Serge had been no prodigy.  His aunt tried to teach him piano when he went to live with her while his mother visited Quebec City to receive a pacemaker.  He was fourteen and coming off three school suspensions in a little over a year.  The aunt, who had no kids and no television set, decided it would be a good idea to give Serge lessons on the dusty upright in her cold Albany basement.  She was quiet and kind, but it only took three days for her to lose patience with him.
   “How can you not understand the difference between a half and a full step?  It’s the most basic thing in music.  You can’t do anything until you learn that.”
   Serge, too, wanted to know why he couldn’t understand things. He felt his heart pounding inside his chest, and he wondered if he might someday be heading to Quebec for a pacemaker of his own.  The thought comforted him a little.  Everyone loved his mother, and everyone at least pretended to like him when he was with her.
   He and his mother lived in the aunt’s basement for a full year after her surgery.  His mother sometimes played the piano at night.  She always showed him a few keys to play for a melody; “Twinkle, Twinkle…” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and then a bit of “Close to You” after he’d gained some confidence.  His mother never talked about steps and scales.  Before long, he was playing parts of songs from the radio on his own.  And then he asked his mother for a guitar.  He heard music in his head nearly all the time.  He played along to his metal CD’s.  He wrote his own songs.  He didn’t fight as much.  He didn’t even play his video games.  He’d found something inside his brain that worked and made sense.
   “Your father loved music,” his mother said.  “I tried to teach him piano, but he had that crooked middle finger from the fight in Kitchener.  He couldn’t do it.”
   His father had been dead for three years, shot and killed during a break-in at his apartment in Windsor.  A woman and two other men were killed as well.  His father was out of hockey by then and hadn’t lived with Serge and his mother for a while.  The newspaper said the killings appeared to be the result of a soured drug deal.  The article didn’t even mention his father’s hockey career.
   Years later, when Serge’s mother was dying, she took to writing on legal pads.  It started with a visit from a hospice worker who suggested daily affirmations and lists of ways to enjoy each new day.  The lists soon gave way to page length sentences covering everything from the inordinate amount of time local newscasts spend on the weather to the details of her marriage.
   “He gave me all the good he had,” she wrote about Serge’s father, “and it was bright and beautiful but there wasn’t enough of it to last because of what he had been through and how his father had seen him and treated him and then how other people saw him and treated him and how they wanted him to be something he really wasn’t underneath and he never could protect himself even when his whole life was fighting for other people like his mother and his brothers and the goal scorers with the skinny shoulders, and I couldn’t help him because I was always sick, and our son was what I could save but I don’t know if I did because people seem to look at him the way they looked at his father and when they dismiss him it breaks my heart.”
 

Tamara came by the house on a Saturday afternoon to look at the things Serge hoped to sell.
   “Anything and everything,” Serge said.  “Except maybe the television.”
   She went right to the piano.  “Do you play?”
   “Not well,” he said.
   He stood where he could keep an eye on the television.  His mother had gotten him into the habit of monitoring CNN all day long.  The only excitement in their day had come when the “Breaking News” or “Developing Story” banner ran across the bottom of the screen.
   Tamara talked him into playing the piano.  He took a stab at “Close to You” and made it through a verse and chorus with only a couple of stumbles.  He hadn’t played music while his mother was sick.  Something hard had grown between the original joy of playing and the years of disappointment that followed, namely all of the bands that had dismissed him because of his drinking, fighting and inability to remember songs when he was using heroin, Ketamine and other drugs.  He’d thought of a band as a family, but he found that he was always easily replaced.  Bands weren’t families.  They were like gangs of dogs, each member willing to chew through another’s neck for a spoiled scrap of food or attention.
   Tamara leaned against the back of the sofa and listened to the music.  The living room was bright from the afternoon sun.  Serge’s mother loved the sunlight.  That’s why he’d put the hospital bed in the room.
   When he’d finished playing, Tamara applauded.  “You’re really good,” she said.  “You must have learned when you were young.”
   “Fourteen,” he said.  “My mother gave me this piano.  You wanna buy it?  It sounds kind of flat, and some of the keys are sticky.  But it’s not bad.”
