One of Swan’s pupils was a gangly white fourteen-year-old named Henry Sexton. Despite Albert’s strong improvisational style, as a teacher he was a stickler for theory. Henry sometimes felt more bullied by Albert in the teaching room than he did by the redneck coaches on the football field at Ferriday Junior High. But Swan was different. She might run him through a few scales at the beginning of each lesson, but this bored her, and she only did it to please her father. She delighted in teaching Henry to play the songs he really wanted to learn, hits he’d heard on the radio, mostly. Henry lived for the hour he spent with the older girl every Thursday afternoon, confined in the eight-by-ten room with a Baldwin upright and a scent so primally feminine that he could hardly think of anything else.

A narrow vertical window had been set in the door of the teaching room, and Henry had cursed it a thousand times. Albert used the window to keep an eye on Swan when she was teaching boys. Since the store was elevated off the ground, the floorboards always creaked, and Henry used those creaks as a Distant Early Warning System to keep track of Albert’s movements. The problem was, some customer was usually playing a piano in the main room, and this masked the sound of Albert’s walk. Bass guitars were even worse. To Henry’s everlasting gratitude, Albert sometimes taught piano in the display room at the same time Swan was teaching him. And it was one of these afternoons that Swan had given Henry the greatest shock, and the greatest gift, of his life.

He’d been trying to copy her technique on Bach, which was torture when 95 percent of his concentration was on the shapely thigh of the beautiful girl sitting hip to hip with him. He was also praying she wouldn’t notice the taut little tent in his lap, which had become a regular feature of the lessons, and which Henry simply could not control. As he struggled to keep his left hand in rhythm, Swan’s hand settled on that tent as softly as a butterfly. Then she began to rub it.

“Keep playing,” she whispered.

Henry stopped anyway, his heart and lungs expanding like balloons hooked to a high-pressure cylinder.

“Go on,” Swan urged, her big eyes flashing, “or I’ll have to quit.”

Sweat poured off Henry’s face. He banged his left hand down on the keyboard, and Swan rubbed harder beneath it. Less than a minute later Henry shivered and began to smack the keys like a man with stumps for fingers—but he kept playing. Swan kissed his cheek and said, “Maybe now you can concentrate, boy.”