"Ruth says the same kind of thing."
"Ruth had the harder job," Andre said. "I'm not going to pretend a visit is a rearrangement. I can come more than once a year. I can be a father who shows up on a schedule instead of a mood. If you'll have that. It's smaller than what you deserved when you were four. It's what I can actually carry."
Aaliyah looked at Ruth, who gave her the smallest nod, the one that meant your choice, I'm here either way. "I'll have a schedule," Aaliyah said. "Write it down. If you break it, say so before, not after, unless you're on fire. That's Miss Anita's rule. It works on fathers too."
He laughed, wrecked and grateful. "Deal."
He kept the next date, and missed the one after because of work, and said so before, and kept the one after that. It was not a movie repair. It was a series of buses and couches and listened-to scales. Aaliyah let it be what it was. The limit and the love sat beside each other on the folding chairs of the center lobby, and she stopped needing them to become one thing.
She was twelve when she went back to Ridgeline Mall without a plan to play.
Ruth needed a coat. The yellow-tag logic still ruled the errands. They walked in through the second entrance, past the phone cases, and the atrium opened its glass chest. The black piano was still there. A new sticker scar joined the old one. The bench had been replaced with a sturdier twin. A sign added in sterner letters reminded people not to set drinks on the lid, a rule born, Jordan could have told them, from a long war between the coffee stand and the weekend uncles.