The Piano Teacher Who Would Not Quit

The notice on the door

Mr. Boyd taped the notice to my door before seven in the morning, before I had even turned my key in the lock.

White paper. Blue ink. His small square letters, the same hand that had written out my receipts for thirty-eight years.

I stood on the brick sidewalk on Second Street with my coffee going cold in a paper cup, and I read it twice to be sure.

Rent on the front room: six hundred dollars a month, effective the first of November.

I had been paying two hundred since before my hair went silver, since Harold was still alive to carry my piano bench in from the car.

Two hundred I could do. Two hundred I had always done, every month, in a sealed envelope slid under the hardware store’s back door, because Boyd owned that too and he liked things left where he could find them.

Six hundred I could not do. Not on lessons at eight dollars a half hour, not with half the children behind and me never having the heart to ask their mothers for it.

I folded the notice into my coat pocket and I unlocked the door anyway, because it was a Tuesday, and on Tuesdays Dani Morgan came at three thirty, and I was not going to leave a ten-year-old standing on the sidewalk.

Inside, the room smelled the way it always did. Lemon oil and old wood and the dust that lives in felt hammers.

The piano was a Baldwin upright, brown as a church pew, and I had bought it used in 1989 with the first money I ever earned teaching.

I sat down on the bench and I put my hands on the keys, and I did not play anything. I just sat there and let the cold notice press against my ribs through my coat.