She waited tables in the summers at a cafe near Ruth's school, a place with pies under glass and a radio that played country in the morning and nothing in the afternoon because the owner liked the sound of plates. Claire's hands blistered in a different pattern than practice blisters. She learned to smile at people who snapped their fingers. She learned that being good at a service job was a skill with its own pride, and that the pride had to be watched or it would turn into a speech she gave herself to avoid practicing. At night she played on the Baldwin until the neighbor on the right flicked a porch light, their agreed signal, and Claire closed the fallboard at ten-thirty like a promise.
Ruth's hands began to stiffen the winter Claire turned twenty-one. Arthritis, the doctor said, common, manageable, a word that minimized the look on Ruth's face when a simple accompaniment hiccuped under her fingers. She stopped taking the youngest beginners. She kept the serious ones. She sat on her hands in the evenings to warm them, a sight Claire could not stand and could not look away from.
"Don't narrate my knuckles," Ruth said. "Play me the Brahms. The A major. And don't make it prettier than it is. I can still hear."
The Intermezzo Op. 118 No. 2 was Ruth's piece the way some people have a hymn they don't advertise. It did not show off. It carried a melody that kept almost resolving and then thought better of it, a tenderness that had backbone. Claire worked it until Voss, who did not care about family mythology, said, "All right. That's not a souvenir. That's a performance."
There was a boy in those years, a violinist named Seth who wanted Claire to be easier in restaurants and more impressed by his plans. He told her, kindly, that she could be happy if she stopped treating every phrase like a referendum on her right to exist. He was not entirely wrong. Claire ended it anyway, on a Thursday, because she did not want a life in which her work was a personality flaw someone loved her in spite of. Seth said she would regret the severity. She regretted, later, the way she had said goodbye, which was clean to the point of cold. She did not regret the Thursday.
In the fall she was twenty-three, a recital set forming, a small residency in Chicago offered for the following year: teaching three days, playing community concerts, the sort of beginning that is not famous and is not nothing. She called Ruth from a practice room with the offer letter folded in her lap.
"Take it," Ruth said. The connection made her voice thinner. "You come home to eat, not to hover. We agreed."
"Your hands."
"My hands are my business. Your life is yours. Don't you dare make me the reason you become careful."