Chapter 12: The Shelter Piano
Grace Shelter smelled of coffee, bleach, and wet coats. On her first night she slept with her plastic bag under her pillow. She had arrived in Chicago with two bags and nowhere else to go, and the woman at the desk had said, "I'm Ruth Henderson. There's a bed, there's supper, and there's no sermon unless you want one." Odessa thanked her, ate the soup, and learned the rules: lights out at ten, chores on a rota, no saving seats at breakfast.
The piano was in the corner of the common room, an old upright with chipped keys and a middle C that stuck if you hit it too hard. Nobody played it well. Odessa walked past it for a week without touching it, telling herself she was resting her wrist. But on the eighth evening, when the room had emptied and Ruth was stacking chairs, she sat down and put her hands on the keys, very gently, as if the piano might startle.
It was terribly out of tune. The bass notes growled. The top octave tinkled like a toy. But the shape of it was right under her fingers, and before she knew it she was playing a scale, slow and even, the way Elena Ruiz had taught her when she was nine: wrist loose, fingers curved, no rushing. Her right wrist ached by the third scale, and she stopped, flexed her hand, and laughed at herself, a short, surprised sound. Ruth looked up from the chairs.
"You play," Ruth said. It was not a question.
"A little," Odessa said. "A long time ago."
Ruth nodded, as if that settled something, and did not ask more. That was Ruth's way: she noticed everything and demanded nothing. She began to play in the evenings, after supper, softly: pieces she remembered whole, and pieces she rebuilt note by note. Tommy Alvarez, a veteran of fifty-eight with a moustache and opinions about everything, claimed the chair nearest the piano and appointed himself her audience of one.
"You guard my bag while I play," Odessa told him one night, "and I'll forgive you for singing along."
"I don't sing along," Tommy said, deeply offended. "I hum. There's a difference."
He hummed anyway, and she let him.
Then the children came. There were always a few children at Grace Shelter, staying with mothers who had run out of options, and one of them, a girl of about eight named Keisha, with braids and a missing front tooth, stood beside the piano one evening and watched Odessa's hands for a long time. Finally she said, "Can you teach me that?"
Odessa looked at her, and at Ruth, who was pretending very hard to be busy with a teapot. "I can teach you the first bit," she said. "But you have to promise to practise, and not to bang. Pianos don't like banging."
Keisha promised, solemnly, and Odessa showed her middle C and the notes that climbed up from it, one finger at a time. The next evening there were three children. The evening after that, five. Ruth found old music books in a cupboard, donated years ago and never opened, and Odessa set up a secret school in the corner of the common room, twice a week, after supper, with rules on a piece of cardboard: sit up straight, listen first, no laughing at mistakes, especially your own.
She did not call it teaching. She called it "piano time," because teaching sounded like a job, and a job sounded like something she had lost. But it was teaching, and it was the first thing since Detroit that made her feel like herself again. The children learned scales and a simple song about a river. Keisha learned to play with both hands, slowly, frowning with concentration. Tommy guarded the plastic bag of sheet music like it held state secrets, and once chased off a visitor who tried to move it, saying, "That's the lady's music. You don't touch the lady's music."
One cold evening, Ruth sat beside Odessa after the children had gone to bed. "There's a difference between hiding and resting," she said. "You've been resting. That's allowed. But don't hide too long, Odessa. That gift wasn't given to you to keep in a corner."
Odessa looked at the chipped keys and flexed her aching wrist. "I'm not hiding," she said. "I'm just waiting to see what comes next."
Ruth smiled, the way people smile when they know better and are too kind to say so. "Well," she said, "when it comes, you'll be ready. That piano's awful, but your hands aren't."
Odessa played a little more that night, after Ruth had gone, a slow melody she had written for James, and the out-of-tune upright made it sound sadder than it should have. It did not matter. In the shelter, with rain against the windows and Tommy snoring in his chair, the music was hers again, and for the first time in years, she went to bed thinking not about what she had lost, but about what Keisha would learn tomorrow.