Imani sold the piano in October, on a day when the light through the front window was the color of weak tea. She did not let Aaliyah watch the movers. Ruth took her to the library and let her check out more books than the rule allowed because the librarian understood faces. When they came back, the wall had a pale rectangle where the instrument had stood, and the floor had four round dents, and Imani was on the couch with her hands open in her lap as if she had set down something heavier than wood.
"Where did it go?" Aaliyah asked, though she knew.
"To a house that can keep it warm and tuned," Imani said. Her voice was thinner. Her eyes were not. "We needed the money for a different kind of keeping. I am not going to dress that up. A piano is a glorious object and it is still an object. You are not an object. If I have to choose between the wood and the prescriptions and the rent, I choose you, and I will be angry about the choice without reversing it."
"Did I play it too much?"
"No." Imani took her hands, the hands that had learned hello on middle C. "Listen to me. An instrument leaving a room does not take the hours with it. The hours are in you. They are inconveniently invisible. We will borrow keys where we can. Church. The center, if Anita will have you on a weekday. The little keyboard in the closet that I have been too proud to call a piano. Pride is not a pedagogy. You will keep the gray song. You will keep the kitchen phrase. You will not quit in a week because a truck came. Say it back."
"The hours are in me."
"And?"