People ask about the scar on my left hand. It runs from the base of my thumb to the wrist, thin and white now.
It happened during my brother's graduation weekend. He was moving out of state, and we had a party.
Someone knocked his soccer trophy off the shelf. The figurine was already broken from an old fight, but the jagged ceramic edge caught me as it fell.
I was twenty-three, playing bass in a cover band that was going nowhere. That same weekend, I told them I was quitting to apprentice with a piano tuner.
My fiancée, then just a girl I was seeing, bandaged my hand with a dish towel. She said, 'This is your sign.' I thought she meant the cut, but she meant the whole thing.
Twenty-six years later, I tune pianos in this railroad town. I'm saving up for a wedding that took its own sweet time.
The scar is still there, faint. When people ask, I trace it and say, 'That's the night I chose a different key.'