The melody always started precisely at 9:00 AM on Sunday mornings.
Joanne, a seventy-year-old retired nurse, spent her weekends tending to the azaleas in her backyard. For weeks, she had been hearing a faint, beautiful soprano voice singing “It Is Well With My Soul.” The singing wasn’t coming from a radio, and it wasn’t coming from the street. It was drifting through the broken attic window of the sprawling Victorian house next door.
The property had been abandoned for ten years, locked in a bitter estate dispute, its paint peeling and the yard choked with briars. The bank had supposedly shut off the power and water a decade ago.
On the fourth Sunday, the singing was accompanied by the unmistakable, slightly out-of-tune chords of an upright piano.
Joanne couldn’t ignore it any longer. She wiped the damp soil from her gardening gloves, walked through the overgrown rhododendrons, and stepped onto the rotting back porch of the vacant house. She expected the heavy wooden door to be padlocked. Instead, when she turned the rusted brass knob, the door clicked and swung silently inward.
The air inside smelled of dust and old paper, but the hardwood floors in the hallway had been recently swept. The music grew louder, echoing from the front parlor.
Joanne walked quietly down the hall, her heart racing. She peeked around the heavy mahogany doorframe into the sunlit room.
Sitting at the dusty piano, playing the keys with weathered, familiar hands, was a woman Joanne had attended a funeral for fifteen years ago.
Ruth’s Hands
Ruth Pruitt.
Joanne knew the hands before she knew the rest. The left one had a crooked ring finger from a car door in 1974, and Ruth used to hold it out at church potlucks like a dare. Joanne had stood over those hands in an open casket at Hadley & Sons. Somebody had folded them over a Bible. The nail polish was the wrong color.
She didn’t make a sound. She was sure of that. But the woman stopped on the second line of the verse and said, without turning around, “You can come in. The floor by the door squeaks, so mind it.”
Joanne minded it. Her legs were doing the minding, not her.
“Ruth?”
“No.”
The woman turned on the bench. Same long jaw. Same gray eyes that went a little cross when she was tired. But thinner, much thinner, with a cardigan hanging off her like it was on a hanger, and her hair was cut short and uneven, as if she’d done it with kitchen scissors. Which she had, Joanne found out later.
“I’m Naomi,” the woman said. “Ruth was my sister. My twin. Everybody says that part first, so I’ll say it first.”
Joanne sat down. There was a chair, a wooden one with a cane seat, and she found it with the back of her knees. Her gardening gloves were still on. She noticed the dirt on them and was embarrassed, which was stupid.
“Ruth didn’t have a sister,” she said.
“She had one,” Naomi said. “She just didn’t have one here.”
Forty-One Years in Ridgecrest
It came out the way those things do, in the wrong order. Naomi started with the piano, how Walt had gotten it from a school that closed, how the C above middle C stuck in humid weather. Joanne had to steer her back.
Ridgecrest State Hospital, 1961. Naomi was seventeen. Their father signed the papers; their mother cried in the car and then didn’t mention it again. Something about voices, something about a boy, something about the church choir director who’d said she was “overwrought.” Naomi didn’t dress it up. She said she’d been sick, and then she’d been medicated, and then she’d just been there, which was its own thing.
Forty-one years.
“Ruth wrote,” Naomi said. “Every month, sometimes twice. She married Walt and moved up here and she kept writing. Her handwriting got worse. She had the arthritis in the knuckles.”
“Ruth never said a word,” Joanne said. “Thirty years next door. We shared a clothesline.”
“She was ashamed of it.” Naomi said this flat, not angry. “Not of me, I don’t think. Of what it would be, saying it. Out loud, over a clothesline.”
Joanne had nothing to say to that, because she knew it was true. She’d known Ruth Pruitt as a woman who changed the subject with a casserole.
Ridgecrest closed in 2002. Naomi went to a group home in Marion, then a boarding house. Then Ruth got the diagnosis, pancreatic, fast, four months. The funeral was in April. Naomi was there.
“I sat in the back,” she said. “Third pew from the door. A woman gave me a tissue. Big woman, green coat.”
Joanne’s mouth was open. She closed it.
“That was me?”
“You said, ‘It’s hard, isn’t it.’ And I said yes.”
Joanne remembered the coat. She did not remember the woman. She had handed out maybe forty tissues that day, being the nurse, being the one who carried them.
What the Floors Were For
The first payment came with the tour, because Joanne asked, and because Naomi seemed to want someone to ask.
The hall was swept because Naomi swept it. Every morning, with a push broom from the cellar, because dust made her cough and because, she said, you can’t let a house know you’ve given up on it. The back door was unlocked because the lock had rusted in the frame in 2016 and Naomi didn’t see the point of fixing what nobody was trying to use. The front was nailed shut.
No power. No water either, officially, but there was a hand pump in the kitchen that Walt’s father had put in before the city line came through, and it still drew from the old well. Naomi boiled what she drank. A camp stove, a few lanterns that ran on batteries. The piano needed nothing.
“Where do you sleep?” Joanne asked.
“Upstairs. The back bedroom, with the good radiator, though it doesn’t run.” Naomi laughed at herself. “I have a lot of blankets.”
The kitchen counter held a sleeve of saltines, half a jar of peanut butter, and a can of peaches with the lid peeled back. That was all. No bread. No eggs. A pot on the stove with a skin of oatmeal in the bottom.
Joanne looked at that and something in her that had worked thirty-four years on a medical-surgical floor came up out of its chair. She took Naomi’s wrist without asking. The pulse was fast and thin. The skin, when she pressed her thumb into the top of Naomi’s foot, held the dent.
