From "Metronome"

“Jin?”
He turned to find Mrs. Carter standing on the landing. She sighed, and walked over to join him at the piano. Over his shoulder, she looked at the music he held in his hands.
“It’s incredible,” she says. “Just jibberish to me. And you can turn that into music.”
“He doesn’t feel like coming down, does he?”
She sat down in the fold-out chair beside him. She leaned back and closed her eyes for a minute, and Jin felt permeated by the tiredness rolling off the slight slope of her shoulders, her limp hair, sticking slightly to her neck.
She pulled her hands into her lap and intertwined her fingers. “He says he wants to quit,” she said.
“He’s angry,” said Jin, grasping the sheet music.
“He’s angry.” She looked down at the carpet. “But he’s also sad. It’s a lot for a boy, I think. His school. You have to do so many things well. And there’s some stuff going on with his Dad.”
Jin’s pulse quickened at the mention of the man he’d never met.
“So I think we should just give him a little time off.”
Jin’s throat clenched. Time off was time lost. They had not yet reached the point where Jake could not live without the piano. And they had to reach that point, less he become another gifted student who limits the display of his talent to saccharine, forced performances at birthday parties, or Christmas.
“He’s been making so much progress, though. Jake has a gift.”
Mrs. Carter smiled warmly at the mention of her name. “It’s amazing, isn’t it? Watching my own son do something I could never dream of? I love to stay upstairs while you have your lessons and listen to him play. But he’ll be off to college next year. And I can’t force him.”
Why not? Jin thought. Why? With a gift like his, it was a wonder the neighbors didn’t come barreling through the front door with shouting at the infidel to come down and perform.
“There’s a lot of stuff going on right now, and I just feel like he deserves to concentrate on his friends, his sports, the things that make him happy. You’re only young once, right?”
“But he loves to play the piano.” Jin said, desperate.
“Does he?” She asked, her brown eyes lighting up. “He won’t talk about it with me.”
“Please,” Jin whispered. “You shouldn’t let him quit,”
Mrs. Carter broke into a wider smile and leaned forward to clasp his hand. “Oh Jin,” she said, “don’t take it personally. I’ll recommend you to all my friends.”
Jin pushed the piano bench backwards and got to his feet. He gritted his teeth together to keep his eyes from welling up, and forced his lips to curl upwards into a delusional smile when Mrs. Carter gathered his bag of music off the floor.
“He might change his mind,” she said, passing it to him. “Fingers crossed!” She held up two crossed fingers, to empathize her point.
Jin did not feel like standing in her living room and staring at her crude attempt to make him smile. Jin felt like running up the stairs and yanking Jake out of his bedroom and forcing him to come downstairs to that piano, because if you didn’t go to it in the worst of times, you might never go to it again. Jin did not do this. Jin laughed at her crossed fingers. Jin accepted her offer to pay him for the remaining month’s lessons, and then he let himself out of their home into the perfect light of summer’s end.

From "Metronome"

They stood like that for several thundering ticks of the grandfather clock in the entrance hall; Jin’s fingers on this soft part, willing him back. And then Jake pulled away from him, and Jin knew what Jake must be thinking, and it was with a retch of pure revulsion that he listened to Jake ascend the staircase to the second story; a place that was off limits to a clumsy piano teacher who should have used his words instead of his hands. If he had been Jake’s father, or his brother, or yes, he could admit it, if he had been his lover, he could have crossed the threshold that separates a misunderstanding from a making up. As it was, he was not even a friend of the familys, and his own desires and disappointments held no weight. Jake had a mind-boggling but still nascent gift, and it didn’t matter, because no one in Jake’s family was going to push him to want something that he didn’t. There would be no more apple juice. There would be no more iced coffee. Suddenly exhausted, Jin reached down for his tote bag full of music, and let himself out in to the perfect light of summer’s end.

From "Metronome"

Through the living room window, Jin spied a little girl riding a training bike in between two women. She wore a pink helmet on her head with white polka dots, which made it appear as if she was making the first athletic efforts of her fourth year under the tutelage of giant mushroom.

