By ten she was past the students who quit. The lemon drops went mostly to other children. Claire's candies were the extra half hour, the permission to try a Bach minuet until it stopped sounding like a child being good and started sounding like music. Ruth was not a romantic teacher. She did not say the piano was a friend. She said the piano was a responsibility that happened to sing if you told the truth with your fingers.
"If you lie," she said, "it gets clever. Clever is how people hide. I don't teach hiding."
"What if I'm scared?"
"Then play scared and in time. Scared is allowed. Rushing is just scared in a hurry."
Paul died on a Tuesday in April when Claire was seventeen. An aneurysm, the manager said, at the grill, fast, the kind of death people later call merciful because they were not the ones who had to identify the kindness. Claire was at school. She was pulled from a chemistry class by a secretary whose face had already done the worst part. Ruth played the funeral herself because she could not ask her daughter to, and then, in the car, she did ask.
"Tomorrow," Ruth said. "Not for them. For him. Something he can hum, wherever he is, which I don't know, so don't ask me theology in a parking lot."
Claire played "Abide with Me" in the empty sanctuary the next afternoon, simply, without the extra notes she had started to enjoy. The janitor waited in the back with his mop and did not interrupt. When she missed a tone in the third line she fixed it and went on. Ruth sat in the front pew with her hands folded so tightly the knuckles whitened, and she did not cry until the last chord, and even then she cried like a person who intended to be finished crying by the time she stood up. Claire cried in the car. The order felt important. The room got the music. The car got the rest.
After that the house was quieter in a way that had nothing to do with volume. Ruth still taught. Claire still practiced. Paul was not in the doorway. Sometimes Claire played a rag anyway, too loud, and Ruth did not tell her to bring it down. That was grief too, the permission.
Scholarships were discussed at the kitchen table with brochures that looked richer than the table. Ruth wanted Cleveland. She did not want Claire across the country being brave and broke in a city that would not know the sag of their porch. The Cleveland Institute accepted her. The money was not everything, but it was enough if Claire worked summers and if Ruth kept the school job and the private students and did not get proud about accepting a church stipend for accompanying.