They left him at the stage door in a small traffic of farewells — the Saturday teacher, departing, pressed his hand with both of hers and said the tempo had found him, which he chose to take as the review he had been waiting for since he was nine — and his parents crossed the lot to the visitors' rows, past the gatehouse, where the guard was checking the concert tab's departures against the binder with a pencil, marking the evening out name by name, the way a harbor is emptied on paper. The guard nodded them through the gate as checked-off guests, party of two, third row, and the car went down into the spring streets, and the school settled behind it into the last hour of its concert night: the hall emptying of its music into cases, the stage door's light, the binder open on the gatehouse counter with the evening's names in it, and one name in the student roster at the front of the book — checked in that morning for classes, due out before the gate's closing — still to come through, in his own time, at his own pace, by his own chosen road home.
The music building at the end of a concert night has a sound of its own, which is the sound of cases closing. Xavier went to the instrument room to collect the cello, through corridors that had already been swept once and would be swept again, past the audition room — dark now, its chairs stacked by the stage crew against the wall where the high windows gave onto nothing but the night and the lawn — and past the practice rooms, each with its card on the door, each door open on an empty room with a piano and a chair and the faint smell of rosin and warm electronics. The locker tape above his slot still read DIALLO — LOANER 4, in the secretary's labeling hand, although the designation had been out of date since winter, when the youth orchestra's library, retiring its instruments at the year's turn, had sold the loaners to their players at the library's valuation, and the Diallos had bought the warm brown cello with the repaired crack outright, at the kitchen table, with the folder open to receive the bill of sale — the year's most satisfactory document, Moussa had called it, and no one had argued. The secretary had never updated the tape. Xavier hoped she wouldn't. He took the case out and stood a moment with his hand on it. In the folder at home the program would go in tomorrow, in order, behind the apology and Weber's letter, and that was the whole of the year's filing left to do. The rest of it — the logs, the tables, the report, the minutes, the plea — was in other people's custody now, in institutions that kept records professionally, and his family's part of the archive had narrowed, over the year, to one dark folder with a clasp, which was as it should be: a family is not an institution, and its archive should fit in a kitchen.