Aaliyah played the opening of the gray song. Her right hand remembered. Her left hand, nervous, got loud. She corrected it. She did not stop. When she reached the end of the page she knew, she lifted her hands and waited for the verdict the way you wait for a weather report.
Miss Anita was quiet long enough for the creak in the bench to seem like a comment. Then she said, "All right. You have a line. You also have a habit of rushing the third beat when you get afraid of the silence after it. We will embarrass that habit until it leaves. Wednesdays. If you miss, you tell me before, not after, unless you are actually on fire. You will learn scales even when they bore you, because boredom is not an emergency. You will learn the hymn clean. You will not perform your grief at me. I already went to the funeral. I am here for the fingers."
"I don't have much money."
"Your grandmother and I will speak about what can be paid, and it will not be nothing, because nothing teaches the wrong lesson, and it will not be a punishment either. If a week is thin, you say thin. You don't disappear." Miss Anita's mouth moved, not quite a smile. "Your mother used to argue with me about tempo and then bring me pound cake as if cake were a footnote. I miss the argument. I will accept you instead. That is not the same as accepting less."
So the months arranged themselves around borrowed keys.
Aaliyah was eight, then nine, then ten. She learned the walk from school to the center well enough to do it in the rain without wrecking the copied music, which she kept in a plastic folder Ruth had labeled in marker: AALIYAH — DO NOT BEND, as if the warning applied to the girl as well as the paper. At home she practiced on a sixty-one-key keyboard balanced on a folding table, headphones on when the neighbor worked nights, the soft keys sinking a little too easily so that she had to imagine the resistance of a real action the way a runner imagines a hill. The high keys didn't exist. She learned to hear them anyway. Ruth timed twenty minutes on the microwave when homework was done, then sometimes allowed ten more if the phrase was close and the apartment wasn't already tired.
"Again," Ruth would say from the kitchen, not because she could name the mistake but because she could hear when Aaliyah stopped before the honest end. "Don't cheat the last bar just because the chicken is ready. The chicken will wait. The bar will not."