"You asked for one."
A fork paused at the next table. The girl had gone very still, the way children go still when they are afraid the moment will be taken away if they breathe wrong.
"Excuse me?" the woman said.
The chandeliers kept doing their crystal business. Out on the sidewalk a car threw its headlights along the glass and took them back. Claire set her fingers on the fallboard's edge, not the keys. She thought of all the years that had gone into the hands, and of all the years the hands had carried plates instead, and of the fact that she had not promised anyone a miracle. She had promised, by sitting, only that she would not let the sentence be the last true thing in the room.
"So watch," she said.
Her wrists lifted. The right hand hovered over the middle of the keyboard, where a voice would begin if a voice were allowed. The left hovered lower, quiet, an agreement not yet made. She did not press. The green silk across from the girl caught the light and held it like a withheld opinion. The girl's mouth was parted. Somewhere behind Claire, a tray hesitated and then, professionally, continued. No pedal moved. No hammer rose. The first key under her hand remained a surface, cool and blank, a door she had walked up to in front of a hundred people and had not yet opened.
The room had been dared to look. It had not yet been given a sound.
The morning had started in a kitchen that smelled like old coffee and the wool of a coat drying on a chair.
Claire's apartment was a third-floor walk-up in Albany Park, above a tailor who played a radio so softly it might have been a memory of a radio. The piano against the inner wall was an upright with a scar on its cheek where a previous tenant had clipped it with a door. One key, the E above middle C, stuck when the weather forgot what it had decided about damp. She had learned to lift it with a fingernail before she trusted a phrase. On the music rack sat a paperback Brahms, the spine taped, and a notebook she did not open in the mornings because mornings were for the other life.