"Eleven," Ruth said. "Your mother had you at twenty-six. I did that math tonight and had to sit with it. She was so young and so sure. You don't have to be sure yet. You just have to come home."
"I'll come home," Aaliyah said.
In May the center hosted a small audition for a Saturday youth piano studio across the river, a program that loaned practice time on better instruments and charged on a scale Ruth could survive if Andre's occasional envelopes continued and if the dental clinic hours held. Miss Anita did not call it a destiny. She called it a door with a form. Aaliyah prepared the minuet and the gray song and shook in the hallway beforehand so hard the folder rattled.
"If you shake, you shake," Miss Anita said. "The panel has seen shaking. They are not owed your calm. They are owed the piece. I'll be in the back like a suspicious plant. Ruth will be a more respectable plant."
The room had a grand piano, the first she had sat at up close. Its lid was propped. Its bass was a dark room under the sound. For a moment Aaliyah felt the old folding of the hands, the bookstore café, the question about whether her mother was nearby. Then she put her feet where they belonged, thought just wait to herself — not as a line for a woman in a blazer, as a instruction to her own panic — and began.
She was not the best child in the city. She knew it when she heard, through the door afterward, another student play with a speed she did not have. She was accurate, and she was musical, and she repaired a slip without drowning. The panel offered her a place in the Saturday studio, partial aid, practice hour on Thursdays if she could get there. Ruth cried in the car in the parking lot, briefly, angrily, wiping her face as if tears were a mess someone else had made. "These are not sad," she told Aaliyah, who was holding the acceptance paper like it might evaporate. "These are my eyes doing paperwork. Drive — I am not driving. I am sitting. Let me sit."
They sat. The rain on the roof was a round of applause neither of them had to bow for.