Aaliyah sat down in the new shoes and lifted her hands and said just wait, and the note stayed inside her wrists, and the mall held its breath without knowing it was a kind of breath.
Imani Brooks had owned, at the highest point of her ordinary luck, an upright piano with a sticky D and a bench that wobbled unless you put a folded church bulletin under the short leg.
The piano lived in the front room of a rented duplex on Carver Street, against the wall that shared its secrets with the neighbor's television. It was dark wood, not black, with a finish that had gone cloudy where hands and years had polished the same path above the keys. Imani had bought it from a widow who was moving to her daughter's house and cried when the movers tilted it through the door, not because the price was unfair but because a house without a piano had suddenly become the house she was going to. Imani, twenty-eight then, had cried too, in the truck, and then she had wiped her face and said to the friend who was driving, "If I start keeping other people's grief in the bench, there won't be room for the music." The friend had said that was cold. Imani had said it was maintenance.
Aaliyah was four the year the piano arrived. She remembered the day mostly as a smell of lemon oil and a sound the instrument made by itself when the truck's ramp thunked, a low sympathetic hum, as if the piano were clearing its throat after a long ride. Imani had put Aaliyah's hands on the keys that evening and said, "Gentle. You're saying hello, not knocking."
"Hello," Aaliyah had said, and pressed middle C too hard anyway.
"That's a shout," Imani said, and laughed, the laugh she used when the correction could carry affection without losing its shape. "Try again like you're waking it up, not scaring it."
Imani was tall in Aaliyah's memory even after Aaliyah learned, from photographs, that her mother had been five foot six and not a tower. She had Aaliyah's bright eyes and a mouth that went serious when she listened. She worked days at the county clerk's office, filing the paper trails of marriages and businesses and the small legal weather of other lives, and she took piano students on Thursday evenings and Saturday mornings in the front room. The students were children with better and worse attention spans, and one retired mailman who wanted to play "Amazing Grace" at his daughter's wedding and was willing to be bad at it in public if he could be less bad by June. Imani charged what the neighborhood could pay and a little less than she needed. She called the difference an investment and Ruth, already a frequent visitor with casseroles and opinions, called it a leak.