The rubber band had gone soft in the drawer and it broke when he pulled it, and the cards fanned across the table like a dealt hand.

He had gone to the drawer for a blank one. Thursday night, Lucy down, Claire in the bath, and he had thought that if he wrote the number on a card it would be a thing on a card and not a thing in his chest. Three. The blank cards were under the takeout menus, and on top of them was the stack from the interviews, and now it was loose and he was looking at his own handwriting.

41 texts Sun. His block letters, from the bench in Yolanda's garage with his back to the keys. 10 pm texts. Credit chain. Whiteboard = memory. And the last card from that night, the one he had rehearsed in the car, with her two sentences on it, one under the other, the way she'd said them.

wants them to practice more — "sure, ask anybody"

stop texting parents at 10 at night.

The first line was underlined. Twice. The line under it, about texting, had nothing under it at all. There it still was, four months later, unmarked, like a thing someone had said in another room.

He had spent October to January on the underlined line, and it was on the store with a whale on it, and three people had opened it this week, and one of them was six and lived here. Everything that was not underlined was about the same thing. A text at ten. A credit nobody could find. They had told him, all of them, on cards, in his own hand, and he had made a spreadsheet with no column for it.

He did not write the three on a card. He put the cards in his shirt pocket and put the blank one back.

"I'll take Tuesday," he said Sunday, over the paper.

Claire looked up. Tuesdays at 4:30 were hers, and he had never asked for one.

"You have a thing?"

"I want to ask Yolanda something."

"Ask her," Claire said, and went back to the paper, and he heard the September in it and let it go.

It rained Monday night and was still raining Tuesday, the first real storm since the one that had flooded the Arbor lot, and he was in the folding chair at 4:31 with the cards in his pocket and water running off the CR-V in the driveway. The garage smelled of wet coats.

At five, at the door, he said it.

"Three people used the app last week. One of them's Lucy."

Yolanda was writing in the planner and did not stop. "Nathaniel, I could have told you that in December."

"You did."

"I said it was cute." She finished the line. "That's what I say about a fruit bowl."

"In October, on the bench. I asked you about practicing and you said something after, and I wrote it down, and I didn't—" He got the card out. "I underlined the wrong one."

She took it and read it, front and back, the way she read everything he handed her, and gave it back.

"I never said I wanted kids to practice more," she said. "I said I wanted to stop texting parents at ten at night. You wrote down the wrong sentence."

"Could I sit here," Nate said. "Not ask questions. Sit. Three evenings. I want to see what happens between the lessons."

"You want to watch me work."

"Yes."

She pointed with the pencil at the corner between the mini-fridge and the heater, where there was a kitchen chair with a cushion he had never seen her use.

"That one. The parents need the parents' chairs. You don't talk to a child. You don't talk to a parent unless they talk to you, and if they ask, you're Lucy's father, which is true. You don't touch the planner. You can write. You don't type; I can hear it. And I'm not charging you. I don't know what this is yet. When I know what it is, I'll bill you."

"Tomorrow?"

"Now. Your wife can come get her. It's raining, so the Nguyens will cancel by five-fifteen, and you'll want to see that."

He texted Claire from the chair. Can you get L at Y's? Staying till 7:30. Will explain.

It's pouring, she wrote. And then: Fine.

The Nguyens' text came at 5:08. He had started a card, the time down the left side, and had written 5:00 Nguyen and then nothing. Yolanda's phone lit on the Clavinova.

"There she is," she said.

She read it and took the pencil and drew a line through the five o'clock square, and the line was harder than the writing. She did not answer the text.

5:11. It lit again. She made a sound through her nose. "Now she wants to know if that means they lose January."

"Do they?"

"You're not talking."

He wrote 5:08 cancel (rain). 5:11 credit? She doesn't answer.

5:14. The side-door bell. It was the Patels, early, Mrs. Patel with an umbrella and the boy from the beta behind her, and she said, before she was all the way in, "Sorry, I know we're the five-thirty. The Saturday from before Christmas. Arjun thinks we used it and I think we didn't."

"You didn't," Yolanda said.

"So we still have it."

"You still have it." She had not looked at the planner or the board. Mrs. Patel sat down relieved. Yolanda went to the whiteboard, looked at it, wrote nothing, and came back.

He wrote 5:14 credit? (Patel, Dec Sat), not written anywhere. Patel Sat 12:30?? was on the board again, the same words she had erased in September to make room for him. He didn't know if that was the same Saturday. He was fairly sure she didn't either.

Claire came at 5:22 in her school raincoat and took Lucy's hand at the side door and looked at him in the corner chair with a card on his knee, and did not say anything, and he knew he would answer for it, and not tonight.

Then it was a lesson, twenty-six minutes of a nine-year-old and a sonatina and Yolanda's voice going and, and, thumb under, no, listen, and nothing happened that he could write down, and he understood after ten minutes that this was the part that worked. Nobody had ever texted her at ten at night about the sonatina.

