Claire said she would take it. She meant it. Then in November Ruth's heart, which had been a quiet complaint for a year, stopped being quiet. Not a stroke. Not the swift plot Claire had braced for since Paul. Congestive heart failure, the doctor said, a phrase that sounded like a moral accusation and was only a description of a muscle doing less than the body asked. The house acquired a pill organizer and a scale and a new kind of waiting. Claire deferred the residency. Voss did not congratulate her on the deferral. Voss said, "Go home. Keep your hands honest while you're there. Grief is a sloppy editor. Don't let it cut the bass."
She moved back into her old room. The reindeer sweater was long gone. The Baldwin was still there. She played in the afternoons while Ruth rested on the couch with her eyes closed, conducting sometimes with one finger, stopping Claire when the melody asked for pity.
"I don't want pity," Ruth said. "Pity is sharp in the wrong places. Play me the truth. If the truth is sad, fine. Sadness is not the same as sagging."
"You should have been the one with the scarf and the students in Cleveland."
"I had the students I wanted," Ruth said. "One of them is currently insulting my life choices. Again from the second system."
March came with dirty snow and a hospital that smelled like warm plastic and chicken soup no one had ordered. Claire learned the cafeteria's coffee, which was never hot enough, and the chair that did not stab her back, and the way nurses spoke when they were leaving room in the day for bad news. She played, badly, on a lobby piano that was out of tune, until a volunteer asked her to stop because a family nearby was crying and the music made the crying harder. Claire understood. She stopped. She added it to the list of times stopping was the decent thing.
Ruth died on a Wednesday while Claire was in the cafeteria getting a coffee she would not drink. The nurse who found her was kind. The kindness did not rearrange the fact. Claire stood in the hallway with the cup and understood that she had stepped out of the room for four minutes and the four minutes had been enough. People told her, later, that it was all right, that mothers often waited until a daughter left, that there was no four-minute version of the story in which Claire was guilty. Claire nodded. She kept the four minutes anyway. Some debts were not financial. They did not care whether you called them irrational.
The funeral was full of students who were no longer children. Claire played the Intermezzo. She did not make it prettier than it was. She sagged once, in the middle, an inner voice late, and she brought it back without apologizing to the keys. Ruth would have accepted the repair and rejected the speech. Afterward, in the fellowship hall, a woman Claire barely knew pressed her hands and said, "She was so proud, and you play so beautifully, you must keep it up, you must," and Claire said thank you until the thank you became a kind of wall. She drove home. The Baldwin sat in the afternoon light. She closed the lid. She did not open it for six weeks.
Chicago in July did not care that she had arrived late to her own life.