"You were holding it like a plumber," Rose said. "You've thanked me since. It averages out." She sat down opposite him and looked him over with the nurse's eye and the wife's eye at once. "Buttons," she said. "Top one. There." She reached across and did it herself, her hands steady. "You look very distinguished, Mr. Delaney."
"I look like the antique they're exhibiting."
"Yes," Rose said. "We are the antiques they exhibit. That's the honour of it. They polish us, they put a little card next to us โ founded 1986, original condition โ and the young people walk past and say, they don't make them like that anymore." She sipped her tea. "We'll allow it. For one evening."
"Four hundred guests," Arthur said. "When we had the first concert, I was afraid sixty chairs would be too many. I laid awake inventing reasons people wouldn't come. The rain. The Pirates. I believe I blamed the moon at one point."
"Thirty-eight came," Rose said. "And thirty-eight people is not a failure, Arthur. Thirty-eight people is a room. You taught me that."
"I taught you that?"
"You taught the children that, every year, in the first rehearsal. 'We do not count the empty chairs. We tune for the people who came.'" She set her cup down. "Four hundred chairs tonight, and every one of them filled, and half the people in them once sat in a folding chair in a church hall with an instrument we handed them. Or their children did. That's not an audience, Arthur. That's the crop coming in."
There was a knock at the door โ two knocks, the neighbour knock โ and Mrs. Petrov from two doors down came in without waiting, because forty years of street had arranged these things, carrying a tin. Mrs. Petrov was eighty, wore her coat indoors until May on principle, and had come to deliver her opinions about galas along with the biscuits.
"You'll go with biscuits in your bag, Rose Delaney," she announced, "because those hotel sandwiches are cut for decoration, not for eating." She set the tin on the table and stood back to look at them, and her face did a complicated thing. Her own grandson had been a cello, Foundation, Class of '99. "Well," she said. "Would you look at the pair of you. Forty years, Rose."
"Forty years," Rose agreed.
"My Andrew says to tell you, he still has the trumpet. His girl plays it now. Third generation on one trumpet. He says to tell Mr. Delaney the valves still stick in cold weather, same as ever, and he wouldn't trade it." She folded her arms. "Now. You'll telephone me tomorrow, Rose, and you'll tell me everything, and you'll not skip the food, because the food at these things is the only honest review."
"We'll telephone," Rose promised. "And we'll skip nothing."
When Mrs. Petrov had gone, the house settled again into its held breath, and the light outside the windows had gone the colour of the inside of a cello. It was not yet five. The bus was at twenty to six, four streets away, an easy walk in the planning of it and a real one in the walking, and Arthur performed his preparations with the deliberation of a man packing for a campaign: the invitation, taken down from the mantel one final time โ yes, Saturday, yes, October, yes, the Allegheny Grand, yes, their names in the careful hand โ folded once, along its own crease, and placed in the inside pocket of the tuxedo, over his heart, where it made a small square of consequence he could feel when he breathed. Rose watched him do it and did not tease him, which he noticed, and loved her for.
"June," he said suddenly. "You did send the reply. In June."
"I sent the reply in June," Rose said. "The little card. I wrote our names and the number two, and I put it in the post with a first-class stamp. We are expected, Arthur. We are on a list downtown in a hand as careful as the one on that invitation." She was putting on her good grey coat over the green dress and checking her bag with a nurse's inventory: tissues, mints, biscuits, reading glasses, a small sewing kit in a tobacco tin, because Rose had sewn a strap back onto a soloist's gown in 2004 and had never since attended a concert professionally unprepared. "If you're asking whether some clerk lost usโ"
"I'm not asking," Arthur said. "I was counting. June the reply. April the invitation. Nineteen eighty-six, the chairs."
"It isn't coming back," Rose said, and came and stood in front of him and straightened his bow tie, which did not need straightening, with both hands. "It's arriving. There's a difference." She looked up at him โ he was still the taller, even stooped, even after all the years had done their editing โ and her face was composed and her eyes were not entirely. "She promised you the front row when she was ten years old, in a church hall, Arthur Delaney, and she renewed the contract at fifteen. In front of the lockers. With witnesses."