"Really old. It was my grandma's."
"It's got a lovely tone. Warm. You can hear the wood in it." He sat back down heavily. "Who's playing?"
I hesitated. "My cat."
He did not laugh. That's the thing I remember most, and the reason I've thought about Mr. Dombrowski kindly for the rest of my life. He took his huge glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose and put them back on and looked at me with his floating eyes and said, "Every night?"
"Every night. Just before midnight. Always that one."
"Huh," he said. He was quiet a while. "Cats are creatures of habit, you know. More than dogs. A dog will do a thing because you want him to. A cat will do a thing because that's the thing that is done. You change a cat's house, he'll hang on to whatever he can of the old one." He tapped the recorder. "Somebody probably taught him that. Or he learned it watching somebody."
"My grandma died in October."
"Ah," he said softly. "I'm sorry, Miss Haskins."
"It's okay. I didn't know her very well. We only went down at Easter and sometimes in the summer. My mom and her—" I stopped, because I didn't know how to finish that, and because it suddenly seemed like something I shouldn't say to a teacher.
Mr. Dombrowski nodded as if I'd finished it anyway. He picked up his apple again and turned it in his hand.
"E-flat," he said, "is a funny note. Some people, the old composers especially, thought every key had its own character. C major was plain and honest. D major was triumphant, all trumpets. E-flat they thought was the key of love, and devotion, and"—he smiled a little—"conversations with God. Beethoven wrote his Emperor Concerto in it. Mozart wrote a lot of his most tender things in it." He shrugged. "That's mostly nonsense, of course. A note's a note. It's a vibration in the air, three hundred and eleven times a second. But it's interesting, isn't it, that it's that one."
"Why is it interesting?"