"You say that every day, and I know it ain't true."
He smiled. He hadn't known she was awake. She always was.
"Go back to sleep."
"Caleb."
"Yeah?"
"Don't shrink for nobody today. Your music is your ancestors talking. You hear me?"
"I hear you."
He said it the way he'd said it every morning for 3 years. He didn't know yet that this was the morning the world flipped.
On the kitchen table sat a manila envelope from Boston Medical Center. Stage two congestive heart failure. Delores had been diagnosed 6 weeks ago. She had refused to tell him for four of those weeks, and when he'd finally found the letter, she'd just shrugged and said the Lord would sort it out.
The medical bills underneath it - three of them now - she hadn't bothered to open at all. Caleb looked at the envelopes for a long moment. Then he picked up his saxophone case, zipped his jacket, and slipped out into the cold.
It was a scratched-up Selmer alto. The bell had a dent where a previous owner had dropped it. The lacquer was worn through in patches. Two winters ago, Delores had walked into the pawn shop on Blue Hill Avenue and come out with it wrapped in a bedsheet, $300 lighter.
She had sold her wedding ring that afternoon. She had been married to Caleb's grandfather for 31 years before a heart attack took him in 2014. She never once told Caleb what she had done, but he had found the receipt in a shoebox 6 months later and never mentioned it.
He caught the 28 bus at 4:52, then the Orange Line at Ruggles, then the 39 out to Jamaica Plain, followed by a 10-minute walk through streets lined with homes that cost more than his entire building. Jefferson Preparatory Academy rose out of the dark at the end of a long drive, lit like a cathedral: brick and ivy and two centuries of old Boston money.
Tuition was $64,000 a year. Oil portraits of dead headmasters hung in every hallway. There were 20 scholarship students out of a student body of 600, and Caleb was one of them.
He let himself in through the side entrance the music faculty used. The building was empty. It was 5:40 in the morning.
In the music room, the morning light hadn't come yet. He unpacked the Selmer in the dark, wet the reed, and warmed the keys in his palms. He could not practice at home. The walls were too thin.
Mrs. Delgado deserved her sleep. His grandmother deserved her quiet. So every morning for 3 years, he came here to this empty room and played.