"You knew I'd see it," my father said.
"I hoped you would." She did not look away from him. "I hoped you'd see it and you'd finally say something. To them. I didn't know you'd tear it up and stuff it behind the radiator like a little boy hiding a report card." She paused. "I should have. You did the exact same thing with your report cards. I found them behind the radiator in the house on Kemble Street every June."
My father laughed. It came out of him like something breaking, a single bark, and then he put his face in his hands again and his shoulders moved and I realized he was crying, actually crying, without any sound, at the kitchen table on my birthday with the candles still stuck in the cassata.
I had never seen my father cry. Not when Mom left. Not at Grandpa's funeral, where he stood at the front and read a poem about a fishing boat in a perfectly steady voice and then went out to the parking lot and sat in the car for twenty minutes, alone, while we waited in the funeral home lobby next to a fern. I knew he must cry sometimes. I had heard the shower running for forty-five minutes too. But I had never seen it, and I didn't know what to do with my hands.
Grandma Ardis did not get up. She just reached across the corner of the table and put her hand flat on his back, between his shoulder blades, and left it there.
"I'm sorry," my father said, into his hands. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Maya. Happy birthday. I'm sorry."
"Why did you give it to Niva?" I said.
I didn't say it to be cruel. I want to be clear. I just needed to know. It was the last missing letter at the beginning of the line.
He lifted his head. His face was wet and blotched and he wiped it with the heel of his hand, the gray of the toner showing in the creases even through the wet.
"Because I thought your mother sent it," he said. "I read that front side, those capital letters, I didn't know whose they were. And then I turned it over and saw my own writing, and I thought, she knows. She found out I sold it, somehow, and she bought it back, and she sent it to you on your birthday with my own card on it so that you'd open it in front of everybody and know what I did." He breathed out. "I thought it was a message. To me. And I couldn't—I didn't want it to be in your hands, Maya. I didn't want you holding it and looking at me. You look at things. You'd have looked at me, holding that, and you'd have known."