Chapter 11
The Audition Fee

Noah paid the audition fee before telling Imani he had done it.

She found the receipt on the kitchen table beneath a grocery list. Beside it lay a note in his quick uneven handwriting.

Don't reimburse me. We can talk later.

She was still holding the receipt when he came home from the college rehearsal room.

“I could have helped,” she said.

“I know.”

“Then why the note?”

He set his sticks beside the fruit bowl.

“Because every conversation now sounds like someone asking what your money can do.”

Imani leaned against the counter.

“You're my brother.”

“I was your brother before Thursday too.”

Walter, reading in the next room, turned a page with exaggerated care. They both knew he was listening.

Noah had been seven when their mother left the family to live nearer her sister after a difficult separation. She remained in contact, imperfectly, through visits and calls that sometimes went well and sometimes reopened old arguments. Imani had been old enough to help and young enough to mistake helping for being required to manage everyone.

She had carried that habit into adulthood. Noah had carried the experience of being loved and supervised by the same person who remembered packing his school lunches.

“I don't want you to think I only need you when I can't pay,” he said.

The sentence made her put the receipt down.

“I don't think that.”

“Sometimes you answer before I finish telling you the problem.”

She had intended to explain how many things she could finally fix. Instead, she asked what he wanted her help with.

He looked surprised.

“The recording. And maybe getting to the audition. I don't want Dad driving that far with his knee.”

“I can drive.”

“And I'd like you to listen without saying every take is good.”

She laughed, then nodded.

They agreed she would cover specific travel costs as a gift he could accept or decline, and he would keep pursuing the support available through his own work. Larger decisions would wait until they understood them.

Noah showed her the audition requirements after they stopped arguing. The form asked for a statement about interests and experience. He had written three versions, each more formal than the last.

“Which sounds like me?”

Imani read them without reaching for a pen.

“The first half of this one. Then you start sounding like a grant brochure.”

He groaned.

“The tutor said I needed to be serious.”

“You are serious. You don't have to sound deceased.”

He laughed, took the pages, and crossed out a sentence he had never liked. Then he explained the piece he had chosen and why its silences frightened him more than the fast sections.

“You can hear everything you haven't done yet,” he said.

She thought about standing beside Graham's table and knowing the room expected her to fill the quiet quickly. Silence had felt like a space someone else might occupy before she was ready.

“Do you count?” she asked.

“Yes. But not like I'm waiting for permission.”

He demonstrated on the tabletop, then stopped when Walter called from the next room to remind him the fruit bowl was not a percussion instrument.

Imani moved the bowl aside.

Noah looked at her and smiled. He finished explaining the phrase before asking what time she could drive him. She checked the calendar, leaving enough room for travel and food rather than planning to arrive breathless. He noticed the care and accepted it without needing to call it rescue. She liked that better than being thanked before departure.

Walter came into the kitchen only after the conversation eased.

“For the record, my knee has not applied to be the family's excuse,” he said.

“It submitted several statements last week,” Noah replied.

They laughed together, and Imani felt the room become less arranged around her balance.

Later, she called their mother, Denise. News of the wager had reached her through a cousin. She was proud, worried, and offended that the cousin knew before she did.

Imani listened to the first two feelings and answered the third without taking responsibility for every route a rumor traveled.

“I needed time to understand it myself,” she said.

Denise went quiet, then asked whether they could have dinner the following week.

“Dinner,” Imani said. “Not a meeting about money.”

“I can cook without an agenda.”

“Historically, you can cook while concealing one.”

Her mother laughed, surprised into sounding younger.

After the call, Imani wrote the dinner date in her calendar. Nearby, Noah practiced a difficult passage with the same patience he had accused her of failing to hear.

She sat outside his door until he finished. When he asked what she thought, she described the place where the rhythm seemed to lose its shape.

He nodded, considered it, and began again.