Every evening after dinner, she’d pull him onto the bench beside her. His feet didn’t reach the pedals. His fingers could barely cover five keys. But she placed her hands over his and showed him how to feel the weight of each note. Not just press, but lean into it. “Music doesn’t care where you come from, baby. It only cares that you show up.” She said that so many times that Byron stopped hearing it as words. It became a sound, a hum in the background of his childhood. The way the apartment smelled like her lotion and warm wood and dust inside the piano. Vivian got sick when Byron was nine. Pneumonia first, then something worse. The doctors used words Byron didn’t understand. Loretta understood them, though. She started praying louder. Vivian died on a Wednesday in March. Byron was 10. He didn’t play the piano for four months after that. Then one night he couldn’t sleep. He walked to the living room, sat down, put his hands on the keys, and played. He’s played every night since, eight years. No teacher, no lessons. YouTube videos paused and replayed hundreds of times. Theory books borrowed from the public library, returned, borrowed again, and a small notebook, his mother’s notebook, filled with handwritten music. Melodies she composed, chord progressions she experimented with, notes in the margins, softer here, breathe, let it ring. Byron carries that notebook in his backpack every day, everywhere.
He found the flyer on a Tuesday afternoon, taped to the bulletin board at the public library, between a lost cat poster and a GED tutoring ad. Glossy paper, black and gold lettering. Whitfield Summer Intensive, three weeks of advanced musical training. Scholarships to partnering conservatories available for exceptional participants. Tuition $2,800. Byron stood in front of that flyer for four minutes without moving. $2,800. That was exactly what he had saved over the past 14 months. Every dollar left after rent, after groceries, after Loretta’s prescriptions. He kept it in a shoe box under his bed. Counted every Sunday. If he spent it and failed, Loretta would miss two months of medication refills. He didn’t tell her. He folded the flyer into his back pocket and went to work. But Loretta found it. She found it in his jeans when she did laundry because grandmothers find everything. She was sitting at the kitchen table when he came home. The flyer was smoothed flat in front of her. She looked up at him over her reading glasses. “How long you been carrying this around?” “A few days.” “And you weren’t going to tell me?” “It’s too much money, Grandma.” Loretta took off her glasses, set them on the table, looked at him the way she looked at him when he was lying. Which was the same way she always looked at him. “Your mama didn’t leave that piano so it could collect dust. Go.” Byron registered the next morning. Paid in cash. $2,800 in 20s and 10s. Counted out at a folding table. The woman looked at the bills, then at him, then at the bills again. He walked out with a confirmation slip and nothing in the shoe box.