"Well... everyone's watching now."
It was not an apology. It was not quite a warning. It was a fact he offered as if the fact had been arranged by the boy, or by Reynolds, or by the unfortunate acoustics of marble, and not by the little crowd his own questions had gathered. Elijah heard the ellipsis in it, the place where a different man might have stopped. He set the card on the music stand's ledge, face out, not because he needed the room to read it again but because he wanted his hands empty.
He sat.
The bench was higher than Mrs. Keene's. His shoes met the floor, barely, the way they were supposed to if a pianist intended to use the pedal and also intended not to be carried away by it. He felt the distance. He felt the eyes. He felt Harper to his left, a tall weather. He did not put his hands on the keys. He put them on his knees and looked once at the fallboard, which was open, the keys bare, eighty-eight of them and only a few that would matter in the next minutes, though that was a lie pianists told themselves to keep from drowning. All of them mattered. Even the ones you did not play, because the ones you did not play were the silence the others stood in.
Reynolds waited. She did not smile for the benefit of the lobby. She gave him the respect of a practical pause.
Harper cleared his throat. The sound was small and received more attention than he had meant to spend. He had the sense, unfamiliar and unpleasant, of being a person who ought to leave and who could not leave without the leaving becoming another speech. He looked at the side of the boy's face, the concentration already there, the jaw not clenched but decided. Something in him still wanted to offer an exit. An exit, he told himself, was kindness. A child should not be made to fail in a lobby. He had not yet allowed the other possibility to finish its sentence.
"Still sure about this?"
Elijah lifted his hands. He held them above the keys, in the air, in the shape they would need, and did not drop them. The room leaned in, hungry for a sound he was not yet willing to give. He could feel the hunger. He had felt a smaller version of it at church when he played for offering and somebody's cousin waited to see whether the little boy was cute or good. Cute was a trap. Good was a job. He kept his hands in the air until the hunger had to become patience.