"Your mama would have told you the second page still needs work," she said, eyes closed, so the sentence could be tender without being a scene. "She also would have been unbearable in that atrium. In a good way. She would have stared that blazer down to ash and then bought the boy a pretzel for being gentle. I am not her. I got there late and I did what I could."
"You got there," Aaliyah said. "That was the part I needed."
Ruth's hand patted the backpack once. "All right then. Both can be true."
At home the keyboard waited on the folding table, humble and slightly dusty. Aaliyah did her twenty minutes. The gray song felt both easier and more serious, as if it had been outside and come back with weather on it. She did not rush the third beat. Ruth listened from the kitchen and did not say again, because she did not need to. When the timer beeped, Aaliyah played the kitchen phrase once more, softly, for nobody, and put the headphones straight.
That night she dreamed not of the pale rectangle but of the mall's glass ceiling, and of her hands hovering, and of the note still inside them. In the dream she was not afraid of releasing it. She woke in the dark and lay listening to the apartment's small sounds, the refrigerator, a far bus, Ruth's radio murmur from the next room where Ruth had fallen asleep with the sermon on low. Aaliyah put a hand on her own ribs.
"I did it," she whispered, not as a boast, as a report to a person who was not there and to a person in the next room who was. "I waited, and then I didn't only wait."
The refrigerator answered with a click. It was enough of a congregation.