Chapter 27
Noah Keeps the Middle
Noah's first performance with the regional ensemble took place in a hall above a sports center.
The chairs were uncomfortable. The stage lights made everyone look overheated. Imani thought it was the most beautiful room she had entered in months.
She arrived with Walter and Denise early enough to watch Noah pretend he had not seen them. He wore black, carried his own sticks, and looked so much like the boy who had once practiced rhythms on cereal boxes that she had to look away briefly.
“Don't cry before he starts,” Walter whispered.
“I wasn't.”
“Neither was I.”
Denise handed them both tissues without comment.
Before the performance, Noah asked Imani to help carry a stand from the car. He gave her the lightest piece, then reconsidered when she raised an eyebrow.
“I wasn't questioning your strength.”
“I know. You were questioning my understanding of which end folds.”
“That too.”
They carried it together through the side entrance. In the corridor, another performer was looking for a missing clip. Noah lent one, checked his own bag again, and introduced Imani to a friend without mentioning the wager.
“My sister,” he said.
She liked the introduction enough to remember it.
The friend thanked her for filming the audition. Then they began discussing the piece, leaving her free to find her seat. Noah did not need her beside him until the last possible minute.
She stepped away before he had to ask.
At the hall door, a volunteer offered a program. Imani paid the amount and found Noah's name among the ensemble members. It occupied no special position. She read it twice anyway.
Walter watched her sit down.
“You look like you've found buried treasure.”
“His name is spelled right.”
“A rare achievement in this family.”
They laughed while Denise opened her program. The stage remained empty for another minute. Imani let herself enjoy the waiting without turning it into a worry she could solve by moving.
She had helped him get here. The music itself belonged to the people who would walk onto the stage and make it together.
The piece began quietly. Noah counted through the rests, shoulders still. When his entry came, the difficult middle held together with a precision Imani recognized from all the evenings he had insisted on trying again.
Then he made a small mistake.
She saw it in his face before she heard it. He recovered, stayed with the ensemble, and finished without looking toward his family for a verdict.
The audience applauded. Imani did too, relieved to have something useful to do with her hands.
Afterward, Noah came down the corridor carrying the instrument bag he had borrowed. Denise embraced him first, then Walter. Imani waited until he reached her.
“The middle was strong,” she said.
He narrowed his eyes.
“Did you hear the slip?”
“Yes. You kept going.”
He grinned, more pleased by the honest answer than he would have been by perfection offered as comfort.
At dinner in a noisy café, they discussed the ensemble schedule and the part time job he would keep. Imani had agreed to contribute a defined amount toward travel for the term. The support was written into their family plan, not held over him as evidence of what he owed her.
He had also secured additional assistance through the program. He was proud of that and allowed to be.
Denise asked if he wanted to apply somewhere farther away next year.
“Maybe,” he said. “I want to finish this first.”
Imani felt the impulse to explain deadlines. She drank water instead.
Noah saw her.
“You can remind me about the form,” he said. “I know you're suffering.”
They laughed.
On the drive home, Walter fell asleep in the passenger seat. Noah sat behind Imani, tapping quietly on his knee until she asked him to stop conducting the turn signal.
“It's in the wrong time,” he said.
“Take it up with the manufacturer.”
Later, after the house became quiet, he knocked on her door.
“Thank you,” he said.
“For coming?”
“For helping. And for not making the help everything.”
She sat up.
“I'm trying.”
“I noticed.”
He left before either could make the moment uncomfortable with too many words.
Imani looked at the training book beside her bed. Tomorrow she would return to the studio. Noah would rehearse. Walter would argue with the man repairing the garden gate, though the man was his friend and the argument mainly concerned football.
The million had not arranged their family into happiness. It had relieved pressures that had made happiness harder to notice. The rest still depended on asking, listening, and letting one another do things imperfectly.
She turned off the lamp and heard Noah begin the middle passage once more, softer this time, before deciding it could wait until morning.