“On a pond you mean, sir.”

“On a pond, yeah.”

Dominick poured himself a small drink and threw it back.

“So, anyway,” Babe said, “everyone was having a fine old time, and we’d bought all the little tykes skates and they were stumbling around the pond—it was frozen.”

“I gathered, sir, yes.”

“And um, I, well, I sure do like playing that piano. And Helen sure does as well.”

“Helen’s your wife, sir?”

“She is.”

“Noted,” Dominick said. “Proceed, sir.”

“So myself and some of the fellows decided to take the piano from the front room and push it down the slope onto the ice.”

“A fine idea at the time, I’m sure, sir.”

“And that’s what we did.”

Babe leaned back in his chair and relit his cigar. He puffed until he got it going and took a sip of his whiskey. Dominick placed another beer in front of him and Babe nodded his thanks. Neither of them said anything for a minute and they could hear the two men at the other end talking about alienated labor and capitalist oligarchies and it could have been in Egyptian for all that Babe understood it.

“Now here’s the part I don’t understand,” Dominick said.

Babe resisted the urge to cringe on his barstool. “Go ahead.”

“You’ve got it out on the ice. And does it crack through the ice, taking all those tads on skates with it?”

“No.”

“No,” Dominick said softly. “I believe I would have read about that. So, my question then, sir—How did it manage to go through the ice?”

“The ice melted,” Ruth said quickly.

“When?”

Babe took a breath. “It was March, I believe.”

“But the party…?”

“Was in January.”

“So the piano sat on the ice for two months before it sank.”

“I kept meaning to get to it,” Babe said.

“I’m sure you did, sir.” Dominick smoothed his mustache. “The owner—”

“Oh, he was mad,” the Babe said. “Hopping. I paid for it, though.”

Dominick drummed his thick fingers on the bar. “So if it’s paid for, sir…”

Babe wanted to bolt the bar. This was the part he hadn’t quite worked out in his head yet. He’d installed a new piano in both the rental cottage and the restored house on Dutton Road, but every time Helen looked at that new piano she’d look at Ruth in a way that made him feel as attractive as a hog in its own filth. Since that new piano had taken residence in the house, neither of them had played it once.

“I thought,” Ruth said, “if I could pull that piano from the lake, I—”

“The pond, sir.”

“The pond. If I could pull that piano back up and, you know, restore it, it would make a swell anniversary gift for my wife.”

Dominick nodded. “And what anniversary would that be?”

“Our fifth.”

“Isn’t wood usually the appropriate gift?”

Babe said nothing for a moment, thinking that one through.

“Well, it’s made of wood.”