   “You can’t sell that,” she said.  “Not if your mother bought it for you.”
   “She bought me a lot of stuff.  I just can’t afford to keep everything.”
   “That’s so sad,” she said.  “What type of cancer was it again?”
   “Brain,” he said.  “But she had heart problems, too.  She told me she always thought it would be her heart that got her.  She used to dream about her heart stopping.”
   “I have bad dreams, too,” Tamara said.  “About my daughter.  Some times I dream that I’ve lost her or she’s on the edge of a ravine and I can’t get to her.  It looks so real and familiar, but I can’t really remember ever being anywhere like it.”
   Serge stood up.  On the television, a group of firefighters were rescuing a duck from a storm drain.  Serge thought of a Chinese restaurant he used to frequent.  The specialty was Peking Duck, but Serge had gone for the strong drinks at the bar.  The bartender was usually good for some coke as well.
   “It must be scary having a kid,” he said.  “The worst dream I have is that I get forced to go back to high school.”
   Tamara smiled.  “Seriously?”
   “Yeah, they tell me I missed one credit but I have to go all the way back to ninth grade.”
   “Good God,” she said.  “That is a nightmare.”
   “Yeah, but it’s a stupid nightmare.  My mother was dreaming about dying, and you’re dreaming about keeping your daughter safe.  Those are real things.”
   Tamara walked back over to the piano and stared at the keys.  He could tell she wanted to touch one of them, to feel the sound.
   “How old’s your daughter?” he asked.
   “She’s eleven.  Her name’s Mabel.”
   “That’s a nice name,” Serge said.
   “Do you think so?  I named her after my mother.  She was the strongest woman I knew.”
   “My father named me after a hockey player.  Serge Savard of the Canadiens.  It was between him and Toe Blake.”
   “I like Serge better,” she said.
   She finally plinked a key.  She frowned at the noise, drew back from the piano and walked over to him.
   “Listen, I don’t have much money right now.  I can’t really afford to buy any furniture.  But what if I paid you to teach my daughter to play the piano.  I’d really like to do that for her.  For me, too, I guess.  I think it would be great to have a house filled with music.”
   “I don’t teach,” he said.  “I don’t have any real training, you know.  I wouldn’t know what to do.”
   She shrugged.  “So, how did you learn?  Did your mother teach you?”
   For some reason, he told her his aunt had taught him.  “I don’t remember much.  Steps and half steps and all the formal things.”
   “Don’t give me that,” she said.  “You’re great.  If you don’t want to teach a kid, just tell me.  Believe me, I understand.”
   She might have understood, but her face tightened in scrutiny.  And her suggestion had stirred an apprehension inside of Serge.  The warm sun on the back of his neck felt uncomfortable.
   “I don’t even listen to music anymore.”
   “How can you not listen to music?” she asked.  “God, I’d go crazy.”
   He cracked a window and lit a cigarette.  He stood watching the neighbor’s dog run in circles on a patch of snow.
   “I get interested in something, and then I overdo it,” he said.
   “I think she could use something like this,” Tamara said.  “She’s a little different.”
   “What do you mean?” he asked.
   “Well, I don’t think it’s really unusual, but she pretends to be people from movies and television shows.  And sometimes she makes up characters on her own.  When she’s home, she does it.  She can go a month as this totally different person.  At school, she just kind of shuts down.  I think she has a great imagination, but it doesn’t always come across well to other people.  Her teachers never say anything positive.  It’s always negative.”
   “Well, people are assholes,” Serge said.  “If you’re not what they want you to be, they don’t give a shit about you.”
   She walked up behind him and touched his shoulder.  “You’re not an asshole,” she said.  “And I promise I’m only an asshole part of the time.”
   He stubbed out the cigarette on the windowsill and turned away from the sun.  She was looking at his face, smiling like she’d stumbled across a rare find at a junk sale.  She’d made her appraisal, and he had surmised to a degree something inside his own less organized brain.  It was no less appealing for being a bit out of tune, a melody that touches the nerves a little, a new song to learn.  New shoes.  Fresh, gleaming ice.  Tall grass to mow.  He reached out and touched the insides of her wrists, and she moved closer to him.