The apartment was small enough that the upright piano took up an argument’s worth of space nobody had won yet shoved against the wall at an angle that suggested at least one previous tenant had tried to get it through the door sideways and given up halfway.
Mike had learned to live around it the way you learn to live around anything that matters more than the furniture arrangement.
The hour started the way it always started: scales first, unglamorous, the kind of thing nobody paid to hear, fingers finding the same grooves they found every morning whether he wanted them to or not.
Then the actual repertoire the requests he’d need tonight, the standards nobody thought about until they were the only thing standing between a wedding reception and total silence.
His hands did most of the early work without him; that was the whole design of the hour, the reason it existed at all.
Skip it, and the edge dulled.
Skip enough of them, and some Tuesday a bride would ask for something he used to know cold, and his fingers would hesitate over the keys the way they never should, and everyone in the room would feel the half-second gap even if they couldn’t name it.
He was maybe twenty minutes in, into the part of a Gershwin tune that always wanted to rush the bridge, when he caught sight of the phone on top of the piano, where he’d set it down last night without looking at it, and the small red light doing its small red blinking.
Two messages.
He’d known that since the night before, since a corner booth and a walk and a door clicking shut behind him at Phoebe’s, and he’d let it sit there through all of it through breakfast, through the coffee shop audition, through Monica’s terms and Joey’s noise the way a bill sits on a counter getting more expensive by not being opened.
His hands kept playing while he thought about it.
That was one of the genuine mercies of the hour: it didn’t need the rest of him.
He finished the phrase, let it resolve, and stopped.
He dialed in for the messages standing up, phone against his ear, one hand still resting on the keys like he might go back to them the second this was over.
The first one was mostly a dial tone with a sigh at the front of it, his mother’s voice arriving half a second late the way it always did on these things, like she resented the machine for making her wait her turn.
“Michael.
It’s your mother.” A pause, the kind that in person would have come with a very specific look.
“I’m calling because we haven’t heard from you, and I find that says something, though I won’t speculate what, over a machine.”
He knew the rest of the shape before it arrived the familiar architecture of a Bitsy Hannigan voicemail, complaint disguised as concern, concern disguised as scheduling.
He let it run. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
“There’s a lovely girl,” the message went on, conversational, almost warm, which with his mother was somehow worse than if she’d been cold, “Bryn Mawr, the Whitfields’ daughter you remember the Whitfields, your father plays golf with the father I’ve already mentioned you to her mother.
Sunday.
Family dinner, and I do think it would be lovely if you came and met her properly, rather than the two of you being introduced like strangers at your father’s retirement, which is where this is headed if you don’t call me back.”
A pause, exact, surgical.
“We don’t disapprove, darling.
We simply have a longer view than you do right now.
Call your mother.”
The message ended.
The second one started almost immediately, shorter, the tone of a woman who’d expected to be called back between the first message and the second and was recalibrating her patience accordingly.
“Michael.
Sunday.
I need a headcount for the caterer, and I would like that headcount to include you, and possibly, if things progress the way I hope they will, someone appropriate at your side.
Call me back before Thursday or I’ll assume the answer is the one I don’t want, and I’ll seat you next to the Whitfield girl anyway, out of principle.”
Click.
He set the phone down on the piano’s edge, carefully, the way you set down something you don’t entirely trust yourself not to throw.
Something in his chest had gone tight in the familiar way it went tight around anything with his mother’s name attached to it not fear, not exactly, closer to the sensation of a scale he knew perfectly well suddenly not resolving where it should.
Quietly, without meaning to, he named it.
Flat B.
The same note the machine at Central Perk sat in, the same note his own radiator made in February a private tell nobody in this room could hear, which was the only reason he let himself have it.
That wasn’t a decision he was ready to make yet, not with the message barely finished ringing in his ear, not with a headcount and a Bryn Mawr surname sitting in his chest like something swallowed too fast.
What he decided, standing there with one hand still resting on the piano’s cool wood, was smaller and more certain than that: he wasn’t going Sunday.
Not to the dinner, not to the seat beside a stranger his mother had already measured him against.
That part, at least, wasn’t a question that needed more sitting with.
He sat back down at the bench to finish the hour.
His hands found the keys again, found the Gershwin where he’d left it, and for four bars it went fine clean, unhurried, the tune doing what it was supposed to do.
Then his fingers missed the turn into the bridge entirely, landed a half-step off, discordant enough that he stopped outright and sat with his hands flat and still on the keys, waiting for the sound to finish dying in the room.
That didn’t happen.
Not from nerves, not from the cold from a mind that had gone, for one full measure, somewhere else entirely, chasing a headcount and a name he didn’t know yet and a Sunday he’d already decided not to attend.
He started the phrase over.
Missed it again, differently this time, a wrong note instead of a wrong entrance, and sat with that too for a second before trying a third time.
The third time held.
Not perfectly a little stiff, a little more careful than the tune wanted but it held, all the way through the bridge and out the other side, and he let himself exhale on the last chord instead of holding that too.
He checked the clock on the wall, more out of habit than need, and found the hour had run eight minutes short of itself, eaten by a voicemail and its aftermath, eight minutes he wasn’t going to get back before tonight’s first set.
He noted it the way you note anything a debt: no drama in it, just a fact he’d be carrying into a restaurant on Sixty-Third later, hoping nobody there asked for something obscure enough to find the gap.
He didn’t call his mother back.
He did close the fallboard over the keys, gently, the way you close something after deciding for now, only for now that it had done what it needed to do for the day.
Sunday was three days off.
Thursday, when she’d expect the answer, was closer than that.
He had time to decide how to say no.
He didn’t, yet, have the words for it only the certainty underneath where the words would eventually go, sitting steady under a chest that hadn’t quite finished being tight.