"It's time and a half if somebody calls out and I cover," Cassia said, "and Elio called out, and I need brakes."
"You need a personality."
"I have one. It's tired."
The truth, which she did not tell Gaby, was that she had never liked her birthday very much, and had never been able to explain why. Her parents had always made a fuss. Her mother still baked the same lopsided chocolate cake with the same seven-minute frosting every year, and her father still sang in a loud flat baritone that made waiters in restaurants stop and stare. There was a dinner tomorrow night at the house on Lakeview Avenue, the one she had grown up in, with the cake and the singing and probably a card with a check in it that she would try to refuse and would not succeed in refusing. She loved them. That was never the problem. The problem was something underneath the birthday, some low hum she had felt every October for as long as she could remember, a feeling like walking into a room and knowing someone had just left it.
She had a theory about the hum, and it was the obvious one. She had been adopted out of foster care when she was four years old. Her parents had never hidden it. There was a book, a real book with a padded blue cover, that the county had given them, and inside it were the few photographs and documents that had come with her from her first life: a hospital bracelet that said CASKEY, GIRL, a copy of a birth certificate with a different first name on it, a crayon drawing of something that might have been a horse or a dog, and six photographs of a small girl with a lot of light brown hair. She knew the book the way some people know a prayer. She had stopped looking at it when she was about fourteen, around the time she decided that wondering was a kind of weakness, and it lived now in a plastic bin on the top shelf of the closet in her old bedroom, under her high school yearbooks.
So, the hum. Birthdays were when a person was supposed to feel most like herself, and Cassia, every October, felt most like someone else's lost property. That was the theory, and it was a perfectly good one, and it did not make the hum go away.
The morning was ordinary. A man bought nine bags of ice and a single lime. A toddler in a Broncos jersey screamed at a pack of gum with the deep personal grief of someone who had been betrayed by a friend. At ten-fifteen Shay, the front-end manager, came by with a cupcake on a napkin, a pink one from the bakery case with a plastic ring stuck in the frosting, and set it on the little shelf beside the register.