Trouble With the Truth (9781476793498) by Edna Robinson Read Free Book Online Page A

detected that you could almost blow the keys down. And Mr. Milano either hadn’t liked B-flats or at some time he’d mistakenly engaged a plumber to repair all eight. Not one of them sounded.
    â€œYou tell your mamma she can have it for twenty dollari if she take it away,” Mr. Forelli said.
    â€œAnd how much would it cost to move it?”
    â€œAh, now I see why she send a little girl! You live near?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œThen, I tell you what. If she want it, my boy and me, we put it on my delivery truck and bring it. But it still twenty dollari. After all, I paid for the paper ad.”
    â€œWe want it, all right. You bring it,” I said. “Today.”
    â€œCalma! We ask your mamma first, eh?”
    â€œMy father said it would be all right. He’ll pay you the twenty dollars.”
    When I came home from school the next day, the piano was in my room, hidden from my father’s critical sight. I wouldn’t let Fred dustit or Ben touch it. I only suffered everyone to listen to it. It and Miss Bunce’s book became the focal points of my existence. To an audience that didn’t even try to conceal its displeasure, all that afternoon and evening I practiced beginning exercises and scales, less their B-flats. I played them for Miss Bunce the next afternoon, and she used the principal’s telephone to arrange for one of the more willing members of the reprehensible costume committee to deliver the unfinished costumes to our house that very evening.
    The next week was filled with fulfilling our various bargains. Fred, tight-lipped and antagonistic, directed sewing sessions. He was particularly abusive about my father’s difficulty with mastering the craft of tacking a light material to a heavier host, the veiled headpieces. My father spent one entire session searching for a silver thimble that he’d once bought as a gift for me but had forgotten to give me. Now he used it himself, and that, added to his missing one work period, compounded Fred’s anger. He invented opportunities to remind my father that he was hardly abiding by the bargain. In return, my father kept reminding Fred that his grandiose gesture of offering Ben and me financial aid had not been called to action. Ben bent to the sewing task with intense, distracted grace, his mind chained to the purpose of memorizing the introductions and lyrics to “Welcome, Sweet Springtime.” The only waking hours we ceased sewing, practicing, memorizing, and complaining were the afternoon my birthday party came and went.
    Three days before the exchange program, the costumes were finished. My father was criticizing Fred’s handiwork and musing that he himself might have become a very successful tailor. Ben could do the introductions and “Welcome, Sweet Springtime” in his sleep, and I could play “The Blue Bells of Scotland” and the chord progressions Miss Bunce had arranged as accompaniment for her bedecked vocalists.
    Last rehearsals were wars of sound: Miss Bunce’s larynx, franticallyurging the chorus to shriller and shriller heights, pitted against me stabbing the keys with all my might, and Ben’s lone, melodic greeting spring “in so-ong” contesting unscheduled noise from the restless leaves and blue bells.
    The night before the performance, Ben said his throat hurt. My father looked at it and said it couldn’t. Ben said his stomach ached. My father said it would stop.
    â€œFlowers of Spring is going to be awful. Those kids don’t know what they’re doing. I wouldn’t come see it if I were you.”
    â€œBut you and Lucresse are in it. And I’ve contributed more needlework than ten women. Certainly Fred and I will be there.”
    â€œTell him how awful it’s going to be, Lucresse,” Ben ordered.
    I didn’t know if I should support him or not. “Are the other parents going?”
    â€œSure. But what difference does it