"You don't use this piece to be sad on purpose," she said. "If you're sad, you can be sad in the other room. When you sit down, you play the line. The line is allowed to be serious. You are not allowed to drown in it for applause. There is a difference between feeling a thing and wearing it like a hat."
"Do people wear songs like hats?"
"All the time," Imani said. "You'll see it someday in a lobby. Somebody will play the first four bars of a famous thing and look up to check who's watching. That's a hat. We don't do hats in this house."
They did scales. They did a hymn Imani had arranged simply, "There Is a Balm in Gilead," not to make Aaliyah into a church exhibit but because the melody forgave a child's hands and still asked them to listen. They did a four-bar phrase Imani had made up while washing dishes, a little rising question and a falling answer, which Aaliyah named the kitchen song and Imani allowed, because naming a thing could be a way of keeping it without crushing it. Andre, Aaliyah's father, was already a phone call by then, a voice that arrived on birthdays and some Sundays and spoke kindly and did not stay. Imani did not make him a villain in the front room. She said, "He knows how to love you from a distance. Distance is a skill and also a limit. You can be glad for the love and honest about the limit. I will not make you choose a speech."
Aaliyah, at seven, understood enough to keep a drawing he had mailed — a bad, affectionate sketch of a piano with too many legs — taped inside her notebook. She did not understand enough to stop checking the door on Thursdays as if a father might be a student who had mixed up the time.
The illness announced itself as a cough that Imani called allergies until Ruth stood in the kitchen with her arms folded and said, "Allergies do not make you hold the counter like that. We are going to the doctor, and you can be mad at me in the car."
What followed was a narrowing Aaliyah later remembered in rooms more than in explanations. The clinic with the television always on a cooking show. The duplex front room with the piano gathering a thin coat of the lemon oil Imani was too tired to use and Aaliyah began to use, carefully, because maintenance had been her mother's word. The students who were told, one by one, that Thursdays were ending for a while. The mailman cried. Aaliyah did not know what to do with a crying mailman, so she offered him the bench, and he sat, and he did not play, and that was its own kind of respect.