Before leaving, June stopped at the piano in the empty dining room and played one phrase of her father’s song, then her own variation after it, soft enough that only Pearl and Corinne, waiting by the door, could hear. The two melodies sat side by side, related and distinct. June lifted her hands, let the last note fade, and smiled, not because the world had been convinced, but because she no longer needed it to be.
Chapter 19: The Audition
The morning of the audition, June woke before her alarm and lay still in the narrow room in Tremé, listening to the house settle around her. Pearl was already in the kitchen, moving quietly, as if loudness might break something. The smell of coffee and buttered toast came down the hall, familiar and steady, and June held on to it the way she held on to a first note before playing it.
She dressed carefully, in the plain dark dress Pearl had pressed the night before, and pinned her hair back so nothing would fall across her face. She did not want to look like a performance. She wanted to look like herself, only steadier. At the table, Pearl set down a plate and did not fuss. She only said, "Play it the way you hear it, baby. Not the way you think they want it." June nodded, because her throat was too tight for more.
The Crescent City Conservatory of Music sat in a pale stone building with tall windows and a quiet courtyard, and inside it the air smelled of old wood and polish. Corinne Duvall met them in the corridor, her manner calm and unhurried, and walked June to a small recital room where a grand piano waited under a soft fall of light. The panel sat in a row of chairs a little way back: three teachers and a director, their faces polite and unreadable. June tried not to read them. She had learned, in the restaurant and in the days since, that a room could change its mind while you were still playing.
She sat down, placed her hands in her lap for a moment, and breathed. The bench was firm. The keys were cool. When she lifted her hands, she thought not of the video or the rumour or the people who had doubted her, but of the first time she had heard the melody, not knowing it was her father's, and of the way it had felt like something remembered rather than learned. She began "Song for June" the way Elias had written it, tender and unhurried, letting each phrase finish before the next one rose.
The melody moved through the room like a person entering quietly and being recognised. June played the opening as a lullaby, not a display, and when the line deepened she let her left hand carry its weight without forcing it. Her fingers remembered the worn cassette and the old upright at home, and also the annotated scores Corinne had given her, where her father's handwriting had marked a breath here, a softening there. She honoured those marks, but she did not copy them blindly. She let her own breath shape them. Halfway through, she heard a small sound from the panel, not quite a sigh, and kept going, because stopping would have been worse than any mistake.
When the final notes of the written piece faded, the silence in the room was complete, the kind of silence that follows something true. June did not rush to fill it. She let her hands rest, took one slow breath, and then began again, this time with her own variation.
It started in the same place, with the same tender opening, but then it turned, gently, toward something she had found in her practising with Sam Oduya listening on Frenchmen Street and in the long evenings at home. Where her father had written a long, rising line, she answered it with a shorter phrase that returned and rested, like a question finding its own reply. Where he had left a pause, she let the pause last a fraction longer, and then filled it with a low, warm chord that belonged to her, not to him. It was not louder or faster or more brilliant. It was hers. She could feel the difference in her shoulders, in the way her hands no longer braced for judgement but moved because the music asked them to move.
She finished on a single clear note and let it fade until the room itself seemed to release it. For a moment no one spoke. Then the panel stirred, and June saw, with a clarity that steadied her, that they were not of one mind. One teacher leaned forward, eyes bright, as if she had heard something she had been waiting for. Another sat back with his arms folded, his expression thoughtful but unconvinced, as if talent were only the first question and not the answer. The director thanked her in a measured voice and said the panel would deliberate and write to her. Corinne, standing near the door, gave June a small nod that said nothing and everything.