"They look like shoes that have given up on being exciting."
"Exciting is how you twist an ankle. Walk again."
Aaliyah walked again. The shoes held her. She nodded. Ruth paid with a careful card and a coupon she had cut from a mailer, and the clerk put the old sneakers in the box without being asked, which Ruth appreciated with a thank-you that had weight. Aaliyah wore the new ones out of the store. They made a different sound on the tile, cleaner, a little shy.
"Food court," Ruth said. "You were a person. One thing. Not a large thing. We are not funding the beverage industry today."
They rode the short escalator up. At the top, the atrium opened, and Aaliyah saw the piano before she saw the menu boards.
It sat in the wash of glass light, black and unbothered, near the coffee stand and a row of benches. A little girl in a pink coat banged two keys with her palm, laughed at the noise, and was pulled away by a father who said, "Okay, that's enough, we're not a concert." The phrase snagged in Aaliyah's ear. The piano did not seem insulted. Pianos, she had learned, survived insults better than people did, and also remembered hands better than they remembered words.
Ruth was reading the food-court prices with the expression she used for parking tickets. "Orange chicken is a robbery. Pizza is a smaller robbery. You want the pizza."