Read Online Heart of Palm by Laura Lee Smith - Free Book Online Page B

springing gait, nearly on his toes, with his eyebrows raised and his shoulders hunched forward. He always looked as though he was ready to jump into a sprint, running toward or away from something, though Frank never knew quite what. Biaggio was big, solid-shouldered, tall. He could have been intimidating, if he were a different sort of man.
    “I heard the hollerin’ starting early,” Biaggio said. “They been goin’ at it a while, Frank.” His brow was knit. “They are righteously pissed off this time. It’s about the Steinway.”
    “So I heard,” Frank said.
    His mother’s Steinway. It was a beautiful instrument, or had once been, rather, before the ravages of time and neglect had taken it over. The piano had been passed down in Arla’s family since before the turn of the century, and he knew that when her parents died it was one of the few things she’d insisted on saving from their Davis Shores home before the auctioneers liquidated the estate, before what little was left of the old Bolton money began its steady, slow leak through the Bravo family coffers. A full-size upright, deep mahogany so dark it was almost black, the piano had a beautiful, ornate shape and had, at one time, a rich clear tone. Arla had grown up practicing scales and banging out overtures in her parents’ living room overlooking the Matanzas, though as an adult she rarely played anymore. Instead, she had put all her children through piano lessons, had presided over their practice sessions with a fervor bordering on compulsion, even though Carson and Sofia were hopeless at the keyboard, and it had been only Frank himself, and Will, who had taken to it with any level of appreciation and who had developed any skill. But for all her attachment to the blasted, blighted Steinway, which Frank knew was one of Arla’s few remaining vestiges of the life of privilege she’d once known, the piano had never been maintained. Even during the years of lessons it had never been tuned, never been regulated, never had its decrepit old hammers adjusted or even inspected, for that matter. Eventually the house termites had annexed the instrument, and the Steinway had sat, moldering and austere, in the living room at Aberdeen for as long as Frank could remember. And for nearly the same amount of time, Sofia had been hell-bent on getting rid of it.
    And here was a battle of wills most powerfully matched. Both blessed with a towering height that might have been called statuesque on some women, Frank’s sister and his mother were capable of wicked outbursts of temper and, more problematic, complete and utter lapses of reason. The condition was made more intimidating by the fact that both Arla and Sofia were still, by any measure, beautiful women, though Arla’s age and her physical condition had, through the years, skewed her charms, made them fit less snugly, less comfortably. She had the look of a woman whose beauty was fading fast, and worse, who knew it. But it was Sofia, really, who threw the equation out of whack here at Aberdeen. When she was a child, people said she was willful. When she was a young woman, people said she was moody. Now that she’d hit her forties, they said she was crazy. Beautiful, but crazy.
    And she was odd. The mood swings, the bitter rages, the panic attacks. When his sister was younger, Arla, and even Dean, before he left, give him some small credit, had tried to work Sofia through it, had taken her to counselors and doctors and support groups and all the rest. But after each attempted treatment she’d return home exhausted, defeated, more anxious than ever, and Frank had had the feeling that perhaps it was cruel to ask her to try, to ask her to become something she was incapable of becoming. And then came the final one-two punch—that horrible night of loss, all those years ago, followed by Dean’s last valediction down the long driveway of Aberdeen. It had become clear to Frank—painfully so—that Sofia would handle