One thing about Sally, she never made me take any kind of piano or voice lessons, even though that’s what she teaches all day. (I can’t sing a note, by the way: Two parents who do it professionally, and it’s all I can manage to stay on pitch. They could probably take the hospital for millions.) But I teach myself stuff sometimes, just for fun, banging it out for myself, stuff like “Mack the Knife” and “Piano Man,” and “When I’m Sixty-four.” I was nervous about playing for Norris, so I made a big thing out of it, sitting down and rubbing my hands and cracking my knuckles, until Norris said, “Enough already, kid, go,” and I finally went into “The Entertainer.”

I had to stop. I got maybe ten or twelve bars into the piece, and I just had to quit. The sound was so beautiful I was just about to get sick, or have hysterics, or I don’t know, wet myself—something was going to happen, anyway, that’s for sure. Some people get that way when they see flowers or sunsets, or read poems, whatever. I don’t, I never have, but that damn piano. I stopped playing, and I looked up at Norris, and I couldn’t talk. He laid his arm around my shoulders. He said, “Yeah, me, too. I know I don’t deserve it, I’m embarrassed every time I use it just to sing scales, but I keep telling myself it’s a present for what I’m going to do. You have to believe that stuff, Jennifer, in our business.”

Norris always talks to me as though I were a real musician, the way he is, and the way Sally is. Sometimes I like it, sometimes I really don’t, because it’s not true and he knows it. He wanted me to play some more, but I got up from the piano and went over to him. I said, “Sally’s getting married.”

“I know,” Norris said. “Nice guy, too, Evan what’s-his-name. You like him all right, don’t you?”