Byron pays for most of it. He’s 18. Just graduated from high school three weeks ago. No ceremony, no party. He picked up his diploma from the front office on a Tuesday and went straight to his shift at Dave’s Grocery on Passyunk Avenue. 5:00 a.m. starts. Unloading pallets, stacking shelves, hauling crates to the back. His hands are rough from it. Calloused across the palms, scarred on two knuckles from a box cutter that slipped last December. But those hands are long. The fingers are thin and stretch wide. A piano teacher would look at them and say, “Those are built for the keys.” No piano teacher ever looked at them. After the grocery shift, Byron showers, changes, and walks 11 blocks to his second job. Evening register at a convenience store on Snyder Avenue. He stands behind the counter from 4:00 to midnight selling cigarettes and lottery tickets to people who don’t look at his face. He doesn’t complain. He doesn’t talk much. His co-workers call him ghost because he moves through a room without making a sound. Head slightly down, eyes watching everything. The kind of quiet that people mistake for empty, but isn’t.
Because every night after his shift, Byron walks home, locks the door, and sits down at the piano in the corner of the living room. It’s an old upright, a Wurlitzer from the 1970s. The cabinet is scratched, the finish peeling along the edges. Three of the keys have yellowed past ivory into something closer to bone. The sustain pedal sticks if you press it too hard. But Byron wipes it down every morning before he leaves. He covers it with a cloth his grandmother made. And he plays it every single night. Quietly enough not to wake Loretta, loudly enough to feel it in his chest. He’s been doing this for eight years. His mother taught him. Vivian Palmer had long fingers, too. She could stretch a tenth on the keyboard, thumb to pinky, ten white keys apart without straining. She played at a community college recital once when she was 22, and the professor told her she had the most natural left hand he’d seen in 15 years of teaching. She applied to the Curtis Institute of Music that same year. Full scholarship application. She spent three months preparing her audition piece, Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat major, and took two buses and a train to the audition. She was rejected. The letter didn’t say why. It never does. But Vivian suspected it had something to do with how the panel looked at her when she walked in. The way one of them glanced at her shoes. She never applied again. She never talked about it with bitterness. She just came home, sat down at the Wurlitzer, and played. And then she taught Byron.