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understand the subject, but dogged memorizing and Mrs. Torrance’s encouragement helped me pass the exams, and now I heard Mrs. Torrance ask, “How are your cations and your anions, Steven?”
    â€œAll my ions are okay,” I said.
    She seemed to think this was very funny.
    I worried about Mrs. Torrance. She has a slight trembling in her hands, and with her interest in atomic particles, it seemed to me she ought to wonder what was going on in her lungs. She took my arm, and held her cigarette out to one side. She and Mr. Torrance often had me up to their apartment to eat hand-packed ice cream from a gourmet dessert shop on Piedmont Avenue. We would watch videos on nuclear accelerators or baseball games, which were almost exactly the same subject, as far as I was concerned, and load up on butterfat.
    â€œI grew up with a Steinway,” she said.
    â€œOh really.” I really wanted to be polite, but I was very concerned about my father’s piano.
    â€œI hated it.”
    This seemed very much unlike Mrs. Torrance. “You don’t like music?” I asked.
    â€œI hated the lessons,” she said.
    I knew how she felt, recalling my father’s look of anguish when I splashed yet another chord on the little Casio keyboard.
    The manager, Liz Compton, marched across the tidy, bright green lawn and stood with her arms crossed. She was angular and unpretty, but so full of energy she radiated a sort of sexiness, if you like nerves.
    â€œThe elevator stuck again,” said Liz, “or I would have been here sooner.”
    â€œIs anyone trapped?” Mrs. Torrance asked.
    â€œNot the last time I checked,” said Liz. My father attracts women like Liz—almost as smart as my mother.
    More men showing up on our balcony, holding their arms out to the piano several stories down, as though to encourage it.
    â€œSix men and none of them know what they’re doing,” said Mr. Torrance, an unlit Pall Mall waggling in his lips.
    â€œTripping on their dicks,” said Liz, the sort of thing my mother would say.
    Mrs. Torrance drew hard on her cigarette, maybe a little offended at Liz’s manner and wanting to put a little smoke between her and such talk.
    I tried to offer the opinion that they looked strong enough for the job, and Mr. Torrance gave a rumbly smoker’s chuckle, winking at Liz, maybe flirting in an antique fashion, right in front of his wife. “It’s leverage that matters,” he said.
    My dad joined the piano movers up on the balcony, a hand to his mouth. He caught sight of me and waved, his hand out like a traffic cop, as though to caution me not to spread my wings and fly up to join them.
    The winch made an unsettling, wasplike keen. Without comment, all of us moved away from the lawn, leaving the rope holders plenty of space.
    â€œYour poor father,” said Liz. “He really looked forward to this.”
    The piano was developing a definite hitch in its position, an unmistakable cant. The winch whined, hauling the piano higher, and then too high, the piano creeping upward beyond where my dad was, leaning forward.
    We all shrank back even farther, all the way to the tennis court fence.
    You couldn’t see the mammoth piano slip, but you could see a tendency, like when you know a row of books is going to topple.
    This Bechstein beauty my dad had his heart set on was about to do a breathtaking plunge, all the way to the empty place near a half dozen retired people. And I found myself curious as I backed away from ground zero. How far would the piano keys scatter?
    The winch was suddenly silent, and the piano slipped down, inch by inch. This made it possible for my father to reach out, straining over the side of the balcony, and touch the brass tip of one leg. He touched it with the pads of his fingers, but this little barely existent nudge was enough to move the quilted piano around in the beginning of a slow countercircle.
    Dad reached that