Weber came down the corridor with his score under his arm and his jacket over his shoulder, locking doors with the bunch of keys that school music directors carry like janitors of a smaller, louder kingdom. He stopped at the instrument room and surveyed the lockers with the satisfaction of a man whose property has all come home. He said: your parents got off all right. Xavier said they had; that his mother had admired the sound in the third row; that she sent no message, being his mother and not the school's. Weber said: she was in the third row when I looked, during the slow movement. I couldn't see her face for the lights. I could see she wasn't taking notes. It was the closest the year had come to making him laugh in the corridor of the music building, and he let it, briefly, and Weber, who had conducted the laugh's timing as he conducted everything, nodded as if a cue had been taken correctly. He locked the instrument room behind them and they walked together to the stage door, where the night had the warmth still in it and the lot lights were on, and Weber said: same time Monday. Rehearsal's the Haydn next, and the new girl's in your section in the fall — the west-side cellist, who had written to Weber in April to ask whether the school's gate was easy to find, and had been answered by the office, in the new manner, with a map, a name to ask for at the gatehouse, and the hour her name would be on the list from. Xavier said he would show her the lockers. Weber said he had already put her name beside his in the fall roster, in pencil, at the front of the section, where it would be expected.
He went out the stage door into the lot. The stage door's light made its small pool and then the dark took over, the good dark of a school after its evening, lawns breathing out the day's heat, the buildings settling. The gatehouse stood at the bottom of the drive with its light on, as gatehouses keep their lights on until the book is closed. In the window, the guard was at the counter with the binder, finishing the concert tab — he had the look of a man completing a document he intended to be the last word of the evening, which, in the only sense the year had left the phrase, it was: the evening's word, in the gate's book, every arrival matched to a departure, every name accounted for in the secretary's hand and his. One name remained unmatched, and the guard was in no hurry about it, because the name's owner was a student of the school with the run of the late gate on concert nights, and because the guard had learned the names of the regulars, and this one most particularly, in a year of learning names.
Xavier crossed the upper lot in his concert suit with the garment bag over his arm and the cello case on his back — his cello now, in its case, where it belonged, where it had been on a bench in another April. The distinction would have mattered to no one watching him come down the drive. It mattered to the record, and the record was the family's native tongue.
Across the city, the family car made its way home through the spring streets with two of its three people in it and the program on the back seat where the cello used to ride. Moussa drove. Renee sat with the evening arranged in her mind the way she arranged everything, in its order of occurrence, and at a red light on the long avenue she said: he played it slower. Moussa said: he played it at the tempo of the music; Weber wrote that a masterclass teacher told him that in December, and he has been practicing toward it since Christmas like it was a rank to earn. She said: it was the same notes. He said: it is never the same notes; ask any counselor. They came home to the dark house and the porch light they had left on for a son who was coming home by bus, and Renee hung the dress in the closet's front, where it would be the first thing the closet offered her the next time an occasion asked her to be only a mother in public, and Moussa put the kettle on out of the momentum of evenings, and the folder waited on the kitchen counter for tomorrow's program, in its place, with the clasp open — the archive at rest, the house at its ordinary order, the light on over the counter for the boy who would let himself in with his key a little before eleven and put his case down by the door of the room where he had been practicing other people's music at other people's tempos since he was nine years old.