Surrender 01 - Surrender

wish I had an answer.”
    It was the truth. What, indeed, could she do? She’d grown up on a ranch the size of a small kingdom, and sharing hostessing duties with her sisters at their father’s formal dinner parties had been a great learning experience if you were into folding linen napkins into swans, or knowing how to seat people so they wouldn’t end up glaring at each other, or being able to carry on polite chitchat in four different languages. She could talk about places in Europe, Asia and South America, thanks to visits she and her sisters had paid to the general.
    Because of her otherwise useless degree, she could also write research papers on esoteric topics so deadly, you’d sooner eat nails than read them, or, conversely, speed read an endless document and boil it down to two cogent paragraphs. She’d long ago developed her own kind of shorthand, but then, that was what being a straight-A student did for you.
    Perhaps that was the reason making a buck playing the piano had seemed, at the very least, interesting.
    “You play?” the piano player had asked.
    Emily had nodded. “Eight years of lessons. You know how that goes. But I’m not a pro like you.”
    “A pro? Me? I’m an actor. Well, I’m trying to be an actor. I pick up a few bucks playing piano on weekends. Want to play a little?”
    He’d segued into “Malaguena . ” Emily had grinned, put her hands on the keys and joined in.
    It turned out that she was no better and no worse than he was.
    “Is it hard to get jobs like this?” she’d asked.
    The wannabe actor had scribbled a name and number on a scrap of paper. Two days later, Emily had met with his agent. Max Pergozin of Pergozin, Pergozin and Pergozin. She’d auditioned on a piano in Max’s office and he’d given her what he called a fake book, a collection of sheet music that contained the melody lines, chords and lyrics of what looked like every song ever written.
    “Keep this with you,” he’d said. “You can fake your way through any tune.”
    The next weekend she’d played her first gig.
    She’d earned a pittance. Well, union scale but one job added up to a pittance when there was rent to pay, groceries to buy, bills, bills and more bills. Still, it was better than nothing and other gigs had followed, all of them forgettable, none of them steady. When she’d complained, Max had sighed and explained that she was never going to get what he referred to as callbacks until she learned to judge the mood and needs of her audience.
    “You play a ladies lunch, they want Cole Porter. You play a wedding rehearsal, they want Elton John. You play an upscale singles hangout, they want Adele.”
    It might have been good advice, but how would Emily have known? Max had yet to book her into a lunch or a wedding rehearsal or an upscale anything.
    She’d told him that, at which point he’d sighed with the resignation of a physics professor explaining addition and subtraction to a five-year-old.
    “You got to work your way up, Miss Madison. Right now, the kind of people you play for—they want lively stuff. Big chords. Big runs. Schmaltz. Know what I mean?”
    Schmaltz was not a word in Emily’s North Texas vocabulary.
    “No.”
    “Think Liberace.”
    “Who?”
    Max had rolled his eyes. “Play loud. Play fast. Play big. Dramatic. You get my drift?”
    Emily got his drift. And she schmaltzed.
    She tossed aside the formal rules a childhood’s worth of piano lessons had taught her, added chords, trills and frills, created arpeggios that should not have existed. She never took her foot off the right pedal.
    It had worked.
    Or, at least, it had led to the Tune-In.
    “You’ll get lots of experience playing there,” Max had assured her.
    One look and she’d almost turned around and walked out.
    Then she’d reminded herself that playing piano was just a detour on her way to... well, on her way. So she’d taken a deep breath—a big mistake, considering the smell of the place—and told herself that the Tune-In had character.
    Right.
    Sighing, Emily slid from “Hello, Dolly” to “My Way . ” Definitely two huge, in-demand current hits, she thought with a mental roll of her eyes.
    Why Gus, the owner, wanted somebody to play piano was beyond her.
    “A little class,” Max had said when she’d expressed surprise. “He keeps hoping the neighborhood’s gonna be discovered and he wants to be ready when it is.”
    Gus was somewhere in his late fifties. Perhaps longevity ran