"Okay is not a promise."
"I promise."
She smiled then, quick, and the smile had a worry under it that she folded as neatly as the shirt. She was proud in a way that made her careful. Pride, in their life, had often been treated by other people as a down payment on a debt. She refused the debt and kept the pride.
They drove because the bus would have delivered them either early enough to haunt the sidewalk or late enough to run, and she did not want him running. The car was a gray sedan with a temperamental lock on the back door and a crack in the lower corner of the windshield that had not grown in a year, a fact Denise regarded as a treaty. Elijah held the music on his lap though he did not open it. Opening it in the car made the notes jump. He watched the city assemble: the car wash, the boarded storefront with the mural of a trumpet, the hospital where she worked rising like a pale argument, then the river, then the streets that got quieter as the trees got older. Whitaker sat on a rise in a neighborhood of stone houses and brass plaques. The school itself had been a women's college a hundred years ago and still carried itself like a place that expected to be photographed. A banner over the doors said SCHOLARSHIP OPEN HOUSE in letters that did not have to shout.
The circle was full. A man in a vest directed traffic with the weary authority of a person who had not been hired for traffic. Denise idled, tried the circle twice, and made a sound in her throat.
"Garage," she said. "You go in. You stand by that piano under the stairs, the one in the pictures, and you stay there. Card in your hand. I will not be long. If they call you before I get upstairs, you go with Ms. Reynolds. You do not wait on me to begin your life."
"You'll be there."
"I'll be there. And if I'm one minute behind a staircase, you still belong in the room. You hear me?"