Thank You for the Music by Jane Mccafferty

think I can even imagine what it would be to have that sense of home,” Anne said. She made it sound like a compliment and my mother took it that way.
    â€œWell thanks. I just can’t imagine not living here where I grew up,” she said. “My sisters, my cousins, we all stayed.”
    â€œIt’s beautiful, I think,” Anne said.
    My mother smiled. “So you’re a painter and a piano player.”
    Anne was looking at my hands now. She wasn’t answering. My mother finally said again, “A painter and a piano player.”
    â€œYes, yes. Look at those hands! Those hands should play the piano.”
    We all looked at my hands on the solid wooden table. For a moment they seemed to glow from within.
    My mother held up her own hands. “And look at mine! Dishpan hands! These hands should go wash the dishes!” She began to gulp down the rest of her tea.
    Anne watched her, a bit puzzled, and I blushed, embarrassed for my mother, wishing for a moment that she was not connected to me, fearing that Anne would judge me for it. My mother was not an educated woman. She had graduated early from high school at sixteen to marry my father. She read fat romance novels. She had never been to a museum, and the art she hung was made of yarn, or those paintings of girls with the big heads and enormous black eyes set low in their faces. At twelve I was beginning to develop a snobbery I didn’t understand.
    â€œI just love music,” my mother was saying as she rose from the table. “Do you play any Burt Bacharach?”
    â€œOh, sure, I could,” Anne said, and when her eyes flashed over to me, for a moment I was fearful that she was mocking my mother.
    â€œI just love his stuff,” my mother said and sighed, and took her teacup to the sink. “So, welcome!” she said, and then we were leaving.
    Back in our own kitchen my mother said, “Another odd duck for the building, huh?”
    I shrugged.
    â€œShe’s nice, though, huh?”
    â€œYep.”
    Later I heard my mother tell her friend Lorine on the phone, “We got a new neighbor. A mixture of a nun and an artsy-fartsy.”
    Nun because she wore no blue eye shadow, no lipstick, no bleach in her hair, no nail polish, I supposed, like my mother and Lorine. And she had that quiet about her whose source was surely the luxury of her own reflections. Not that the nuns who taught me had any of that.
    â€œSo do you want to take piano lessons?” Anne said. It was fall, I was in my school uniform bouncing a ball on the sidewalk. Though it was warm, Anne was in a coat that looked like an Olive Sibley coat, and for a moment I took my affection back. I didn’t want her to be too strange. I wanted her to walk that thin line between strange and ordinary, or to be ordinary and secretly wonderful. Why was she in that winter coat? And why did her eyes look so urgent?
    â€œI don’t think my mom would let me,” I said. “Too much money.”
    â€œI’d give them for free, if you’d let me paint you.”
    â€œPaint me? You want to paint me?”
    â€œYou’d make a great subject, I think.”
    â€œI’ll have to ask my mom.”
    â€œOf course. Just let me know.” She smiled, and I felt again my rush of curious affection for her. I watched her walk away, her dark silver-streaked braid hanging down her back, swinging with her sturdy stride.
    Later I jumped up and down in our kitchen with my hands folded into prayer. “Please oh please can I ma can I ma?”
    My mother just looked at me. Maybe she was envying my energy.
    â€œShe said I’d make a great subject!” I whined.
    Lorine was at the table watching this display; my mother had set Lorine’s hair, as she did every Thursday, and now a net covered her pink foam curlers. Her husband, a man I’d grown up calling Uncle Lou, had moved the year before to Chicago with a twenty-two-year-old girl,