"What if they think I can't?"
"Then they will be having a thought. Thoughts are not your instrument." She took the pencil from behind her ear and pointed, not unkindly, at his hands. "These are. And this." She pointed at his ear. "If you get to the bench and the room is full of people who have already decided, you do not give them a speech. You give them a reason to put their decisions down. And if they won't, you have still played."
"Just play," he said.
"Just play," she said. "Which is not the same as only play. Just means: don't add a costume."
On the night before, he slept, which surprised him. He dreamed of a staircase that was also a keyboard, and in the dream he was not afraid of falling. He was afraid of skipping a step and calling it an interpretation. He woke, found the real stairs of the dream were the Whitaker stairs he had seen in photographs, and lay in the blue window-light running the prelude until his mother turned on the shower.
In the garage, Denise circled until a space appeared on the third level between a concrete pillar and a car that had parked as if the lines were a rumor. She took the space. She sat for ten seconds with her hands on the wheel, because a mother is allowed ten seconds if she pays them back in walking. Then she got out, checked the half sandwich as if it were a child she was leaving, locked the treaty-windshield car, and found that the elevator required a token she did not have. The stairwell smelled like cold dust. She climbed. Her good shoes, which were not performance shoes, only the shoes she wore when she refused to be mistaken for someone who had not tried, made a practical sound on the concrete. She thought of her son in a lobby she had seen only in pictures. She thought, with a flare of anger that had no object yet, of how long a minute could be made to feel if you were eleven and holding a card. She climbed faster.
Harper stood with the card's afterimage still in his eyes and did not know where to put the minute he had just spent.