“Whoa, okay, little warning next time. Not a bad idea, though. I like it!” I clap my hands. “Ready to get started?”

The girl waves the picture back and forth in the air, checks it, seems satisfied, and tapes it onto a fresh sheet of paper on the first page of her scrapbook. With a pink colored pencil, she scribbles under the picture, Guitar Leson #1 with Maree.

Then she opens her own notebook and hovers the sharpened tip above the page, looks up at me expectantly.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

She wrinkles her nose, and her glasses slide away from her face. With one finger, she pushes them back into place. “I’m ready to learn.”

I motion with one hand toward the living room. “Great; follow me.”

She gets up from the table so fast she knocks her chair backward, the notebook gripped in one hand, colored pencil in the other.

“It’s not the SAT, kiddo.” I settle onto the floor and point to the space beside me.

She sits down, eyes blinking behind her glasses, which are far too big for her small face. “SAT?”

I laugh. She’s too young to know anything about that. “I mean, relax. You’re not going to take notes, and I’m not going to test you. You’re going to learn as you play. But first we need to tune it.” After our first lesson together, Mom found an old tuner and taught herself and me how to use it. I pick up the girl’s guitar, run my fingers along the wood underneath, and get to work.

It doesn’t take too long, but when I look up from the guitar, the girl is staring at me. “My name is Maree,” she says, loudly and with emphasis on each syllable, like I’m hard of hearing. “Like Mary with a y, but with e’s instead. Ms. Kiko said to remind you, but not too much. Is this too much?”

Her utter lack of guile brings an easy smile to my lips. “No, not too much. Thank you for reminding me, Maree.”

“I’m getting pretty good at it, I think.” She tilts her head. “Do you remember how come you started playing guitar in the first place?”

“My mother taught me.”

Maree’s eyes widen. “She did?”

I nod and my ears fill with the harmonic sounds of Mom plucking away at the old guitar she’d traded with somebody in exchange for a month’s supply of her chocolate chip cookies. “She taught herself and taught me at the same time,” I say.

The girl hunches over, pulling at a loose thread of carpet. “My mom left me.”

The sad tone in her voice scratches at my heart, revealing my own feelings of abandonment. I can relate more than this girl could know.

I reach out and touch her shoulder, knowing instinctively that she needs someone to listen. I did at her age.