She sat down more often between pieces. She told June it was a long wedding season. She told Nia it was nothing, baby, keep your wrist soft. Then she could not finish a Thursday at the hotel without a break that made the manager look at his watch in a way Denise understood. Doctors' offices entered their life the way weather enters a house with a bad window: first a chill, then a steady leak, then buckets.
Ovarian cancer was the name they eventually said out loud in the kitchen, after Nia was in bed, and Nia heard it anyway because the walls were thin and the word was thick. She did not know what ovaries were. She knew the silence after the word, June's voice going low and furious at the universe, Denise saying, "Don't you dare fall apart where she can hear you," and June saying, "She can hear a pin drop in this place, Denise, don't insult her," and then both of them crying in the particular way of sisters who had shared a childhood bed and a hundred emergencies and still thought there would be more time.
The rental company did not pause for grief. Denise called. She explained. The woman on the phone was sorry in a script. The contract was the contract. If the account lapsed, the harp would be picked up. Denise asked for a month. They gave her two weeks. June offered to put the payment on a card that was already near its limit. Denise said no with a pride that June later described, in a different kitchen, as holy and stupid in equal measure.
"Pride doesn't tune a harp," June had snapped.
"And a debt in your name doesn't cure me," Denise answered. "If something happens, you are the one who will be left holding her. I will not leave you holding a contract too."
The men from the rental company came on a Tuesday while Nia was at school. Denise made them wait until she wiped the column with the soft cloth, slowly, the way you wipe a face. She signed the paper. She watched them angle the harp through the doorway that had always been half an inch too narrow, the same dance in reverse. When they were gone, the corner by the radiator looked larger and dirtier. Dust marked the outline of the base like a chalk body. Denise sat on the kitchen-chair bench until the light changed, and then she got up and folded the dust cover and put it in a drawer because she could not stand to see it and could not throw it away.
Nia came home and stopped in the doorway so fast her backpack struck the frame.
"Where did it go?"
Denise had prepared a sentence. It failed on contact. "It had to go back, baby. For a while."