She had been teaching piano for forty-one years when she told her last student that she would not be taking on any more.
The student was nine years old and named William, which she found satisfying. It seemed important to end with a William. Her very first student had also been named William — twelve years old, the year 1983, a different piano, a different house, a different version of herself entirely. The point is, it came full circle. Or near enough that the difference didn't matter.
William the Second was not particularly talented. He had small hands and a tendency to rush the left, as though he didn't trust it to keep pace on its own. But he was attentive, which is rarer than talent and worth considerably more in the long run. He listened when she demonstrated. He asked what the composer had been thinking. She told him honestly that no one knew, that this was precisely what made the question worth asking.
On his last lesson, she played for him herself. This was something she rarely did. Her arthritis had made the upper registers difficult, and she had long since made peace with the fact that her own playing had become demonstration rather than performance. But that afternoon she played the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata — slowly, imperfectly, with a drag in the left hand that she knew he noticed and that he was kind enough not to mention.
When she finished, he said: "Is that what it's supposed to sound like?"
She considered this. "That's what it sounds like now. When I was your age it sounded different. In ten years it will sound different again."
"Because you'll be better at it?"
"Because you'll be different. The music doesn't change. You do."
He nodded with the serious concentration of a nine-year-old carefully storing something for later use. She hoped he would keep it. In her experience, some students kept what she gave them and others lost it almost immediately, and she had never been able to predict which would be which.
After he left, she sat at the piano in the quiet house and played a few scales — just the familiar ones, the ones her first teacher had drilled into her until her fingers knew them without asking her brain for permission. Forty-one years later, they still felt like coming home.
She closed the lid. She went to make tea. It did not feel like an ending so much as a change of key: the same melody, continuing, in a register she had not yet learned to hear.