Out of the Box by Michelle Mulder Read Free Book Online Page A

and her husband Frank live in a new condo near Chinatown. Louise beckons us in with a big smile and introduces us to Frank, who looks familiar, though I don’t know where I’d have met him before. He’s short, round, balding, and looks happy to see us.
    Their place is incredible. The floors are polished concrete, and the high ceilings are covered in big pipes painted bright orange, red and yellow. A canoe sits in the middle of their living room. “No other space for it,” Louise says when she notices me staring.
    The usual living-room furniture is squeezed tight around the canoe, and a potter’s wheel stands off to one side, leaving very little room to walk. The far wall is full of books—and I mean full : floor to ceiling, with a ladder that’s two stories tall to reach the top ones. What strikes me most, though, is an enormous poster of a couple dancing, the man in a tuxedo, and the woman in a bright red dress with heels high enough to make walking impossible for most people. I wonder if Frank and Louise were once mad dancing fiends, or if the poster’s here because the colors match the decor.
    â€œTango,” Frank says, coming up beside me.
    â€œI know.” I ask if he dances and immediately feel my face flush. I can’t imagine him and Louise ever looking as glamorous as the dancers in the poster. Maybe he’ll think I’m mocking him.
    â€œUsed to dance,” Frank says. “The music itself has always been more my thing though.”
    He smiles, and suddenly I know who he is: the bandoneón player at the tango festival Alison took me to last year. I turn to Jeanette, and she’s grinning at me. So are Louise and Frank.
    â€œI suspect you two will have a lot to talk about,” my aunt says. “This is the fellow who was going to teach Alison to play the bandoneón.”
    In three days, Jeanette has given me not only the instrument of my dreams but someone to teach me to play it as well. I stand there in stunned silence for a second or two before Louise claps her hands together.
    â€œFirst we eat,” she says. “I’ve just made a strawberry pie that we can’t possibly finish ourselves.”
    We sit down around the canoe and eat pie and ice cream while Frank tells me about growing up playing accordion in Germany and later studying music in Paris.
    â€œDo you play Edith Piaf ’s stuff?” I ask, my dessert forgotten, the ice cream melting in front of me.
    â€œOf course. What decent accordion player doesn’t play Piaf?” He gets up, goes to a kitchen cupboard, pulls out an accordion and starts to play.
    I lean back into the couch and close my eyes, drifting with the strong, sad tones, hearing Piaf ’s mournful voice in my head. This is way better than my iPod.
    â€œYou keep playing like that,” Jeanette says, “and this kid’ll never finish her dessert.”
    My pie is now a soupy mess on the plate, but I don’t care. I have a hundred questions bubbling up inside me. I don’t know where to start, so I begin with the most important. “Can you teach me to play the bandoneón?”
    I ask before I think about having no money of my own to pay him, before I remember that my parents won’t want a noisy accordion-like instrument in the house and that I won’t have time to practice come September. Right now, none of that seems important.
    â€œI was hoping you’d ask,” Frank says. “Jeanette tells me you’re now the proud owner of a fine instrument. So we’ll make a trade. A few lessons this summer for all those stamps you brought over, which will give me many happy hours. Deal?”
    I sneak a glance at Jeanette. She nods. I wonder whether she’s already made arrangements to pay him. She does things like that: discovering something I’d like and helping me get it. She doesn’t care if it’s a practical skill. She does it just to see me smile.
    I