Outside, the club was waking for the evening. Maya took her place at the piano for the sound check, and her hands, for once, did not shake at all.
Chapter 7: The Upstairs Flat
Maya moved on a Tuesday morning, in the rain, with everything she owned in two suitcases, a duffel bag, and a cardboard box that had once held oranges. The driver Vincent had assigned — a quiet man named Sal who called her Miss Sullivan and did not comment on the box — carried the suitcases up the narrow stairs behind the club and set them down, as she directed, outside the flat's door. Not inside it. Outside. Then he went back downstairs and left her alone with the new key in her hand.
The lock was bright and unmarked, fitted that morning. Tony had kept that promise within hours. Maya turned the key herself, heard the bolt draw back with a clean, solid click, and stepped into rooms that smelled faintly of lemon polish and fresh paint.
It was small, and she was glad of its smallness. A front room with a window over the alley and a better one over the street. A kitchen no wider than a corridor, with a two-ring stove and a kettle already on it. A bedroom just large enough for a single bed, a wardrobe, and a chair. A bathroom with a deep old tub and taps that groaned. Nothing in it was luxurious. Nothing in it was a message. It was staff housing, plainly kept — and that ordinariness felt, to Maya, like a form of respect.
Against the front room wall, beneath the street window, stood an upright piano.
She had not put a piano in her terms. For a moment suspicion rose in her, quick and familiar — an extra, a sweetness laid on top of the bargain to soften it. Then she saw the note taped to its closed lid, in Lucia's brisk hand: This was already here. Belonged to the flat since before I did the books. Tuner comes Thursday, already in the club budget. Play it or dust it, your choice. — L.
Maya laughed, alone in the room, and pressed her palm flat to the piano's cool side the way she might greet an old dog. Hers to use. Not a gift. Already here. Lucia, she was learning, understood ledgers of every kind, including the one Maya kept in her head where every kindness had to be entered and feared.
She unpacked slowly, because there was so little that she wanted to make a ceremony of it. Clothes in the wardrobe, hung, not folded — a small defiance of the year of living from a bag. Toiletries in a row on the bathroom shelf. Her father's framed photograph, the two of them behind the bar at Sullivan's, Seamus mid-laugh, on the front room sill. Three paperbacks on the kitchen counter. Her good shoes, paired, by the door. Her sheet music — what she had kept of it — in a neat stack beside the piano stool.
This, she thought, is what a life looks like when it fits in a box marked ORANGES. It did not shame her. She had carried it this far herself.
Lucia came at six, without knocking until Maya had called her in — knocking, waiting, and entering only at the word, in a way Maya understood was deliberate and filed away gratefully. She brought supper on a tray: chicken soup in a covered bowl, bread still warm, butter, a small jar of honey for tea. Over one arm hung spare linens, white and ironed, and over the other a towel set and a folded blanket in deep green wool.
"Every flat gets two sets," Lucia said, before Maya could phrase a refusal that would not sound ungracious. "One on, one in the wash. It's on the inventory, and if you leave with them I'll have to chase you for eight dollars' worth of sheet, which would embarrass us both." She set the tray down and looked around with a bookkeeper's eye. "Heating's temperamental. Kick the radiator by the window, don't bleed it. If the hot water runs brown for a minute, let it run. Vincent's office is below the bedroom, so if you're pacing at three in the morning, he'll know — but he wears it well."
"Lucia," Maya said, "thank you."
"For soup and sheets? Don't be daft. Eat." But her expression softened. She did not sit until Maya gestured to the chair, and she stayed only while the soup was eaten, talking of ordinary things — the Thursday tuner, a singer who kept missing rehearsals, a delivery of lemons gone wrong. Not once did she ask about Ryan, or the office, or the terms. When she rose to go, she took the tray and left the blanket.
At the door she paused. "Lock it behind me," she said. "Not because anyone here would — because it's yours to lock. There's a difference, and you should get the use of it."
Maya locked it behind her. She turned the key and drew the small bolt that Lucia, she now realised, had not mentioned because it was not the club's bolt at all — no. It was. It was simply hers, on the inside, where bolts belong.
The flat settled into evening quiet. Below, muffled by floorboards, the club began its nightly tuning — glasses, low voices, a trumpet running scales. Maya showered, and the water ran clear at once. She made tea with the honey and put the green blanket across the foot of the bed.
Then, because the room asked it of her and no one else was asking anything at all, she opened the piano.
For a year she had played only at work: other people's requests, other people's evenings, her hands earning their keep while the music itself went elsewhere, out of reach. Even at The Velvet Note she had played as a waitress plays — carefully, in the gaps, ready to stop. Now she sat on the stool in her own front room, in a borrowed-feeling dressing gown, with her tea going cool, and put her hands on keys that were slightly, forgivably out of tune, and played for no reason except that she wanted to hear it.
She played her father's favourite first, badly, laughing at her own rust. Then a slow standard, then something of her own she had half-written before everything fell apart and never finished. The unfinished ending did not frighten her tonight. She played to the middle of it three times, each time stopping where the music ran out, and on the fourth time she played one bar further — a small, plain phrase, nothing grand — and sat in the silence after it with her hands still raised, astonished at how much room there was in her chest.