the side of it, it said Starving Students Moving in the kind of writing that suggested a drunken midnight and a can of spray paint. Only, it was more like several cans of spray paint, since the S was in pink, but in the middle of the V it changed to black, then turned yellow on the D, and finished in glorious orange after the O. In fact, whoever had used the orange was so enthusiastic that it dotted off to the front of the truck and only quit in front of the wheel well, though I suspected the ground had been spray-painted as well.
The guys who jumped out each door of the truck as soon as it stopped didn’t look like they were starving. They also didn’t look like college students, unless the category was expanded to include those students who had gone on a trip into space in the eighties, had failed to come down to Earth, and hadn’t yet realized that twenty years had gone by.
The bellies protruding out of their too-short T-shirts and above their too-tight pants definitely had taken twenty years and a lot of beer to develop.
“Yo,” the nearest one said. “Is this where we drop the piano?”
In these circumstances, I’m always possessed by the ghost of my grandmother, the last woman in my family who put any stock in the term ladylike. I straightened myself up, which meant I reached these guys’ chests, but never mind. Morally, I was standing on a mountain. “If you please,” I said. “It should go in the workshop.”
I think I was a little surprised they didn’t look at me like I was a total nut. Instead, they climbed onto the back of the truck and started untying the piano, which was covered in a confusion of ropes that looked like a cat’s cradle.
While they were doing that, I went into the workshop, leaving the door open. Mind you, it was a workshop. It was also where I earned the living that kept E and me in roof, food, and clothes.
Having tried three majors on for size, I’d left college to get married. That course of study had proven as much a success and now All-ex—couldn’t be any more ex unless I killed him, something I considered two times a week and three times on Sunday—Mahr and I were divorced. I’d turned to the furniture-refinishing talents I’d picked up while trying to furnish the house on a shoestring, to keep up my side of E’s upkeep and my own. So, the food often defaulted to pancakes, my clothes sometimes came from flea markets, and the apartment was in the sort of neighborhood that made Ben worry about my safety. But I was managing. I was on my own.
And it all happened in this little shed, with its chemical-and tool-filled shelves; its worktable made of four sturdy kitchen cabinets topped by a big, heavy board; and its pegs on the wall, that held my protective suit—resistant to most chemicals—my goggles, and my ear protectors.
When the guys came in carrying the piano, I was trying to drag the worktable to one side, which was easier said than done. First, because I had some pieces awaiting refinishing by the wall. Second, because cabinets and plywood top and all, the worktable outweighed me by quite a bit, even without the cans of stain and varnish I had stashed under it.
I’d managed to push it maybe five inches—okay, two—when one of the Starving Students said, “Whoa, there. Let us do that.”
They pushed the table as far as it would go without moving the tea cart and the leather-topped desk by the wall. The blonder of the two—though it might just have been white hair shining from within his mullet that gave that impression—said, “What do you keep under there, little lady?”
He could have chosen a less appropriate thing to call me, since little I am, but lady is open for debate. Before I realized it, my mouth said the first thing that crossed my mind, “The body of the last guy who asked that question.”
I don’t know if they thought I was crazy or if they believed me. This sort of stuff tends to sound much more plausible when you’re in a girl’s workshop, surrounded by cutting and power tools.
Whether they thought I spoke the truth or that I was the rudest woman on Earth, they went ahead and brought the piano in and left it where the worktable had been. When I