At home, the concert acquired the family's calendar the way expeditions acquire weather. Moussa arranged the evening with a counselor's logistics: the car, the route, the seats Weber's letter had promised, the question of Xavier's Saturday teacher, who was invited and who accepted with a telephone call of such formality that Renee, listening, remarked that the woman scheduled gratitude the way other people scheduled dentists. The garment bag came out of Moussa's closet again, because the interview suit — hemmed again in the winter, by Renee, at the kitchen table, with the radio on — was the concert suit now, and Xavier would change at the school, in the practice room, where the sink had warm water, a fact about his musical life that had survived every other change of the year without comment from anyone, including him. What his parents would wear had been settled without discussion until the Saturday before the concert, when Renee came home from an errand with a garment bag of her own, which she hung in the bedroom doorway with a casualness so complete it announced itself as its opposite. She had bought a dress. She was not a woman whose years in uniform and command had left her a wardrobe of dresses, and the family's understanding — never stated, because the family stated only what needed stating — was that the chief of police would attend her son's concert as a mother, in a dress, in the third row, off duty and unintroduced, and that the dress was the uniform of that intention, chosen with the same care she gave to insignia. Moussa looked at it hanging in the doorway for a moment and said: third row. Best sound in the hall. She said: so Mr. Weber writes. He said: he writes good letters now. And that was the whole of the family's ceremony about the dress, which was the correct amount.
The spring concert fell on a Friday in May, on an evening of the kind the city keeps in reserve for the vindication of its winters: warm, green, the light lasting past eight. The Diallos drove across town in the family car with Xavier in the back seat and the cello across the footwell, in the arrangement of a hundred family expeditions, except that this one's cargo included a garment bag laid flat on top of everything like a flag. He would change at the school. They would take their seats as audience. The division of the evening into its two parties — performer and family — had been rehearsed by a year of such evenings at two schools, and it had the smoothness of a thing the family was good at, which was showing up in the correct capacities.
At the gate, the concert had made the gatehouse a small theater of the year's reforms. The school had printed the evening's list on the merged system: performers' families, guests of the school, the foundation's party, the press — two names, expected, one of whom arrived — in the binder's concert tab, each name with its party's size and its seating note. The guard worked the window with the unhurried accuracy of a man whose list finally deserved his care, and cars moved through the gate at the pace of verification rather than the pace of suspicion, which turned out to be faster, a fact he had remarked to the security director in the spring with the air of a man reporting a discovery in physics: a complete list is a quicker list, because nobody has to be decided about.
The Diallos' name was in the tab, under D, with a seating note in the secretary's hand: third row, held, Weber. The guard found it in one pass. He checked the party of two against the car, and he gave Moussa the parking direction for the visitors' rows, and then — because the guard was the guard, and the year had made him the gate's memory as surely as the binder had — he looked past Moussa to the back seat, where the cello case stood upright between a boy's knees in the attitude it had occupied a year earlier in a different vehicle on a different errand, and he said: evening, Xavier. Break a leg, or whatever the correct disaster is. Xavier said it was break a leg and thanked him, and the guard slid the window to, and the car went up the drive into the school's grounds, through the gate that had once been the border of the boy's whole misfortune, at the speed of a family arriving for a concert.
He left them at the music building's stage door with the garment bag and the cello, in the performers' traffic of garment bags and cellos, and his parents went around to the hall's public entrance with the other families, through the lobby where the programs were stacked in their hundreds — the program with the orchestra's names in it, his own among them in the cello section's roster, and again in the solo line the program gave the Elgar movement's cello part, printed in the typeface the school used for such things, correct in every letter, which his mother, reading it standing in the lobby while Moussa found the row, noticed with the part of her mind that kept the whole year's accounts: the name, in the program, expected, in print, twice.