"Can I go look at the piano?"
Ruth followed her gaze. Her face did a quick inventory: public instrument, no rope, a plaque she could not read from here, children in the general area, a coffee line, her own knee, the new shoes, the old warning. "You can look. You do not bang it like a drum. You do not walk off and leave the backpack. I will get the pizza and sit where I can see you if the line isn't a pilgrimage. If somebody tells you to move, you move. We did not come here to make a scene. Scenes are expensive even when the ticket says free."
"I won't bang it."
"I know you won't." Ruth touched her shoulder. "Five minutes of looking is plenty. Then we eat, and then that keyboard at home gets its twenty minutes, funeral or no funeral. Miss Anita will ask what you did with the Saturday, and I am not telling her you stared at a mall."
Aaliyah crossed the tile. The new shoes sounded sure of themselves and she did not feel sure, which made the sound feel like a costume. Up close the piano was more scarred and more beautiful than the directory photo. Someone had stuck a small star sticker inside the fallboard and then tried to peel it off, leaving a silver scar. The keys were real under the light. She set her backpack down because looking, for her, had never been a thing she could do with her shoulders still loaded. She put one hand on the bench.
That was when Lauren Whitfield, late for a feeling she would not have called lateness, came around the planter with a coffee and a phone and a sentence already forming.
Ruth, at the pizza counter, had her back to the atrium for the length of an order. She did not see the woman stop. She did not hear the first sweetheart. She heard, faintly, a man's voice say something about kids running around, and she half-turned, and the cashier asked her a question about dipping sauce, and the half-turn became a delay that would matter and would not be anyone's fault exactly, which is how some important delays happen.