But Jack had not stayed with toys.
He had walked, after school, to St. Mark's, where a retired church organist named Mr. Delgado gave free lessons to children who arrived with clean hands and serious eyes. Mr. Delgado was seventy-one, arthritic, and allergic to sentimentality. He told Jack that talent without discipline was a rumor, and that discipline without listening was a kind of violence against the music. Jack listened. He practiced on the community center upright until the janitor jingled keys at the door. On nights when the center closed early, he practiced on the pawnshop keyboard with headphones, the volume low so as not to wake Eleanor, who worked early and slept lightly.
The Westbridge scholarship audition was not Jack's idea.
It was Mr. Delgado's, offered one evening in October while rain argued with the roof.
"You will hate the building," Mr. Delgado said. "It smells like money. But the panel is fair, and Blake is on it. Blake hears."
Jack had looked at his hands. "What if I'm not ready?"
"Then you will learn that you aren't," Mr. Delgado said. "Which is also an education. But I do not think that is what you will learn."
Eleanor cried when the preliminary acceptance letter arrived—quietly, at the kitchen table, with a dish towel pressed to her mouth so Jack would not hear. He heard anyway. He stood in the hallway in his socks and did not enter until she had composed herself into the version of grandmotherhood that believed in being strong in front of children.