Free The Stone Boy by Sophie Loubière

you?”
    “I’m not used to it, that’s all.”
    “Well, it doesn’t bother me. I want to see what you do to my Gaveau.”
    He laughed, removing his jacket.
    “Nothing too bad. I’m going to try to make it sing in tune, that’s all.”
    The tuner knew his stuff. That he was an Asian Breton in Seine-Saint-Denis lent a certain je ne sais quoi to the situation. Madame Préau watched her piano being dusted with a sense of peace. She felt somehow that years of neglect were being taken off of her, too. Hadn’t she abandoned the piano, like everything else, without a second thought? It was still the repository of all her secrets; as a child, she had told it everything that grown-ups refused to listen to and that scared the other kids. It was on this piano that she played her first piece for four hands with the future father of her child. Back then, Gérard still had the plump cheeks of a teenager, captivated by his cousin’s fantasies, once he got past his initial fear of her. Madame Préau ended up snoozing in her chair, listening to each hesitant tone find its rightful place, up or down until perfectly in tune. Then the tuner started in on a frenzied version of Handel’s
Passacaglia
. The time had come for her to leave her chair and take a few new notes out of her purse that she had withdrawn from the bank the day before.
    She was looking forward to tomorrow.
    To play for the child who had asked her to.
    So long as it didn’t rain.

23
     
    Over his sweatshirt, he had donned a dark blue anorak that was too short. His skinny wrists stuck out of his sleeves. It didn’t seem to bother him. He recovered a burst ball and tried to fill it with soil to restore its round shape, scratching his head lazily. The other two children bickered for the swing. Judging this to be right moment, Madame Préau put the binoculars down on the table and went to the living room. She opened the curtains and the window, sat down at the piano, and began a series of Charles-Louis Hanon exercises, which she knew by heart. She continued with a Czerny study and, having the feeling that she wouldn’t go on much longer, she launched into an improvisation, a series of chords with the left hand, against which the right hand picked out a melody. When a moped passed in the street, blocking out the piano with its shrill buzzing, Madame Préau stopped playing. Her joints were hurting and she was suffering from a bad back. She massaged her fingers and then her neck before getting up. Then she listened. On the other side of the street, Kévin’s shouts answered his sister’s taunts. Could he have heard the piano from the garden across the way? The old woman went to the window and peered through the cedar foliage behind the latticed concrete wall. Nothing moved in the weeping birch. She stayed like that for several minutes before returning to her room to get the binoculars. Crouching, the boy continued to fill the flat ball with soil and scratch his head. What was she hoping for? That the child would hold up a banner that read “Thank you for the music”? That he’d applaud at the end of the concert? Madame Préau had no idea. But that there was no change in the child’s behavior affected her so badly that she forgot to eat dinner and went to bed at seven without having washed. In the middle of the night, she was awakened by the passing 2:45 freight train and then by rustling from the attic. As she couldn’t get back to sleep, she went to the kitchen to nibble some biscuits and drink a glass of warm milk. She went back to the bathroom to freshen up and to soak the joints in her aching hands, and listened to the pathetic mewing of a cat coming from the garden shed—was some idiot molly there to mourn the one-eyed tom?—then she lay down again.
    It was only in the morning when she opened her bedroom shutters, that she saw it.
    The burst ball that the child had filled had landed in her flower bed.

24
     
    Thursday night dinner had turned into lunch on