June closed the lid gently and went back to the kitchen. She did not need to tell Corinne what she had done. Corinne smiled as if she had heard something no one else had heard. For the first time since Pearl had told her the truth, June felt her father was not a weight on her hands, but a hand resting lightly over her own, saying, wait, let it breathe.
Chapter 15: An Audition Offer
The letter arrived on a Thursday, tucked inside the folded scores Corinne had left on Pearl's kitchen table, and June found it when the afternoon light was already thinning across the linoleum. It was not long. It was written in Corinne's careful hand, and it asked June to come to the Crescent City Conservatory the following week, not to perform for a crowd, but to play for three teachers in a small room, the way a student might, so they could hear what she could do and where she might begin.
June read it twice, then a third time, standing by the sink with the tap still dripping behind her. She could hear Pearl humming in the next room, low and easy, the way she hummed when she was shelling peas or folding laundry, and for a moment June wished she could stay inside that ordinary sound and not answer anything at all.
She had not touched a piano properly since the night Pearl told her the truth. She had sat beside the old upright in the corner and rested her hands on the closed lid, but she had not lifted it. The silence had felt safer than the questions that came with every note. Now the letter made the questions louder. If she played "Song for June" for strangers in a quiet room, would they hear her, or would they only hear Elias Ashby coming back through her fingers?
That evening, Corinne came to the house herself, carrying a paper bag of oranges and no ceremony at all. She sat at the kitchen table with Pearl, accepted a glass of water, and looked at June with the same steady attention she had shown at Maison Lumière, when the whole dining room had gone still.
"I am not asking you to be him," Corinne said. "I taught him when he was not much older than you, and I remember how hard he worked to sound like himself. Nobody is born finished. An audition is not a verdict. It is a door, and you are allowed to walk through it slowly."
June wrapped her hands around her glass to stop them trembling. "What if they only want the story?" she asked. "The girl from the restaurant. The daughter."
"Then they will be disappointed," Corinne said, smiling a little. "Because you will play, and playing takes longer than a story. They will hear the places where you hesitate, and the places where you are sure. That is what a teacher listens for."
Pearl said nothing at first. She watched June the way she had watched her as a small child learning to cross a street, close enough to catch her, far enough to let her try. When June finally looked at her, Pearl nodded, just once, and June felt something loosen in her chest, though the fear did not leave entirely.
The next days passed in a kind of held breath. June went to work with Pearl, walked through Tremé in the early heat, and listened to music leaking from open doors without stopping to name it. At night she lay awake and thought about the conservatory, a building she had only ever passed on the bus, with tall windows and students carrying cases like briefcases. She imagined herself walking in with her secondhand shoes and her hands in her pockets, and the image made her feel both small and stubborn at once.
On Sunday, after church, she finally lifted the lid of the upright. Dust rose in the light. She did not play the song. She played scales, slow and uneven, the way she had as a child, listening to each note settle before she reached for the next. Her fingers remembered the shape of the keys even when her mind doubted them. Her breath slowed. The room, which had felt crowded with memory, felt simply like a room again.
She stopped, hands resting on the keys, and felt the last note fade into the walls. It was not a triumph. It was not applause. It was a small, private permission, the kind that does not need an audience to be real.
On Monday morning, she found Corinne's letter where she had left it on the table. She smoothed the crease with her thumb, picked up a pen, and wrote a short reply in her own plain hand. She would come. She would play what she knew, and she would let the teachers hear her as she was, unfinished and still learning, rather than as an echo of a man she had loved without knowing.