Measure seventeen surrendered in November, not gracefully, but honestly. The second page became a road with potholes instead of a wall. Aaliyah still practiced at the folding table with headphones, and once a week she stayed after her lesson to try the center's upright with the parking-lot window dark at five o'clock. Miss Anita sometimes sat in the corner grading theory with a red pen and sometimes left her alone, which was a different kind of trust. "Don't light the building on fire," she would say. "Don't stop before the phrase is finished just because nobody is in the chair. Empty rooms are part of the job. They tell you whether you were playing for the chair."
In December the community center put a piano in the lobby for a fundraiser week, and Miss Anita asked Aaliyah whether she wanted to play twelve minutes in the middle of a Saturday, on purpose this time, with a program the size of an index card. Aaliyah said yes, then no, then yes again in the same conversation. Ruth said, "That's a door, not a stampede. We'll take the door."
The lobby was not the mall. It smelled like copy paper and winter coats. The audience was parents and students and one city council aide who stayed for the wrong piece and left during the right one. Aaliyah played the full two pages. She missed a fingering in the new section, repaired it without a face, and finished. The applause was the fellowship-hall kind, close and human. In the third row, unexpected as a wrong turn that becomes a street, sat Marcus Bennett and Malik.
They had not come to make a reunion. Malik had seen the center's flyer on a library board and had asked, and Marcus, who was trying to check whether his rules still fit, had looked up the time and brought his son on the bus. Afterward Malik stood in front of Aaliyah with a program folded into a small square and said, "I started lessons. Not with your teacher. With a man at the Y who smells like mints. I can do a song with one hand. It is not a movie. Dad doesn't laugh."
"That's a good dad correction," Aaliyah said.
Marcus cleared his throat. "He practices. I say again, which I stole from a sentence I heard a grandmother give a food court. I hope that's not theft."
"It's borrowing," Ruth said, appearing with Aaliyah's coat. "Borrowing is allowed if the child gets it back as a habit. I'm Ruth. We met over a mistake. This is nicer."