At ten minutes after eleven on that Saturday night, Estelle pulled into the driveway of her home on South 12th Street, parking beside her husband’s SUV. The front porch light was on, and a single light glowed through the living room curtain. Her mother was a fitful sleeper, and often chose her rocking chair in the living room, in company with her friendly books, rather than tossing and turning in bed.
Estelle let herself in and stopped abruptly. Her mother wasn’t in her chair, but Estelle could see her older son’s tousled little head peeking out from behind the music rack of the piano. Their eyes met for just a fraction of a second, and then he ducked down, hunching his shoulders.
“You’re up late, hijo,” she said as she crossed the living room. The dark circles under his eyes hinted that he hadn’t just popped out of bed. She dropped her jacket on the sofa, then crossed to the piano. “May I?” she asked, and slipped onto the bench beside him. She circled his thin, bony shoulders in a hug. His hair smelled vaguely musty, reminding her of an old man’s. Her right hand stroked his forehead, pushing the flop of curly black hair out of his eyes. He didn’t look up at her, but she felt him lean against her.
“You got called out,” Francisco whispered.
“Yes. A bad time, querido. But I heard you play. I’m so proud of you.”
He nodded and fell silent, looking down at his hands. His fingers rested on the piano keys as they might on an unresponsive tabletop. After a minute, his right index finger reached out tentatively and touched the face of the black C-sharp key just above middle C. His fingers were long and strong, and she saw that his muscles had already taken on definition resulting from hours of unrelenting exercise.
Estelle waited, sensing that the little boy was wrestling with something far beyond his seven-year-old capabilities to articulate. Perhaps, after the intense excitement of the recital, his first time in front of an audience other than family, the adrenaline rush hadn’t subsided yet.
“Are you going out again?” he asked.
“I have to, for a little bit.”
“Right away?”
“Yes.”
“Are we going up on the mesa to watch Tommy race tomorrow?”
“I hope so.” She felt his shoulders rise with a little sigh of resignation. “You know I can’t promise, mi corazón. But Daddy will take you up if he can. Or Nana Irma. Or Padrino.”
His index finger tickled the front of the C-sharp again. “Did you hear Melody play?”
“Yes, I did.” She didn’t release her hug. “And I thought it was nice that she asked you to turn pages for her. Have you ever played that piece?”
“No. But it’s easy. And it’s boring.”
“Maybe she doesn’t think so.”
“Pitney is mad at me,” he said after a minute. “She wouldn’t talk to me after the recital.”
“Why ever not?” But already part of the scenario was obvious to her. Her seven-year-old son, adorable in so many ways, had wandered into the unpredictable turf between two older females.
“’Cause I turned pages for Melody.”
“Why would that make her mad at you?”
“’Cause. She said I should play Pachelbel,” and he pronounced it patchy-bell, “to show Melody how it should go.”
“You mean instead of your own piece?”
“Yes. But I don’t like that old stairway song.”
“Stairway song?”
He sighed. “You know. Up and down. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da,” and he continued, the fingers of his right hand once more over the keys, marching down and then back up, soundlessly touching each one, following the opening motif of Pachelbel’s Canon.
“Pitney wanted you to play Melody’s piece, instead of your own? Instead of the Mozart?”
He nodded. “But that’s mean, isn’t it, Mamá?”
“More than mean,” Estelle said. “Why would Pitney want you to do that?” She could imagine perfectly well why, but wanted to hear her son’s version.
“’Cause. She doesn’t like Melody, Mamá.”
“I see,” she said. “But you like Melody, don’t you?”
He nodded.
Oh my, Estelle thought. He’s seven, and the women are fighting over him already.
“You know that what Pitney asked you to do was wrong, don’t you?”
“Yes. But she wouldn’t talk to me when Melody finished playing.”
“Maybe that’s not important, mi corazón. When people ask you to do things, you must always think about it. You must think about what they ask of you. And you know, Melody has always been kind to you, Francisco. I’ve seen her at school, and she always asks about you. She’s so proud of you. She doesn’t try to make you do things that you shouldn’t.”
Her son drew his hands off the keyboard, curling them under his chin in that characteristic gesture of delight.
“She’s a clown,” he said, but his tone welled with kindness rather than insult. “She played well, don’t you think?”
“She played beautifully. You all did. Does Daddy know you’re still up?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“You should go to bed. Tomorrow’s a big day.”
He nodded and rubbed his eyes. “I’ve been working on a story,” he said.
A musical story, she knew, and wondered what images he was seeing in his head. If they had returned home from the concert by 8:30, Francisco had been at the keyboard for several hours. “You’ve been here since you came home from the recital?”
“I didn’t make any noise,” he said, and a note of childlike conspiracy entered his tone. “Just like this.” With left hand curled under his chin, his right hand spidering over the keys, and after a moment his left hand joined the music, the touches on the keyboard as soft as a kitten’s tread, so soft that the piano’s mechanisms never moved under the strings.
“Start over,” Estelle said. She reached across and with thumb and index finger twisted an imaginary knob on her son’s left temple. “Turn up the volume so I can hear.”
“Abuela is still asleep,” he said.
“I bet not,” Estelle said. “She can hear ants crossing the sidewalk. And anyway, she’d like to hear, too.”
He took a breath, and once more the right hand started, this time touching three notes in succession, lingering on the last. “That’s her name,” he said, and played the three notes again. “Me-lo-dy.”
“I hear that it is. Should I hear the rest, or will you save it for her?”
That thought obviously hadn’t occurred to Francisco. His fingers hesitated, and he looked around at his mother for the first time. “Should I do that?”
“It’s up to you, mi corazón.”
“I want you to hear it.”
“All right.”
Estelle found herself wishing that she could somehow tune in to the pictures that paraded through her son’s mind as he played, but that remained his private world. The music was simple, the two hands talking to each other as he’d learned to do by playing the Grump, el Gruñón, as he called J.S. Bach. But the music went beyond that, and Estelle wondered if her son heard the difference between his soundless hours of practicing and what now swelled from the huge piano, lyrical and rich.
The music finally wound down, ending with the same three notes, played so softly that they barely escaped the piano-a whisper of affection that Estelle understood so clearly that it made her heart ache.
She realized that her husband was now standing in his bathrobe in the hallway, leaning against the wall. She grinned at him and he winked back.
“He’s figured it out?” he asked.
“Oh sí,” she said, and hugged Francisco fiercely.
“I want to play that for her,” the little boy said.
“That’s what you should do,” she said. “Can we record it?”