The tag was the size of a playing card, cut from something heavier than paper, and it was tied to the box with a piece of red-and-white bakery string, the kind that comes off a spool at Florentine's on Bleecker Street when you buy a half dozen pasticciotti and the lady behind the counter wraps the box faster than you can follow her hands. I noticed the string before I noticed anything else, because I notice things like that. It is one of the few facts about me that everyone in my family agrees on.
"Maya sees everything," my mother used to say, when she still lived with us, in a tone that could go either way. Sometimes it was a compliment. Sometimes it meant I had seen something I was not supposed to, like the overdue notice from National Grid folded in half under the fruit bowl, or the way my father's jaw went still when the phone rang after nine at night.
I turned fourteen on a Saturday in the middle of October, and the party was in our kitchen in Utica because that was the only room in the house big enough for six people to stand in at once without somebody having to sit on the stairs. We live on the east side, on a street of narrow two-family houses with porches stacked on top of each other like shelves. We rent the downstairs. Mrs. Okafor rents the upstairs, and she came down for cake that afternoon carrying a plate of chin chin wrapped in plastic wrap and a card with a ten-dollar bill inside, which she pressed into my hand while saying, "Don't tell your father, he will make you give it back," which was true. My father does not like people giving us money. He does not like it so much that he once drove back to the Price Chopper to return four dollars a cashier had given him by mistake in change, and then sat in the parking lot for a while afterward with the engine off.
So it was Mrs. Okafor, and my father, and my sister Sunniva, who everyone calls Niva except teachers and our grandmother, and Niva's friend Delphine from the coffee place where she works weekends, and me. Grandma Ardis was supposed to be there at three. It was three-twenty and she wasn't, and nobody was worried yet, because Grandma Ardis is never anywhere at the time she says. She says it is a principle. She says that a woman who arrives on time is a woman who had nothing better to do on the way.
The cake was from Florentine's too, a cassata with the green marzipan and the candied fruit on top, because I had told my father in August, when we drove past, that I had never had one, and he had remembered. That is the kind of thing my father remembers. He forgets dentist appointments and permission slips and once forgot to pick Niva up from a SAT prep session for so long that she walked home in the rain, but he remembers that you said in August, in passing, through a car window, that you had never had a cassata.
There were three presents on the table next to the cake. One was from Mrs. Okafor, which was the card. One was a flat rectangle in paper with balloons on it that I knew was from my father because he always wraps everything in the same paper, a roll he bought on clearance years ago that is still somehow not used up, and I knew from the shape it was a book. And the third was the box with the bakery string.
It was not wrapped in paper. It was a plain shoebox-sized cardboard box painted dark blue, the brush strokes still visible, like someone had done it at a kitchen table late at night and been in a hurry but also careful. The string went around it twice and tied in a bow on top, and under the bow was the tag.
I could not read the tag from where I was sitting. It was turned face down, so all I could see was the back of it, which was off-white and a little yellowed and had a pencil line along one edge, as if someone had used it as a ruler once. I remember thinking it looked old. I remember thinking that nobody I knew would buy a gift tag that already looked old, unless they were Grandma Ardis, who buys everything at estate sales and church rummage tables and once gave Niva a hand mirror for her sixteenth birthday with somebody else's initials engraved on the back. "Those are a stranger's initials," Niva had said, and Grandma had said, "Then you'll have a mystery for the rest of your life. That's worth more than a mirror."
"Who's that one from?" Delphine asked, pointing at the blue box. She was cutting the cassata, because my father had handed her the knife the way he hands people things when he wants them to feel at home, and she was doing it badly, in wedges that got thinner as she went around.
"I don't know," I said.