The harp was a blonde Lyon & Healy, not new, not ashamed of itself, with a small chip in the column paint that the rental company had noted on the contract in case anyone tried to blame the chip on the current life. It stood beside the radiator. In winter the radiator knocked and the strings answered in a faint sympathetic shiver, which Denise called the harp clearing its throat. Nia, at six, had believed this literally and said good morning to the instrument before she said it to anyone else.
Denise was twenty-nine then, tall, with Nia's dark eyes and a laugh she used sparingly, as if she were saving it for sentences that had earned it. She worked three kinds of music and none of them paid enough. Sunday mornings she played at a church that liked her sound and grew awkward when she asked about a raise. Thursday afternoons she played in the lobby of a downtown hotel where people clapped if they noticed her and talked over her if they did not, and the manager called it ambiance, which was a word that meant they would not raise the fee. Weddings, when she could get them, were better money and worse music. She came home with rice in her shoes and a check that sometimes cleared.
At night, after Nia had brushed her teeth, Denise pulled the bench out — their bench, a kitchen chair with a cushion tied on until she saved enough for a real one — and put Nia's hands on the strings.
"Not hard," she said. "You don't win a fight with a harp. You make an agreement."
"What's the agreement?"
"You tell the truth with your fingers, and it tells the truth back. If you lie, it gets loud in the wrong way. If you're scared, it gets small. Scared is allowed. Small is not the same as scared. You can be scared and still play the size of the note."
Nia did not understand all of that at six. She understood the part about not yanking. She understood that her mother smelled like the hotel lobby's vanilla diffuser and, underneath it, like the citrus soap they both used. She understood that when Denise sang a pitch and waited, the waiting was a kind of faith.
They started with open strings, the long slow alphabet of the harp, red C, blue F, the pattern Denise tapped on Nia's wrist until the wrist remembered without the tapping. Then simple tunes. Then the discipline of looking at a page without letting the page panic her. Denise wrote fingerings in pencil so light the marks looked like thoughts the paper was having. She never let Nia watch television with the harp uncovered. "It isn't furniture," she said. "Even when we use it like a shelf because this apartment is a shoebox. The dust cover is respect. Respect is free. We can afford free."
June came on Sundays sometimes with groceries and opinions. She stood in the doorway and listened with her arms folded, not because she disliked the music but because she did not know where to put her face while it happened. "That child has your hands," she told Denise once, in the kitchen, while Nia was supposed to be asleep and was not.