The mother mimics the elbow position, still nodding. ‘You got that, Melanie?’

Melanie lifts her elbow out like a wing.

‘Great,’ Lacy says. She puts her hand on Melanie’s shoulder and bends to make eye contact. ‘Some beautiful music today. Keep the elbow like that when you’re practising, okay? And those crunches will be goooone.’ She moves her other hand in a wiping motion, as if she’s erasing them all here and now.

With that, the lesson seems to be done. I push the inner door fully open, and stay there to hold it for Melanie and her mother on their way out.

They shut the outer door behind them, and I can hear the mother’s voice all the way down the stairs. ‘Sounding beautiful, honey, beautiful. This is just about making it more beautiful, the elbow thing.’

Lacy raises her eyebrows and gives me a flat smile. She takes a breath in and lets out a sigh.

‘One more,’ I tell her, holding up a finger.

She teaches three private lessons on Friday afternoons, forty-five minutes per lesson, each one starting at fifteen minutes past the hour.

‘Yeah.’ She leans back against an armchair, crosses her legs at the ankles. ‘Hey, do you think you got the listing?’

‘Better,’ I tell her. ‘I know I got the listing. She’s called me already. I’m going over there tomorrow to sort out the paperwork.’

‘Well, good for you.’ She puts more into the smile this time. ‘Good for you, Mr Realtor. I knew you’d charm her.’

A car pulls up outside, a door opens with a rusty creak. I can hear a child’s complaining voice, but not the words.

Lacy checks her phone. ‘Ten minutes early.’

‘You want me to delay them, or do you want to get it done?

‘Delay them?’ She laughs. ‘What, you stop people at the door and do magic tricks now?’ Something must show on my face because she then says, ‘Thank you . . . Thank you, but I’m good to go.’ She pushes herself away from the armchair and straightens her top. ‘See you in forty-five.’

Some parents drop their kids off and leave, more stay than I’d expected, waiting out the lesson in our lounge room. We hadn’t anticipated that Lacy teaching at home would take up two rooms, but it does. We even have magazines on a table for them now. It’s a waiting room when class is on, usually for one parent, but for up to six when Lacy teaches her home-schoolers’ ensemble. That’s good money, though, ten kids at once.

Lacy’s meeting the student at the door as I go downstairs.

Our house is something of an oddity, but it works for us. It might go for forty thousand more than Ellen’s if we put it on the market, but it’d take the right buyer. The layout technically has the master bedroom upstairs and two others down, which is an arrangement you either like or you don’t. It gives us a music room upstairs, along with a bathroom for visitors who need it. Since it has neither the size nor the bath Americans expect from a room getting credit as a full bathroom, the downstairs bathroom would be marketed as a three-quarter. I learned how to halve and quarter bathrooms at Alaska Real Estate Training.