"You worked all night."
"And you are eleven and walking into a building full of people with expensive hobbies," June said. "Wake me."
Nia stood. The skirt was the good one, the one from the church clothing closet that almost fit, hemmed by June with stitches that would hold through a hurricane and possibly through judgment. The flats pinched at the left heel where a seam had started to turn. She had decided the pinch was useful. It would keep her awake.
At the door June hugged her, brief and hard, the way people hug when they are afraid that a longer hug will turn into a conversation neither of them can afford before a bus. "I love you," she said, into Nia's hair. "Go make a sound."
The stairwell took Nia down into the street. The city was already in its Saturday voice: a bus sighing at the corner, a man pulling a gate up over a nail salon, a radio somewhere playing a song with too much bass for the hour. The sky over the roofs was a clean cold blue. Nia walked to the stop with the bag against her ribs and the banana knocking her elbow like a small, ridiculous drum.
She did not tell herself she would be fine. June hated empty sentences, and some of that hatred had rubbed off. She told herself the things that were true. She knew the piece. She knew the second piece if they asked. She knew where middle C lived under her hands even when there was no harp in the room, because there had been years when there was no harp in the room and the music had to live somewhere or die. She knew Mr. Carter's name from the email that said what time to arrive and which door to use. She did not know that he had pulled a letter out of a file cabinet on Thursday night and sat with it until the janitor's cart squeaked past his office. She did not know that a woman in an ivory blazer was, at that same moment, across the river, telling her daughter to pack rosin and not to slouch.
The bus came. Nia climbed on, showed her pass, and sat where she could see the window and not the faces. The city unrolled. Brick, then wider streets, then the long pale plaza and the glass-and-stone face of the Meridian, which looked, from the bus, like a place that had never heard of a microwave clock blinking the wrong hour.
She got off one stop early and walked the last blocks so her legs would remember they belonged to her.
Denise Cole had owned, at the highest point of her luck, a rented harp and the corner of a living room.