“Don’t stop,” Daisy murmured, bent over her work.
“No, I got it now, I got it.” He went back to the beginning and played it straight through with only a couple clunkers.
“Nice,” she said, as he made the last notes of the arpeggio die away. Her sewing done, she was wiggling one foot into her shoe then wrapping the ribbons around her ankle, her hands deft and sure. “Play another.” Something about her quiet composure gave him confidence. If she had been gushing praise and batting her eyes at him, he would’ve known she was full of shit, and he would have stopped.
He shuffled the sheet music around and picked through a couple Mozart minuets, then movements of the Beethoven sonatas he’d learned years ago. He found a groove, and began to enjoy it. Daisy warmed up, first stretching on the floor, then getting up and using the piano as a barre. Realizing she was timing her movements to his playing, he slowed down or sped up, following her, trying to keep a steady tempo. She smiled at him, her face growing pinker, a fine mist of sweat across her throat and chest.
“All right,” he said, flattening the spine of the Bach book with his fist. “Here’s the real test. Prelude in F Minor.”
“My prelude, really?”
“Don’t get too excited. F minor is…four flats, Jesus.” He tried a few measures and then abruptly bailed, making a mosh on the keys with his fists.
“You’re doing fine,” Daisy said. “Keep going.”
“No, forget it.” He went back to the Prelude in C, now the old friend. Daisy stretched, holding onto the piano, the other hand holding her long leg straight to twelve o’clock high. With difficulty Erik kept his eyes on the music.
“Who else is musical in your family,” she asked, breathing into the stretch.
“My mom played most of her life,” he said. “And she used to give lessons in our house. She’d put me in the playpen next to the piano, and then my brother, too.”
“How old is your brother?”
“Sixteen. He’s deaf. I mean, he’s a lot of things but, incidentally, he’s deaf.”
“Was he born deaf?” She was holding her extended leg behind her now, slowly inclining forward.
“No, he had meningitis when he was a baby.”
“Oh.” Her head and shoulders disappeared from view as she pitched enough to put her hands on the floor. Just her foot in its pointe shoe left in the air. Her voice floated up. “It must have been hard on your parents.”
“Well, for my mother it was. My father left us and she had to go back to work.”
“What does she do?”
“She’s a nurse. And now she’s getting her Master’s in speech pathology.”
She resurfaced, ponytail askew, face flushed from being upside-down. “I see.”
“Anyway, my father leaving was the end of her giving music lessons, and we were so broke, she ended up selling the piano.”
“So how did you play, who gave you lessons then?”
“I went to the Y after school until sixth grade. A woman there worked with me, and I could play every day. Then I would just hang around the school music rooms and bang on the piano any chance I got. I kept up with it until maybe sophomore year, then I got more into guitar.”
Daisy put her foot onto the piano and extended her torso over her leg. “Your father left you?” she asked, forehead on her knee.
He nodded. “Went out one night and never came back.”
She looked up. “After a fight with your mother, you mean?”
“No. He just left.”
Slowly she took her leg down and put both hands on the piano lid. “How old were you?”
“Eight.”
“You haven’t seen your father since you were eight?”
He shook his head.
“No word. No contact. No nothing?”
“Nothing.”