"I hear you."
He got out. The air smelled like cut boxwood and somebody's expensive coffee. He walked up the steps alone, backpack on one shoulder, card already in his fist, and the doors opened onto marble and the piano and the long light, and his mother went to find a place to put the car, and the minute became several minutes, and the man came down the stairs.
The piano had not begun as a plan. It had begun as a room he was not supposed to enter while the deacons counted money.
He was seven. His grandmother still lived three blocks from them then, in a house that smelled of pomade and oranges, and on the Sundays they went to her church he sat in the second pew and watched the organist's feet more than he watched the pulpit. The organist, Mrs. Dall, played a piano in the fellowship hall afterward while the coffee percolated. One afternoon Elijah drifted in because the sound was a corridor and he was the kind of child who followed corridors. Mrs. Dall did not send him out. She patted the bench.
"You have been counting," she said.
He had. He did not know he had been counting, but when she played a phrase and stopped, his mouth had the next number in it, not as a count, as a place. She put his hand on the five keys of a chord and told him the names as if she were introducing him to neighbors he would have to live with. C, E, G. Then the next house over. He went home and drew a keyboard on a piece of cardboard and wore the cardboard soft at the edges.
Denise, who had sung in a chorus in high school and then packed the singing into the same box as other things that did not pay a security deposit, watched the cardboard for a month before she trusted it. She asked Mrs. Dall what a serious start would cost. The answer was a teacher, not a toy, and a teacher cost more than the month could spare if the month also intended to eat. They found a used keyboard through a listing Denise read twice to make sure the seller was not inventing the price. Eighty-eight keys, three of them unreliable, a sustain pedal that clicked like a secret. Elijah practiced with headphones so the neighbor on the other side of the wall, who worked nights, would not have to hate him. He learned to hear through the plastic.
Mrs. Patricia Keene entered the story when Elijah was eight and a half, after Mrs. Dall's arthritis made the fellowship-hall piano a kindness she could no longer spend. Keene was retired from the district, a public-school music teacher who had survived four superintendents and one attempt to replace the orchestra program with a software license. She taught three children in her dining room for fees that slid according to a chart she did not post. She had a gray bun she re-pinned during scales, a pencil with tooth marks, and an upright Yamaha that had been purchased, she liked to say, in a year when people still believed a piano was a piece of furniture a family might own on purpose.