5:56. The Patels out, the six o'clock in. While the girl found her page, Yolanda thumbed a reply to the Nguyens with one hand and the pencil still in the other. Forty seconds. Then the pencil went to a square that was already full, and the eraser came out, and she erased something above it to make room, and the gray got grayer.

At 7:20, with the last student, a teenager, halfway through her forty-five minutes, the side door opened without a bell and it was Mr. Ortega, wet.

"Yolanda, sorry. Real quick. Did February go through? Because Marisa says she sent it and I'm looking and I don't see it."

"I'll check."

"Because if it didn't—"

"I'll check. Go, it's pouring."

He went. She didn't check. She was in the middle of a phrase and stayed in it. He wrote 7:20 Ortega Feb $, "I'll check" and thought about how many things he had watched her not check tonight, and that all of them were still owed.

At 7:47 the teenager left. Yolanda sat down on the bench and picked up the phone, and did the day. Five texts, thumb and thumb. The Nguyens: Saturday at 10, and he didn't know if that was the January credit or a new Saturday, and neither, he thought, did Trish. Then Venmo, and he saw her type Hi! Just checking on February and stop with her thumb over the send.

"I hate the exclamation point," she said. "If I leave it off they think I'm angry."

"Are you?"

"You're not talking." She sent it. "Yes."

She pressed her right thumb into the palm of her left hand, once, hard, the way you'd press a thumbtack, and wrote the Nguyens into Saturday.

"Eleven minutes," Nate said, because he'd counted, and it was out before the rule.

"That's a short night." She closed the planner. "Go home. Same chair tomorrow."

Wednesday he put appt on his calendar from 3:30 and left the structure at 3:35 and nobody said anything, which he had been afraid of for four months. Wednesday was quiet: one cancellation, a stomach; three makeups written in; one did you get my Venmo, at the door, from a father who had sent it to the wrong Yolanda and had to be asked for it again.

Thursday was the one.

Two families had canceled by text before he sat down. Then the four-thirty texted at 2:40 that they were so sorry, they'd forgotten a dentist, could they possibly do Saturday. Yolanda read it while a seven-year-old did scales. He watched her decide. He watched her not decide. At 4:30 the square was empty and she sat in the parents' chair with the planner on her knee and looked at Saturday, which had the Nguyens at ten and one open half hour at 11:30, and wrote Lindqvist 11:30 into it.

"There's no credit," she said, not to him. "They canceled at two-forty for four-thirty. There is no credit and she is getting Saturday, because she'll ask again on Sunday and I'll say yes on Sunday, and Sunday I don't teach, so I'd rather say it now."

She went to the whiteboard with the marker and stopped, and came back to the planner instead, and when she went to write again the pencil went a quarter inch and stopped. He saw her hand. The fingers had gone stiff in a shape that wasn't a grip and wasn't open, and she set the pencil down with her other hand and shook the right one out, twice, and made a fist and opened it.

"Cold," she said.

The heater was on. He had taken his jacket off an hour ago.

"Piano hands," she said, which was what she'd said in August at the garage door with his hand just out of hers, and picked the pencil up and finished the word.

He did not write that down. He wrote 4:30 free makeup, no credit, "I'd rather say it now" and left a line under it empty.

At 7:35 he asked about Monday, and she opened the planner again without a word and read it off like a grocery list. Four cancellations, one at 7 a.m. One makeup. One family she'd had to ask twice. Saturday she texted him at 1:12, unasked: Sat. 2 cancels, 1 makeup, Nguyens came. Don't reply.

He added it up in the Costco lot. Monday through Saturday. Eleven cancellations. Seven makeups written into a planner in pencil, one of them free and unforgiven. Four times she had asked somebody for money she had already earned. He had watched the lessons, all of them, and the lessons were fine.

It took him a week to write one page, because the first version was three and the second was two, and neither said anything Claire couldn't have gotten from the cards.

He wrote it Monday and Tuesday after Lucy was down, and Thursday, the twenty-ninth, at 5:10 in the morning, once, to see. By Friday it fit on one side of one sheet, typed, with the counts across the top like a scoreboard and under them the sentence he'd been unable to make in October with the refrigerator open. It was not his sentence. He had taken it off the card.

Saturday, March 2, with Lucy at swim and the coffee made, he put the page at her end of the table, where the red pen went, and sat down at his.

"Three people used the app the week of Valentine's," he said. "One of them was Lucy. I didn't tell you."

"No."

"There's a ninety-nine-dollar charge from October. Apple. I didn't tell you that either."

"October thirtieth." She said it without heat. "I know. Keep going."

"That's it. That's the list."

She read it line by line with her finger not quite touching, and when she got to the bottom she went back to the top and read it again, which she had never done with anything of his.

Mon–Sat, Feb 19–24: 11 cancellations. 7 makeups. 4 asks for money already earned.

The lessons are fine. What she does between them is the job nobody pays her for.

Stop texting parents at ten at night.

"That's her sentence," Claire said.

"Yes."

"It's a good sentence." She put the page down flat and kept her hand on it. "This is a different thing."

"Yes."

"Is it a different thing you can do at five in the morning instead of one?"

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