Afterward the hall performed its other function, which is the reception of its own music back into ordinary life at a rate the ushers control. Families found each other in the lobby by the acoustics of relief. The foundation's party admired the program's typography. Weber was surrounded in the manner of conductors, in concentric rings of gratitude, and worked his way through them with the air of a man paying tolls he was glad of, until he reached the family he had written a letter to, and there he stopped being a conductor and shook Moussa's hand and then Renee's, and said to Xavier — who had come down from the stage in his concert suit with the bow still in his hand, because performers descend from stage doors holding things the way sailors come off ships holding rails — Weber said: the tempo of the music. And Xavier, understanding that the year had just been reviewed in four words by the only reviewer whose verdict on that subject he had ever sought, said: yes, sir. Weber said: it was always in you. The audition was in you too. They are the same player; the room just took a year to be ready for him. Then a trustee's wife reclaimed him, and he went, in the manner of conductors, back into the rings.
The section leader found Xavier at the stage door with her case already packed, in the haste of a girl whose family was performing the ancient rite of trying to leave a school event before the parking arranged itself into a second event. She had a ribbon from the program in her pocket and the section's card in its envelope, delivered and opened and survived. She performed the year's last transmission in the doorway, over the sound of stands being folded by the stage crew: next year's seating, she said, and the cold spot, third stand left, and don't let the new oboist bully the tempo in the fall, he pushes; and then, dropping the office entirely, she said: play the Elgar at my graduation party in June, my mother asked, there's money in it, real money, musicians' money, not exposure. He said he would ask his teacher. She said his teacher would say yes and to bring the fast Bach for her father, who liked pieces that sounded like arguments won. They shook hands with the ridiculous formality their section had made a house style, and she went out into the spring night in a swirl of siblings, and the orchestra's year turned its page in a doorway, without ceremony, the way years do when they have been properly kept.
There remained the stage to strike, because school orchestras strike their own stages, and the chairs and stands of a hundred musicians do not fold themselves, and Xavier — with the other juniors and sophomores, in shirtsleeves, the concert suits' jackets hung along the practice-room hooks — worked the hall back into a room. It took the better part of an hour. It was the part of the concert no audience stays for and every musician remembers, because it is the part in which the evening's grandeur is carried, piece by piece, into storage by the people who made it, and the hall goes back to being a room with a floor that needs sweeping, and the music goes back into cases. His parents waited through the first of it in the lobby, in the patience of performers' families, and then came to the stage door with the proposal that had been forming since the applause: that he come home with them in the car, the cello in the footwell, the evening concluded in the family's conveyance at the family's hour.
He asked — with the garment bag over his arm again, and the cello case on his back, in the full uniform of his own arrivals — he asked whether they would mind if he took the bus. He said it without drama and with the reasoning ready, because he had been composing it, in the way of sons, since the third movement: the buses ran late on concert Fridays for the schools' sake; the stop was his old stop; the route was the route he had taken to the audition and to the anniversary morning at his old school and to a hundred practices, and he wanted, this once, to take it home from the concert at the end of the year, in his suit, with the case — he said it and then, hearing himself, simplified it the way his family simplified everything true: I want to go home the way I came. Moussa understood at once, in the counselor's way, that the request was a piece of record-keeping and not a rejection of the car. Renee understood it in hers. She said: text when you're on the bus. He said: yes, ma'am. She said: and the folder stays home tonight; the program goes in it tomorrow, in order. He said: yes, ma'am, and grinned, because the folder's discipline had outlasted the folder's emergency, as disciplines in that family were intended to, and because being ordered to file a concert program by a chief of police in a dress in a school doorway was, he suspected, as close as his year would ever come to a benediction.