The Piano Teacher Who Would Not Quit

Why I did not just pay it

People have asked me since why I did not just find the money, or fight it, or go to a lawyer, and I will tell you the same thing I told my sister on the phone that night.

I could not find the money. Six hundred a month is seven thousand two hundred a year, and I cleared maybe nine thousand in a good year teaching, and I am not a math teacher but I can do that math.

And I would not get it by raising my rates, because the whole reason the room existed was so that a child whose daddy worked at the grain elevator could learn to play the same as the banker’s girl.

The day I charged twenty-five dollars a lesson to cover Boyd’s greed was the day I became something I had spent thirty-eight years refusing to be.

As for fighting it, I had a month-to-month arrangement. I always had. A handshake and an envelope. There was never a lease to stand on.

A landlord can raise the rent on a month-to-month tenant as high as he likes, and give her thirty days, and the law will hold the door for him while he does it. I asked. That part is true and there was no getting around it.

So there was no clever paper to pull out of a drawer. There was only the piano, and the children, and me, and a town that was about to watch an old woman get swept out of a room.

I was sixty-three years old. Harold had been gone six years. I did not have the fight in me to go to war with Boyd, and I would not have won it anyway.

What I had was a car, and a metronome, and a shelf of hymnbooks, and a Tuesday with Dani Morgan coming at three thirty.