Then the hugging happened. I'm not going to describe it much. It was the four of us at the kitchen table in a sort of collapsed pile, and Grandma Ardis's elbow was in my ear, and Niva was crying into my shoulder and saying sorry over and over in a voice that made her sound about six, and my father had one arm around each of us and his chin on the top of my head, and he smelled like the print shop, toner and hot paper, the way he always smells. Above us Mrs. Okafor's footsteps crossed the ceiling, stopped right over the table, and stayed there for a while, and I am fairly sure she was standing in her kitchen with her hand on her heart. She has never said so. She did bring down the jollof rice later, though, in a pot the size of a car tire, and wouldn't take the pot back for a week.
My grandmother's present, it turned out, was a photo album. An empty one, with black pages and the little paper corners you lick to stick the pictures in, and on the first page, in her sharp schoolteacher print, she had written: For whatever she sees. A.S. She had bought it, she admitted, three weeks earlier, when Niva told her what the birthday present was going to be.
"You were in on it the whole time," I said.
"I was in on the camera," she said. "I wasn't in on him." She jerked her chin at my father. "Nobody's ever been in on him. Not even him."
Then she ate two slices of the cassata, which Delphine had cut so thin that two slices were about one slice, and declared it too sweet and the best she'd had since nineteen eighty-four.
My father taught us to load the film at the kitchen table, with the cake pushed to one side and the overhead light on. The roll was in the lid of the blue box, like the tag said, taped to the inside of the cardboard: a yellow-and-black canister of Kodak Gold 200, twenty-four exposures. Niva had bought it from Mr. Pinkney too. He had thrown it in free.
I watched my father's hands. That was the thing I noticed, that afternoon, more than anything he said. When he picked up the camera his hands changed. I don't know how else to put it. They stopped being the hands that sign report cards and push reading glasses up and hold the grocery list in his phone, and they became somebody else's hands, quick and sure and a little bit delighted, the way Mrs. Okafor's hands are when she braids hair. He popped the back open with a flick of the rewind knob that he didn't even look at. He showed us how to seat the canister, how to pull the leader across to the take-up spool and thread it into the slot, how to wind it once with the lever and watch the rewind knob turn to make sure it caught.
"If the knob doesn't turn, it didn't catch," he said, "and you'll shoot a whole roll of nothing and not know until you get it back. Your mother did that at Niagara Falls. Twenty-four pictures of Niagara Falls that never existed."
"She did?" said Niva.
"She cried in the car all the way to Rochester," he said. "And then she said it was fine, because she'd seen it, and the pictures were just for proving it to other people, and she didn't need to prove anything to anybody. And then she cried some more." He closed the back of the camera with a click. "She was a lot of things. She was never boring."