The keyboard at home had stickers on the C and the G, half peeled. He played the line again with the dead keys skipped, which made it a different line, and he preferred the station’s version and did not say so. Renee came in at nine smelling like detergent and heat. She kissed his hair. She asked about bridges. He said the book had a drawbridge. She said good. She heated soup. He did the bowls. The bowls were the rent he paid for the lie, and the lie was small, and he intended to keep it small until he could pay a fare without taking it from the grocery envelope.
Renee had found the keyboard at a church sale the autumn Jonah was eight, between a rice cooker and a box of sheet music nobody wanted. She could not read the sheet music. She bought the keyboard because he had stopped in front of it and put one finger on a key and not moved, and she knew that look from the year his father left, the look that meant a thing had become necessary. His father, Dean, drove a delivery route and sent a card at Christmas if the route remembered. The card did not include a piano. Renee’s did, in the form of fifteen dollars and a warning about nine o’clock.
Jonah learned from a library computer with headphones and from a retired teacher named Mrs. Ellison who lived in the building and had once taught middle school chorus. She did not charge. She said charging a child for scales was how you made a child hate scales. She took tea. Renee sent cookies when there were cookies. Mrs. Ellison corrected his wrists and did not correct his hoodie. By ten he could make a line hold together. By the Saturday in the atrium he could make it hold together while adults told him to run around.
He had started taking the train because the library branch near home closed its practice room and the station piano was public and free if you were kind. Kind, on the sign, meant no banging. He was not a banger. He was a waiter. Just wait had been in him before he said it. He had waited for Dean to come to a school night. He had waited for the dead keys to be fixed. He had waited for twenty minutes on a bench while a man took a call. Waiting was a skill. The atrium had tried to spend it for him. He had spent it himself.