The residency had been held, barely, by a director who believed in second chances and in the grant report he had already drafted. Claire sublet a room in Rogers Park from a cousin's friend, a temporary arrangement that became less temporary when the cousin's friend moved to Denver and left her the lease. The condo where the donors gathered was on a high floor with a Steinway that had been polished by someone who did not play it. The city glittered in the windows in a way that made Claire's black dress look like a decision.
She began the Chopin Ballade in G minor because Voss had said it was ready and because Claire wanted, with a pride she would later mistrust, to give these people the opposite of background music. The opening rose. For a page she was inside it. Then the cafeteria returned: the cup, the four minutes, the hallway. Her hands continued for two measures without her. Then they didn't. She stopped in the middle of a phrase, which is a worse silence than a silence between movements, because the phrase stays open like a mouth.
Someone coughed. The director's smile went professional. A woman standing near the window, not cruel, perhaps even trying to be merciful, said quietly to the man beside her, "Some people belong in the room." She may have meant something kinder. She may have meant the donors, the view, the whole expensive quiet. Claire heard a verdict. She stood. She said she was sorry. She said she was unwell. Both things were true and neither one repaired the phrase hanging in the air.
She did not go back to the residency. The director called twice. Voss called three times. Claire answered the third call and said, "I can't hear the bass. I'm not asking you to fix that on the phone." Voss was quiet. Then she said, "All right. Don't you dare pretend the Ballade is ruined. Pieces survive their players' worst nights. Call me when you want a witness, not a rescue."
Claire got a job washing dishes in a hotel kitchen because it was available and because the noise made thinking difficult. From dishes she moved to bussing at The Winslow, which was a step up in shoes and a step down in anonymity, and from bussing to serving when a manager named Diane Okonkwo watched her handle a spilled wine without making the spill the table's emergency. Diane was forty-eight, precise, with close-cropped hair and no interest in origin stories.
"Can you carry four plates and tell the truth about a wait time?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Do you have drama?"
"I have a past," Claire said. "It doesn't need a table."