"Leaks can be patched," Imani would say. "A child who thinks music is only for people with recitals on the east side is a harder repair."
At night, after the students went home and the dishes were done, she pulled Aaliyah onto the bench beside her. Not for long. Long enough. She taught the names of the keys as if they were neighbors. She taught the difference between soft and timid. She taught a left hand that could walk without showing off, and a right hand that had to tell the truth even when the truth was simple.
"Anybody can make a loud beginning," she said one night when Aaliyah was six and proud of a run that had gone faster than the metronome. "Loud is cheap. The expensive part is the note you meant, at the size you meant, when nobody is clapping yet. If you only play for the clap, you'll start lying by measure eight. Pianos can hear a lie. They don't tattle. They just sound worse, and then you blame the piano, and then you're the kind of musician I don't want you to be."
"What kind do you want me to be?"
"The kind who can be a child and a worker at the same time," Imani said. "You get to laugh. You get to be ten when you're ten. You also get to respect the hours. Both. If somebody tells you those things can't live in one girl, that somebody is protecting a small idea, not you."
Aaliyah stored the sentence without knowing she would need it under a glass ceiling. She stored a great many sentences that way. Children who lose a parent early often discover, too late for comfort and just in time for use, that they have been carrying a library they did not catalog.
The gray song entered the house when Aaliyah was seven. It was not called that on any page. On the page it was Chopin's Prelude in E minor, a piece Imani loved and would not let beginners bang through for mood. She called it gray because the feeling of it, she said, was the color of a good coat in November, not a storm, not a postcard. She wrote the fingering in pencil above Aaliyah's simplified opening — not the whole prelude, not yet, the first page and the road into the second — and she made a rule.