The Lucy Variations by Sara Zarr

other day and thought it was going well.”
    Her grandfather and father both turned to Lucy.
    “You did?” Grandpa Beck asked. “Please share.” He folded his hands in front of him and stared, expectant. It was a challenge. Whatever she’d say, he could shoot down solely because she’d quit. Not just that she’d quit, but that she was a Quitter.
    She chose not to back down. “He has a kind of fuller, I don’t know, musicality. Temnikova didn’t really have that, you know. She was great with technique, she—”
    “The best,” her grandfather said, his gaze unemotional, steady.
    “Yeah, maybe, but kind of…cold.” She searched for what she meant. “The technique seemed detached from everything else. More what to do than
why
to do it, when—”
    “And you know better how this all should go?”
    “Dad,” Lucy’s mother said. “Let her finish.”
    “It’s just amusing to me that Lucy’s the expert now,” Grandpa Beck said.
    She met his eyes. He wasn’t unemotional any more. His face had reddened. She’d thought, for a while, that his anger over everything had passed, and his main feelings for her were disappointment and disinterest. Wrong. His rage was as fresh as it had been that day in Prague when she returned to the hotel.
    You entitled little brat. You ungrateful, careless…You think what you did honours your grandmother’s life? It disgraces her, Lucy.
    “I heard him practising with her every day,” she said. “I’ve gone to every performance I could. I know as much as you do.” She drew herself up, feeling the wood of the dining chair against her back. She tried to remember the quote, the Vladimir Horowitz one that Grace Chang had once written out for her that her grandfather knew and liked. It was at the tip of her memory.
    He laughed. “Oh, yes, I’m sure. How do you explain your brother’s success, if Temnikova was such a failure as a teacher?”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    “Really, Stefan,” Lucy’s father said. “Enough.”
    “He’s better than everyone else his age. That doesn’t mean he’s as good as he
can
be.” Then she remembered how the quote went: “Brain, heart, and means. ‘Without heart, you’re a machine.’ Will has
heart
. I know it hasn’t been long, but you can tell that five seconds after you meet him. And that’s what I hear when he’s working with Gus.”
    Gus said, “Yeah.”
    Lucy wouldn’t look away from her grandfather’s stare – a silent continuation of that conversation in Prague.
    “I have to say,” her mother spoke in the tone she used when she wanted the subject changed – loud, cheery, “now that it’s getting out that we took Will on, I’ve yet to hear one negative word about him. And you know what a bunch of gossips these people are.”
    Yes, we know
, Lucy thought.
    “We’ll see.” Grandpa Beck rose from the table. He had to steady himself on the back of his chair for a second, but they all knew better than to express concern or offer help.
    “Goodnight, Grandpa,” Gus said.
    Lucy watched him walk out.
    Brain, heart, means. Her grandfather had two of those. When Grandma Beck died, he lost the third. And Lucy worried that she had, too.

 
    On Monday Lucy still buzzed from the high of standing up to her grandfather.
    All of Sunday he’d acted like nothing had happened, that nothing was different. But she felt the shift. For so long she’d kept her mouth shut, believing his unspoken message: quitting had forfeited any claim she had on music.
    This isn’t allowed to matter to you any more.
    And she saw, now, that was bullshit.
    It did matter to her. Music. It had never stopped mattering.
    Imagine there is no Grandpa
, Will had said.
    Impossible. To deal with piano, she’d have to deal with Grandpa. She’d stood up to him once, and she could probably do it again. But how many more times would it take?
    She would need help, from someone who understood.
    From the back seat of her mother’s car, on the way to school, she