The Piano Teacher Who Would Not Quit

The first day

I put a card in the window of my old room, the one I would lose at the first of the month, and the card said only this: Piano lessons have moved to the public library meeting room, two blocks over, same times, no charge.

No charge. I made myself write those two words plain, so no mother would stand in her kitchen doing the embarrassed arithmetic.

The first afternoon, I did not know if anybody would come. I sat at the old upright in the meeting room with my metronome ticking and my hymnbooks stacked, and I waited.

Dani came first. Of course she did. She came up those wide stone steps with her backpack sagging off one shoulder, and she stopped in the doorway and looked at all the books and the tall windows and the piano.

“Is this really where we do it now,” she said.

“This is really where we do it now,” I said. “Sit down. Middle C. Show me you remembered.”

She sat, and she found middle C without looking, and I knew we were going to be all right.

Then the Hollis twins came, and then the Garner boy, and then a girl I had been teaching four years whose mother had seen the card in the window.

By three forty-five there were six children in that meeting room and three mothers in the folding chairs along the wall, and Miss Ann stood in the doorway with her arms crossed and the biggest smile I ever saw on her.

It was not quiet. A library is supposed to be quiet, and Miss Ann had spent her whole life hushing people, and she stood there and let a child bang out “Twinkle Twinkle” badly and loudly, and she did not hush one soul.