The hymn was clean. The scales were less hated. Aaliyah could sit down at an unfamiliar piano and find its weight within a minute, the way you learn the temper of a strange dog by not grabbing.
What she could not do, yet, was believe that a public room would let her finish.
She had tried once, in the summer, at a piano in the back of a bookstore café where a sign said PLAY ME in friendly letters. She had played four bars. A barista had smiled. Then a woman had asked, kindly, whether her mother was nearby, and the question had folded Aaliyah's hands in her lap as if the keys had become someone else's lap. She had said the piano was public. The woman had said, "Of course, I just worry," which was a sentence with a soft mouth and hard furniture inside it. Aaliyah had stood up. She had felt, walking out, both cowardly and wise. Ruth, told later, had said, "Wise. You don't owe a stranger your courage on a day you didn't bring extra. Courage is a supply, not a personality. Some days you spend it. Some days you save it for the walk home."
The Ridgeline Mall on the first Saturday of October was not supposed to be the day she spent it. It was supposed to be shoes. The yellow tag. The pizza. The twenty minutes at home. But the black piano sat in the light, and her new shoes had carried her across the tile, and a woman had called her sweetheart in a voice that meant little girl, and a father had offered running around as if running were the only honest verb for a child, and something in Aaliyah that had been saving itself stood up inside her chest and asked to be spent.
She had said just wait.
She was still waiting too. Her hands were in the air. The mall's noise dipped and swelled. Lauren Whitfield shifted her weight. Marcus Bennett folded his arms. Jordan Ellis set the stack of lids down without looking at where they landed, which he would regret when they slid. Malik's pretzel had gone cold in his fingers, a small sacrifice the boy had not noticed making.
Aaliyah breathed in. The breath went all the way down, the way Miss Anita had taught by putting a hand near a student's ribs and saying, "Not in the shoulders. The shoulders are gossips. Breathe where the work is." She thought of the pencil fingering. She thought of Ruth at the pizza counter, not yet turned. She thought, very clearly, I am a child and a worker. Then she stopped thinking in sentences, because sentences were not fingers, and she let the first chord of the gray song go down into the keys at the size she meant.