Nobody said anything. Upstairs, Mrs. Okafor's footsteps crossed the ceiling and stopped and crossed back.
"So I wanted it to be from nobody," Niva said. "I didn't want you to owe me. I didn't want it to be, like, a Niva gift, where you had to say thank you every time you used it. I just wanted it to be yours. Like it fell out of the sky."
"And the card," said my father. He was looking at the tag in my hand. "Where did you get the card?"
Niva glanced at our grandmother.
My grandmother sat up straighter in her chair.
"I gave it to her," she said.
My father turned his head slowly.
"I drove you to Pinkney's that day, Benno," she said. "You remember. Your car wouldn't start, that was half the reason you were there. And you were standing at the counter emptying the case so he could look at the camera, and you took the card out of the lens cap pocket and you looked at it, and you put it on the counter next to your keys, like it was a receipt. And you signed the slip and took the money and you walked out and left it there." She lifted her chin. "So I picked it up. I wasn't going to let a man sell his own valentine for a hundred and forty dollars and then leave it on a pawnbroker's counter for the next person to throw away."
"You kept it," my father said. "All this time."
"In my Bible. In Ruth. Seemed appropriate. Whither thou goest." She spread her hands. "And this summer your daughter came to my apartment and sat on my sofa and asked me if I knew what had happened to her mother's camera, because she'd found it on Bleecker Street and her father had told her it was lost in a basement that we both know he does not have the key to. And I am too old to lie to a girl on my own sofa, Benno. So I told her. And I gave her the card. And I said, if you're going to give it to your sister, give it with this. Because that camera has a history, and the history belongs with it."