“How long since you had real food?”
“I eat.”
“Naomi.”
“Since the first of the month,” Naomi said. “About. Things got slower.”
It was the twenty-second.
The Window and the Four Sundays
Joanne asked the question that had been in her all morning. She asked it badly. “Why now? I’ve lived next door since 1989. Ten years you’ve been in here and I never heard one note.”
“The window.” Naomi pointed at the ceiling. “The attic one. Hailstorm in September. It had been boarded up from inside, nice and tight, and the hail took the board and the glass both. So the sound goes out now. Before, it didn’t.”
“You sing every Sunday at nine.”
“Ruth played organ at Calvary Methodist for twenty-two years. Nine o’clock was her warm-up. Every Sunday.” Naomi turned back to the keys, put her hand on one and didn’t press it. “I figured somebody should keep it.”
It was a small answer, and Joanne let it be one. She didn’t say anything about it. She had an urge to, and she sat on it.
“The piano’s out of tune,” Naomi added. “I know. It’s been out of tune since the Bush administration. The first one.”
Joanne laughed, and it came out wrong, wet. She took one glove off and wiped her nose with the back of her wrist.
The Man Who Went to the Hardware Store
Then Joanne did the arithmetic, the plain kind that nurses do, a dose divided by hours.
Ten years in a house with no power. A woman who weighed maybe ninety pounds. No car, no pension that Joanne could picture, no neighbor who’d noticed. Food, in a kitchen with a cold stove. Food, through ten winters.
“Somebody’s been feeding you,” she said.
Naomi’s hand came off the keys.
“Walt did, till he died. That’s when the house went to the nephews and then the lawyers. Then, after…” She stopped. “I’m not supposed to say.”
“Say what?”
“It wasn’t a secret to hurt you. He was just, he said it would only worry you. You had your own.”
The back of Joanne’s neck went cold.
Dale. Her husband. Forty-four years. Dead since February, a stroke in the garage with a socket wrench in his hand. For the last decade, Saturday mornings, he’d gone to the hardware store. Came back at noon with a bag of washers and a bad story about the line at the register. She’d teased him. A man who could spend four hours buying a washer.
“He came Saturdays,” Naomi said. “Like clockwork. Eight-thirty. He used the cellar door, so you wouldn’t see from your kitchen window. He brought canned goods, and a ham at Easter. Pills from the drugstore, my thyroid. A little radio, but I wouldn’t keep it. I didn’t like the news.”
“He never…”
“He was going to tell you. He said so every time. After the holidays. After Joanne’s sister is better. After the azaleas.” Naomi almost smiled. “He liked your azaleas. He said you’d get into it with the bank if you knew, and the bank would put me out.”
“He was right,” Joanne said, because it was true, and because she was shaking and it was the one thing she could say that had edges.
She’d have gotten into it with the bank. She’d have called the county. She’d have called somebody, with a clipboard, and a form, and a van.
It was a bad feeling, being known that well by a man who wasn’t there to argue with.
“Since February I’ve had the saltines,” Naomi said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know who else. I thought about knocking, but you were in black for so long. Then the window broke and I thought, well, if she hears, she hears.”
Nine O’Clock
Joanne did not decide anything at the piano. She’d like to say she did. What she did was go home, and the walk back through the rhododendrons took a very long time because her knees had opinions.
In her own kitchen she stood at the counter and made a list on the back of a church bulletin. Eggs. Bread. Broth, the low-sodium kind. Potassium. A blood pressure cuff, which she already owned, in the hall closet. She took the cuff. She took the pot of chicken and rice she’d put up on Wednesday and hadn’t touched, because cooking for one is a kind of insult.
She also took the key to the cellar door from Dale’s pegboard in the garage. She hadn’t known it was there. It was labeled, in his block capitals: N. SAT.
Then she sat down at the table and was angry for eleven minutes. She counted it on the stove clock. At him, mostly. A little at Ruth. Some at herself, for the thirty years of clotheslines and potluck casseroles when she could have said, Ruth, what’s wrong? and wasn’t that the entire job of a neighbor.
Eleven minutes. Then the pot was hot in her hands and she was crossing the yard again.
Naomi hadn’t moved from the bench. She’d been waiting, Joanne could tell, the way you wait for a test result, hands folded on the fallboard.
Joanne set the pot on the lid of the piano. She took the pressure cuff out of her tote bag and wrapped it around Naomi’s arm, over the cardigan, because that was the first thing she knew how to do. It read 88 over 54. She said nothing about it yet.
“Eat,” she said. “Then you’ll tell the county lawyer who you are. I’ll hold the folder. Don’t argue.”
“The nephews will…”
“Let them.”
Naomi picked up the spoon. Her left hand, with the crooked ring finger, shook a little against the bowl, and Joanne put her own hand around it to steady it. Neither of them said Ruth’s name.
There was a hymnal on the music stand, spine cracked, the pages gone soft as cloth. Joanne turned to 377, which she didn’t need to look up. She’d sung it at that funeral with her eyes on the floor.
“From the top,” she said. “I’m flat. You’ll cover for me.”
The clock on the mantel said 9:41. Naomi set down the spoon and played.
If this one stayed with you, pass it along to someone who’s got a neighbor they’ve never really asked about.
For more stories where one overlooked detail changes everything, read about the index card that upended a costly software plan, the notebook she refused to leave behind, and the stranger who walked into the bank the day after a teller was fired.
