Spooktober Stories: Danny Carter

Danny took paino lessons only one year. Each morning, he would practice on his mother's old piano, jabbing his fingers up and down the keys. Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti, and back down again. But he never played a song.
Danny complained the piano was out of tune. And it probably was. It was, after all, an old piano, and piano tuners are expensive and hard to come by. "We'll tune if you learn to play it," she told him. But he never played anything but scales.
She tried to justify it to herself. Someone ought to play the piano, and Danny needed something to get him away from home. He seemed afraid to cross the threshhold. He'd be a teenager soon, and dare she say it, he needed to spend time with people his own age. Even his cousin, who was feared by most of his peers (and not entirely without reason) had found a group of misfits with which to tell his morbid stories.
She thought Danny liked piano, but whatever he'd thought before, he didn't like the lessons. Once, she caught him sitting at the piano reverently. A patch of sunlight from the window spotlighted him as he rested his fingers gently on the keys. Eyes closed, he traced over them, fingers crossing over one another, gracing the keys, but never pressing on them. Silently, they played a melody only he could hear. But he must have seen her watching, because in a moment the spell was broken, and his single finger hammered on the keys do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti.
After the first month or two, she began to sing along, as if to prove she could withstand his torture, and the scales became louder and more frequent. Her husband and nephew walked through the house with hands over their ears--collateral damage of the war she played with her son. At the end of the year, she weighed her options, and her ears won out. she sold the piano and enrolled him in tennis.