Amazing, the things that wind up under little girls' beds. Discarded toys. Dried-up gum. Boxes of buttons and feathers and pictures cut out of magazines. And once, just once: the music.

Vera's back and knees were not up to much stooping and sweeping anymore, so she let the new girl do all of that, except for the beds. Because the new girl had allergies and cleaning out under beds always had her red-faced sneezing for a half hour.

So there she was, Vera, down on her creaky knees, picking through a pile of lint and junk.

Vera did not recognize the music, not at first. Just looked like a dusty roll of paper, tied up with a blue ribbon. When she brought it up to blow the dust out of the middle, though, she saw the inside. The trail of little crayon marks, like ants lining up for a picnic.

A grand piano sat in the living room below. She knew for a fact that none of folks who lived here played. It was just for show. For resting your drink on at parties.

Of course, she hadn't played herself for a good fifty, sixty years, but she thought, maybe, the fingers don't forget. She took the roll of paper downstairs.

"Where you going?" the new girl asked, her voice echoing off the shower tiles.

The bench squealed as Vera drew it out, and her back gave a twinge of protest. She sat and undid the ribbon. She rolled the paper out above the keys, and she thought, I'm wrong. The meanings of the dots and lines and squiggles did not leap into her mind like magic. It was just paper. Just some little rich girl's doodles. It wasn't the music.

Then she brushed her worn fingertips across cool ivory, and her hands began to move all on their own. And she remembered.

Daddy had found the piano just sitting by the side of the road, all beat up. He put it in his truck and took it around with him and brought it home at the end of the day. Momma yelled at him about it, but he said he was going to fix it up and sell it and then she'd be sorry when he took the money all straight downtown. Whatever that meant.

Well. Fixing pianos, it turned out, was a bit of a specialty skill, and not one that Daddy had. So it ended up that the piano went back in the shed and things piled on it and around it until everyone but Vera forgot it was there.

Vera did not forget, because she had the music.

She wrote the music herself. She had seen, in the hymnals at church, how it was done: the lines, the dots, the squiggles. It wasn't hard. Easier than making her letters at school. She wrote page after page, and when she was done, and she didn't have chores, she brought each page out to the shed and played.

It was true that not every key on the piano made a sound, and it was true that some of the ones that did make a sound, the sound they made was not very nice. Still and all, it came out music, when Vera played it.

Sometimes it was happy music and Vera found herself whistling all week long. But the sad music was better, because when it came out sad music, the people came to hear.

You could tell they came from far away because they were all sorts of funny shapes, and none of them ever could talk right, though some of them tried. They had feet on backwards and upside-down faces, or no faces at all, or their faces were right in the middle of their chests. They had arms down to the floor or six arms or no arms. They had ears long enough to braid, or they looked like cotton sheets sewed up in the shape of a man with rips for eyes.

When Vera played the sad music, the people climbed one by one from the cracks and the in-between places. They sat or stood or danced a slow, sad dance, always alone, as long as the music lasted. When it was over they crawled back where they came from or just stepped into a shadow without stepping out the other side.

If anyone caught her playing the sad music, they always yelled. "What is that racket?" was Momma's favorite thing to say. The people scattered, then, when they heard her. Vera could tell they didn't want anybody else to see them. Just her.

One day the shed burned up.

Another day, Daddy never came home and pretty soon Momma and Vera and her sisters all were living in one room over the drug store downtown, and somewhere along the way all of the music got lost. Or Momma threw it out.

That was that, and Vera forgot. Until today.

Now, this little girl's music was not the same as hers, but it was familiar. As familiar as an old coat that smells of a dog you used to have, or your sister's version of your Momma's apple pie. And Vera could tell it was the sad music, because she could hear the doors and the cracks, the shadows and the in-between places, she could hear them all opening. But before the people could come, the new girl came tromping down the stairs, yelling, "What is that racket?"

And that was that.

What's worse, she told the boss, and the boss told the owners, and just like that, after twenty years, Vera was out of a job.

But the truth was, she didn't mind. She wasn't thinking anymore about cleaning somebody else's house. After the boss told her, Vera just left, didn't say anything. Walked to the bus station.

She stopped off on the way at the Value World for a pen and paper, and all the bus ride home, she wrote.