Down the corridor from the offices, heels sounded, not loud, a working pace. June Reynolds came into the lobby with a clipboard and a pencil behind one ear and the look of a woman who had been solving six problems and intended to solve a seventh before the hour turned. She was forty-two, though what Elijah saw was not an age. He saw the green blouse his mother had noticed in a photograph on the school's music page, the short natural hair, the lanyard, the calm. She had spoken to him once on the phone, after the video, and her voice had been the voice of someone reading a list in order to get it right, not in order to perform getting it right. He had trusted that.
She saw him at once.
"Is Elijah ready?"
The question was for him and also for the afternoon, a check against a schedule only she was holding in her head. A few of the parents straightened, because a name had entered the official air.
Elijah felt his breath go down to the place where the music would have to start if the music were allowed.
"Yes, ma'am."
Reynolds glanced at the bench, at the open space around the piano, at the light. She had planned a warm-up in the practice room at the end of the hall, but the practice room had acquired a clarinet and a nervous parent and a music stand with a broken bolt. The lobby Steinway was in tune. She had heard it at noon. The building was full of people who believed pianos were furniture until a coordinator told them otherwise. She nodded at the bench.
"You can warm up here."