"How do you know that?" my father said.
"Because I helped you clean out that closet, Benno," she said. "The week she left. You remember. You threw out her umbrellas and kept her winter boots because you said the girls might grow into them."
My father put a hand over his eyes.
"Then who," I said. I looked down at the block capitals again. FOR MAYA, WHO LOOKS. "If Mom didn't send it, and you didn't, then where has it been? If it was in the closet, why didn't I ever see it?"
And that was the question, it turned out. That was the one that broke it open. Because nobody in the room answered me, and in the silence I watched my father lower his hand from his eyes and look, not at me, not at his mother, but at Niva. And Niva looked back at him. And I saw something pass between them that I was not part of, the way you see two people in a car ahead of you at a red light having an argument you can't hear.
"Okay," said Mrs. Okafor, suddenly, and stood up. She is a big woman and she stands up in sections, first her hands on the table, then her back, then all of her. "Delphine, my dear. Come upstairs with me. I have a very large pot of jollof rice that is too much for one person and I need a young woman's opinion on whether it has enough pepper."
"I—sure," said Delphine, who had clearly been waiting her whole life for someone to say exactly that, and stood up so fast she knocked her knee on the table leg. She looked at Niva. "Text me?"
Niva nodded without looking up.
Mrs. Okafor stopped on her way past me and put her hand on the top of my head, lightly, the way you test whether bread has risen. "Happy birthday, little hawk," she said, which is a thing she has called me since I was eight and told her I could tell the difference between the crows and the ravens on the telephone wire. Then she and Delphine went out through the hall, and we heard the front door and the screen door, and their feet on the outside stairs going up, and then Mrs. Okafor's door overhead, and then the ceiling creaking as she crossed to her kitchen, which is directly over ours. She would be able to hear us if we shouted. I think everyone in the room knew that. Nobody shouted.
Grandma Ardis finally took her coat off. She hung it on the back of the chair Mrs. Okafor had left and sat down in it, and propped her cane against the table, and folded her hands.