"I'm waiting for my turn."
His voice came out smaller than he wanted and clearer than he feared. He had practiced speaking in Mrs. Keene's dining room, where the rug ate sound. The lobby gave the sentence back to him from the marble.
Harper's smile stayed, but it changed jobs. He glanced toward the recital-hall doors, toward the printed order of the afternoon clipped to a stand: welcome, student demonstrations, remarks, refreshments in the gallery. Finalists were to be called from the holding area, not discovered like loose change under the stairs. He had shaken hands with a boy whose program said piano and whose father had used the word repertoire. That boy was inside, seated, with a parent on either side. This boy was not that boy. Harper felt the mild, almost pleasant certainty of a misunderstanding he was well equipped to end.
"The recital is for students who actually auditioned."
He said it kindly. Kindness, he believed, was a matter of tone. The sentence itself he did not hear. Around them a few people had begun to listen without admitting it. The flute girl stopped shifting her case. Elijah felt the listening the way he felt a change in the air before a window was opened. He kept his shoulders where they were. Mrs. Keene had a phrase for the place between the shoulder blades: neither apology nor armor. He tried to stand there.
Harper nodded at the Steinway, including the boy in a generosity.
"You're welcome to watch. Just don't turn the piano into a toy."
Heat went up Elijah's neck, not the heat of shame exactly, more the heat of being spoken about in the language of objects. A toy. He looked at the piano, at the long lid, at the gold letters, at the keys that were not a joke and had never been a joke in any room he had loved. He thought of the keyboard at home, which was a kind of toy to anyone who did not have to live on it, with the G above middle C that stuck unless you pressed at the left edge. He thought of Mrs. Keene's upright, which had a water ring on its top from a years-ago vase and a sound like a door opening into a larger room. He thought of this piano, which he had not yet touched and already respected more than the man expected.