it meant nothing, the same way she had told herself that twenty years ago.

The next hour went the way she liked her work hours to go, quiet and exact. She opened the piano, pulled her tools, and started down the scale with her felt wedge and her tuning lever. Outside the glass atrium the drumming came and went with the wind, muffled, almost musical in a way she refused to enjoy. Across the room Gabriel worked on his knees with cable ties and a laptop, silent as promised, occasionally glancing over. She pretended not to notice the glancing. She noticed every single one.

Around the ninety minute mark he drifted over, soft steps on the concrete, and crouched near the piano's tail without touching anything.

"Can I ask you something?" he whispered.

"If it's about the mic, no!"

"It's about the shard. The ceramic one on your kit. You still carry that?"

She looked down at her tool roll and, yes, there it was, the little glazed ceramic wedge she'd picked up at a flea market in her second year of design school, the one she used for stubborn dampers because it had exactly the right weight. She had honestly forgotten he'd ever seen it.

"It works," she said.

"It works," he agreed, grinning again. "You berated a guy in our materials class for using a metal shim, and then you turned up with that thing for the rest of the year like it was made of gold."

"Because it works. There's a difference between a tool and a toy." But she was almost smiling, which annoyed her. "Go calibrate your jellyfish, Gabriel."

He went. And the strange thing, the thing she kept turning over while she set the treble, was that the afternoon had gotten quieter once he was nearby, not louder. She put that down to concentration and got back to work, and absolutely did not think about how good he looked kneeling on that floor. Not once. Well. Maybe once.

By four o'clock the piano rang true from bottom to top, every string singing clean, and she closed the lid with real satisfaction. Then the sky outside the atrium went from gray to almost black in about ten minutes, which is the kind of trick tropical weather likes to play, and the first rain hit the glass so hard the whole building sounded like it was being applauded.

"Oh no," Maddy said, running in from the office with her phone. "That's the storm band. Andres is closing the dock early, they're launching the floats early or not at all, and Gabriel, your calibration, the power's going to flicker, the whole grid does this every time."

Gabriel was already moving. "Battery, I told you I set up on battery. But I need the piano and I need it now and I need the room quiet."

Cass looked at her finished work, then at the rain, then at him.

"You have one hour," she said, "and if you so much as breathe on my strings wrong, I'm telling everyone at the port loose exactly what you did in materials class."

Cass stayed to pack her tools, because leaving a fresh tuned piano alone with Gabriel was one thing, leaving her kit scattered was another. He clipped the first microphone to the lid and struck a low A to test the mic, and the note came out round and full, and he actually whistled.

"Okay, that's unfair. That's beautiful. Did you do something to the hammers?"

"I voiced them. It's part of tuning if you're good at it."

"You voiced them," he said, like she'd confessed to witchcraft. "Can I try the test tone sequence? I promise it's quieter than a mosquito."

"Fine. Mosquito level only."

He hit the sequence, and she went back to her tool roll, and that was when it happened. She was testing the damper on the third string of the middle section, the stubborn one, and she reached for the ceramic wedge out of pure habit, and her fingers were tired and the rain had her nerves humming, and the shard slipped clean out of her grip and hit the concrete floor with a click that made them both look down.

It didn't break. It never broke, that was its entire purpose, twenty years of drops and it had one chip near the tip. It rolled a lazy half circle and stopped against Gabriel's knee.

He picked it up.

He didn't just pick it up and hand it back, either. He turned it over in his fingers, tilting it toward the atrium light, and the blue slip glaze caught the gray afternoon and went almost luminous, and he did that thing he'd always done in materials class where he looked at an object like it was telling him something.

"This is a drainage tile," he said. "Like, a real one. Off somebody's wall. Look at the salt crazing in the glaze, that's decades in the weather. Where did you even get this?"

"Give it back."

She heard her own voice and winced, because it came out sharper than she meant, sharp and fast, and there was heat climbing her face that had nothing to do with the afternoon. She held out her hand.

Gabriel looked at her. He handed it over, careful, handle first, the way you hand somebody a knife. "Okay. Okay, here. I just meant it's a nice piece."

"It's a tool." She wiped it on her shirt sleeve, which was ridiculous, it was ceramic, and dropped it back into its slot in the roll, and tied the roll shut with more force than the string required. "Flea market, second year, four dollars. It damps better than felt on stubborn strings and it never wears out. That's all it is."

"That's all it is," he repeated, and his voice carried a quality she did not like, not mockery, worse, curiosity. "You know I've never seen you flush over a tuning lever, right? And you've dropped levers on your own foot."

"Some things aren't for showing off."

"Sure," he said, and let it go, which was somehow more annoying than if he hadn't.

Because the truth, the truth she wasn't going to hand him, was that the shard was one of maybe three objects in her life from before everything, from the years when she'd shared a drafting table with a lanky guy who argued about adhesives and bought her a lukewarm coffee once when she'd failed a materials crit, and she'd kept it through two studios, one failed partnership, and a move to an island, and she did not need him holding it and looking at it like that, like it was a window.

He turned back to his laptop. She finished packing. Nobody said anything, and the rain applauded the glass, and it was fine.

It was fine until the drums started for real.

The port loose ceremony was supposed to launch at seven, but Andres was closing the dock early, so the launching came early too, and the sound of it rolled up from the harbor and through the atrium like weather of its own. Drums, and a horn, and a crowd noise that was half cheering and half yelling at the sky. Cass went to the glass and looked out. Down the hill, the dock gates were opening, and the first ceremonial float came through, a long wooden thing lit with lanterns even under the black storm sky, and the crowd along the seawall went up like a kettle.

"Look at that," Maddy said from the office doorway, phone already in her pocket, shoes already off and sandals on. "They're doing it in the rain. Andres is insane. That's the whole town down there."

"Are you going?" Cass asked.

"Everyone's going. Five minutes before the floats, you can't get a spot on the seawall. Gabriel, are you?"

He checked his laptop. "I need the hour. I'll take the hour."

"Cass?"

"I just finished. I might watch from the door."

But Maddy was already gone, sandals slapping, and through the glass Cass could see the small crowd of museum staff heading down the drive with umbrellas blooming open like dark flowers, and then the building was hers and Gabriel's and the five antique planes and one very expensive piano.

She lasted at the door about four minutes. The rain came sideways in gusts, and the floats were beautiful, she'd give the island that, six of them sliding out through the gates with their lanterns smeared yellow by the wet, and the drums carried even over the storm. But the wind had a mean edge to it and the rain had a colder one, and she was an interior person, a felt and string person, so she stepped back inside and pulled the door until it clicked.

That was when the squall hit.

She would remember this, later, as the sky simply leaning on the