"We are going to figure it out," Ruth said. Her voice was rough from songs and from not crying in front of the church more than she had decided was useful. "Not tonight. Tonight we eat what the church ladies packed and we don't make any speeches. Tomorrow or the next day, we find you keys that are not in a box. You are not going to lose the music and her. That would be two losses wearing one coat. I don't know the whole how. Not knowing the how is not the same as not starting."
Aaliyah nodded against her grandmother's side. Outside, a bus sighed at the corner. Inside, a girl who was not yet nine made an agreement with a piano that was no longer in any room she could enter: she would keep the hours. She would keep the gray song. She would not wear it like a hat. And if a building ever looked at her as if she were only a little girl daydreaming, she would try, even if her voice shook, to be both a child and a worker, because her mother had said those things could live together, and Ruth had not contradicted it, and the two of them together were the closest thing she had to a law.
Miss Anita Rowe did not own a grand piano and did not apologize for it.
She owned, through the complicated mercy of a church budget and a community center grant, two instruments: a spinet in the basement of Greater Hope, where the ceiling was low and the fellowship hall upstairs sent down the smell of coffee on meeting nights, and a better upright at the Linden Community Center, room B, which had a window onto the parking lot and a sign on the door that said PRACTICE in letters someone had printed when printers still felt official. Miss Anita was fifty-eight, with copper-brown skin and a silver braid coiled at the nape, and the posture of a woman who had spent decades telling children to sit farther forward without telling them they were in the way. She had known Imani from a Saturday teachers' circle that met, when it met, in somebody's dining room and argued about rates and fingerings with equal passion. She had come to the funeral and had not said angel. She had said, to Ruth, in the church kitchen, "If the girl wants the work, I have Wednesday evenings and a Saturday that is not this one. I am not a scholarship. I am a room and a standard."
Ruth, still in black, had said, "A room and a standard is more than a lot of people offer the living."
The first Wednesday, Aaliyah arrived with the gray backpack and the simplified prelude copied onto paper that had already been folded too many times. The church basement smelled of floor cleaner and old hymnals. The spinet had a soft pedal that barely softened and a bench that creaked in B-flat, or so Miss Anita claimed, refusing to be charmed by her own joke. She pointed at the bench.
"Sit like you mean to stay. Now play me what your mother left in your hands. Don't dress it up. I can hear dressing up. It sounds like perfume in a kitchen."