"You don't have to warm up in the lobby," she said. "We have rooms now that aren't full of clarinets and broken bolts. Usually."
"I might anyway," he said. "For a minute. Not the program."
"Your program is too good for their chatter. Save it." She studied him with the old coordinator look, the one that inventoried a person without consuming them. "Harper's coming. I told him he could. He retired in December. He asked if it would be a burden. I said I'd ask you."
"You didn't ask me."
"I'm asking you now, which is late, and you can say no, and I'll stand at the door and spend my one dramatic gesture of the year."
Elijah looked at the piano. He thought of the card, which he still had, soft at the edges, in a folder in Denise's hall closet: ELIJAH, 17, PIANO SCHOLARSHIP FINALIST. He thought of the word son, which he had heard since in better mouths and worse ones. He thought of Harper at the trophy case, accepting a boundary. Retirement had not been required to make the man human. The apology in the lobby, public and late, had been the part Elijah kept. The rest he had been willing to let be small.
"He can come," Elijah said. "Don't give him a speech to make. If he wants to say something, he can say it to me, not to the room."