Every Tuesday afternoon. Right after school she dashed home and crammed a week’s worth of practice into thirty minutes. She liked the piano. She really wanted to learn it, but she hated to practice. She hated the minuets and the scales and the way her tiny hands could never stretch enough to play the chords. She wanted her fingers to dance across the keys like her moms did. But that piano seemed a mile long to her little girl hands. It was painful and nothing like a dance.
So she always waited until the last minute. Scales. Minuet. Scales. Scales. The Lazy Spider. More scales. Right up until that black Cadillac pulled up in front of the house on Tuesday afternoons.