After this lesson, Henry ran home and washed his pants in the Whirlpool before his mother could get home from her second job at the church. Then he’d prayed eighteen hours a day for his next lesson to arrive.

When the next Thursday came, Swan made him wait almost the whole hour before doing anything other than what Henry’s mother was paying her to do. But fifty minutes into the lesson, Elizabeth Swan Norris got up and moved to Henry’s right side, which was not her usual place, then took his right hand and guided it under her dress. Henry gulped when he felt what awaited his fingers. Her wetness confused and terrified him. Still, he let her move his fingers in circles over the hard little berry between her legs while she played piano with her left hand. When Swan finally shuddered against him, the music stopped. When her father looked into the window a few seconds later, he saw two kids on the piano bench and four hands on the keyboard. He did not see that two of the hands were wet.

“Don’t you go falling in love with me,” Swan warned Henry that day. “If you start talking foolishness, I’ll stop these lessons. You hear?”

“But … but …” Henry stuttered, knowing already that his heart was full of something that felt nothing like foolishness.

“But nothing,” Swan snapped. “I’m just giving you some special lessons, that’s all. Lessons you need.”

Five weeks of special lessons followed, each one ending with mutual ecstasy. Twice Swan freed Henry from his jeans and sucked until he almost screamed, and those times he felt what the preachers claimed being filled with the holy spirit was supposed to be like and what a heroin addict had told him it felt like when he’d shot up for the first time.

Once during a “special” lesson, Albert actually left the store to run an errand. Swan didn’t waste time with preliminaries. She pulled Henry down to the floor, tugged down his pants, climbed astride him, and unbuttoned her shirt. He’d never seen or felt anything like he did that day, the swelling heat of Swan’s chocolate-tipped breasts and the near-religious glaze in her eyes. Swan had known exactly when he was going to finish, and she slid off him and helped with expert hands, laughing as he spent himself across the ebony piano bench. But Henry couldn’t laugh. After that day, he was in love, or in something even more profound. He was like the drug-addicted musicians Albert spoke mournfully about, the ones who couldn’t go more than a few hours without a fix.