"I don't quit because of a truck."
"Good." Imani pulled her close. She smelled like the clinic's soap and like the citrus detergent Ruth had started buying because the old one made Imani cough. "If you ever sit down at a piano in a place that wasn't built for you, you remember you are not asking the building for a personality. You are asking the keys for a conversation you already started. Be polite if polite is true. Don't be small to make a stranger comfortable. Those are different errands."
Aaliyah pressed her face into her mother's shoulder and felt the shoulder thinner than the sentence. She did not argue. She was eight, or nearly, and the pale rectangle on the wall had already taught her that some arguments are just grief looking for a job.
Imani died in January, early, while the duplex was so quiet Aaliyah could hear the neighbor's television through the shared wall, a game show applauding people who had guessed a price. Ruth was holding one of Imani's hands. Aaliyah was supposed to be asleep on the cot in the corner and was not. She was watching her mother's chest the way a person watches a metronome, and then the metronome stopped, and the game show kept applauding, which struck Aaliyah as a kind of rudeness the world would never apologize for.
She did not go to school that week. She stood in the pale rectangle. Ruth, who did not believe in lying to children about the shape of a loss, said, "She is gone. We are here. Both sentences get to be true even when they fight."
At the funeral the church was full of people who had been filed, in one way or another, into Imani's life: students, coworkers from the clerk's office, neighbors, a man Andre had sent in his place with flowers and an excuse that Ruth listened to without offering him a chair in the front. The church pianist played a hymn and kept going when he missed a chord. Aaliyah respected the not stopping. It was a thing her mother had taught without naming it as courage. People said Imani was an angel now. Aaliyah held Ruth's hand and did not say that she did not want an angel. She wanted the sticky D back and a voice telling her that loud was cheap.
Afterward, in Ruth's apartment — the duplex given up, the boxes stacked, the keyboard in its battered case against the dresser — Ruth sat on the edge of the bed in her black dress and let Aaliyah sit inside the circle of her arm.