Renee’s swing shift ended when she made lead, a thing she did not credit to a boy in an atrium and also did not entirely separate from the year she had decided not to forbid a train. Lead meant days. Days meant dinner at a table instead of soup at nine. Jonah, home for a summer, set the table without being asked. The keyboard under the window had Dean’s used one now, and the stickered one was gone, and the window was the same. They ate. She asked about Priya. He said Priya had a fellowship in another city. She said write her. He said he would. He did. The email was short. Short was their dialect. Here. Leaving. Proud was a word Renee used sparingly, like salt. She used it that summer, once, over the bowls. He said the left hand still rushes when he is tired. She said then don’t be tired. They both knew that was not how shifts worked. They smiled anyway.
Allison’s daughter, the one who had pointed, took piano for a year because her mother had been wrong in public and wanted to be right in private. The daughter quit. Allison let her quit. The letting was the lesson she had actually learned, not the lesson she had almost taught a stranger. She did not look Jonah up. Looking him up would have made him a project. He had declined to be a project when he said he was going to play anyway. She respected the decline by staying a stranger. Respect, for her, was a bag of tissue paper kept to herself.
Greg stayed a cap and a work jacket in a story his son told once. The story did not improve him. Improvement was not the atrium’s job. The atrium’s job had been tile and coffee and a piano the station had installed so people would feel civic. A boy had used it for its other job, which was music. Civic feeling had mocked him. Music had not. Jonah did not need Greg to grow. He needed the pedal, and when the pedal broke he adapted, and when a room became storage he signed a sheet. Adaptation was the plot. Mockery was the weather at the start.