Sunday at Greater Hope, the basement spinet heard about Saturday before Miss Anita did, because Aaliyah warmed her hands on a scale while Ruth spoke to the pastor about a bulletin typo and, incidentally, about a mall. Miss Anita arrived with her coat still on and her eyebrows already in a position of inquiry.
"I hear you gave a free concert between a pretzel stand and a fountain," she said. "Play me exactly what you played. If you embellished it in the retelling, the piano will snitch."
Aaliyah played it exactly. The spinet made the gray song browner, less bright than the mall upright, more like the November coat. The hymn sat down. The kitchen phrase found itself twice in a row. Miss Anita listened with her arms folded and her weight on one hip, the stance she used when she was guarding herself against feeling too much in front of a student.
"The third beat behaved," she said. "Bar twelve behaved. You did not turn the hymn into a wave machine. I am satisfied with the work." She took her coat off at last, which meant the lesson could begin, which meant the praise was over and also real. "I am less satisfied with the part where strangers got to grade you. That is not your fault. It is a fact. This week we will work the second page so that if a room ever grabs you again, you have more road. Not for them. For you. If a video exists, you will not watch it more than once, and not alone. Watching yourself is a way to become your own hat. Ruth agrees with me. We have unionized."
"I haven't watched anything."
"Keep the streak." Miss Anita set the copied page on the rack. "And Aaliyah. You were allowed to be proud in that room for one minute. Pride is a spice. It is not the meal. We are back to the meal. Measure seventeen. It has been waiting for you, mall or no mall."
They worked measure seventeen until the church upstairs began to send down the sound of chairs. Aaliyah's shoulders burned in the good way. When she packed the folder, Miss Anita said, quieter, "Your mother would have hated the woman's sentence and loved your volume. Volume not as in loud. Volume as in size. You played the size of the truth you had. That is the assignment for the rest of the year. The rest of your life, if you can stand the repetition. I will be here to nag you either way."