From "Metronome"

The week had been a long one, and Jin was grateful to find himself on the indistinctive train to Manhattan, the vinyl seats discolored from the sweat of countless thighs and knees, the linoleum aisle littered with bad news and gossip. He brought his cup of coffee up to his lips, and swallowed, and felt happy. He recognized that the coffee was insipid and watered down, a mere shadow to the way coffee should actually taste, but even this pleased him. He’d ordered it “light and sweet”, and this is what he’d been given.

From "Metronome"

“Everyone sit down on your behinds, both cheeks on the floor!”
Jin turned his attention to Ms. Weir, the first grade homeroom teacher, a woman whose eccentricities would never have been allowed to surface in Korea. She was fond of irksome euphemisms, such as “cheeks” and “wee wee’s”, and she dressed monochromatically: her shoes, her clothes, her tights.
“Can we say good morning to Mr. Kim?”
“Good morning, Mr. Kim!” Exclamation points everywhere, like many balloons, rising.
“Good morning,” he stood. “Are you ready to warm up?”
“Yes!!”
That year, the first grade was working on “Chim Chim Cher-ee” from Mary Poppins. Jin hadn’t played any part in the selection of this song, and he was more than grateful that this was the last year the first graders would be singing it.
The choice was problematic for a number of reasons. It was extremely difficult to get first graders to enunciate all of the “cher-ees” and “cher-oos” and the melody was haunting. How a group of parents soberly decided that The Sherman Brother’s bittersweet tune would make an appropriate send-off for the seniors was beyond him. After “Nature Boy”, it had to be the saddest song he’d ever heard in English.
“We’ll take it from the beginning?” The little children crossed right ankles over left, clapped hands together, reached out and poked their friends. Every day was a new beginning for them.
Their eyes opened wide as he played the first stanza- the ba, da-da-dum, ba da-da-dum like a whirling carrousel.

Chim chiminey, chim chiminey, Chim chim cher-ee!
A sweep is as lucky, as lucky can be.
Chim chiminey, chim chiminey, Chim chim cher-oo!
Good luck will rub off when I shake hands with you!

Their high-pitched, eager voices almost camouflaged the dark current, but the lyrics reinforced the downward-pulling irony of the relentless bass. Ba da-da-dum, ba da da da-da-dam…

Now, as the ladder of life has been strung
You might think a sweep's on the bottommost rung
Though I spend my time in the ashes and smoke
In this whole wide world there's no happier bloke.

Jin stopped. Some of the parents had complained. They were fairly certain that ‘bloke’ was a bad word, but they couldn’t come up with anything to replace it. ‘Rogue’ had been proposed, but that seemed just as bad. The real problem was that the children couldn’t manage the hard ‘k’.
“Remember what we said last week? We were going to cough?”
Jin retook the stanza and looked up at Ms. Weir. He loathed singing out loud, but she was more than happy to demonstrate the phrasing.
“In this whole world there’s no happier blow- KUH!”
“Shall we try it again?”
It was worthless, really. On the day of graduation, the children would be nervous and all of the words would run into each other like colored cereal in milk.
“In this whole world there’s no happier BLOKE. YAW!”
Jin smiled. A lot of these little boys would go home that evening and run around a kitchen island singing “Bloke-ha! Bloke-ha! Bloke-ha!” until their mothers hit them playfully with a dishtowel. Others would go home to quieter households where laughter was viewed as a vulgar display of affection, and it was for these children that Jin the lamented the endless repetition of the song.

From "Homemade"

She noticed that he stopped in the fiction section before heading towards the checkout. She sucked at her cheeks while she watched him choose. After flipping through the fiction rack, he moved to the table of bestsellers. She felt both relieved and saddened when he chose “Tuesdays with Morrie”. It made her sad to imagine a grown up reading a tale about a grown up and his mentor. But then again, most people bought it as a gift for their fathers, which struck her as an incredibly sad gift, indeed.

From "Homemade"

The parking lot of Bookends had recently been painted and the parking-space lines seemed particularly white and aggressive to her that day. Teresa took a deep breath before she pulled her car into her usual spot, considering the barbed snarl of potential disasters waiting inside.