"Dad," Niva said. Her voice was very small.
"Take it, please." He was still holding it out. His arm was perfectly steady and I remember that, how steady it was, while the rest of him was not. "I'll get Maya something else. I'll get you something else, Maya, honey, I promise, we'll go to the mall tomorrow, you can pick. Anything. Okay? Niva, take the camera."
And Niva, my sister, who had been quiet for weeks, who would not say the name of the college she wanted in case it jinxed it, who had shared a room with me for my whole life and once held my hair back in a Walmart bathroom when I threw up from a stomach bug at age seven, reached out and took the camera from my father's hands.
She held it against her chest. She did not look at me. She looked at a spot on the table about six inches to the left of my plate, and her face was doing something I had never seen it do, a kind of crumpling that stopped halfway, like a paper bag that someone had started to crush and then thought better of.
I didn't cry. I want to say that too, because I think people assume I did. I was too surprised to cry. I sat there with my hands still open in front of me in the shape of the camera and I looked at my father, and I looked at my sister, and I looked at the gap behind the radiator where the tag had gone, and I thought, very clearly, the way you think things in dreams: He knows who it's from. He read it, and he knows, and he doesn't want me to know.
That was when the front door opened.
We heard it before we saw her: the screen door's long complaining whine, the thump of the inside door that sticks in damp weather and has to be shouldered, the tap of a cane on the hall floor, and then my grandmother's voice, carrying the way it carries, the voice of a woman who taught eighth-grade English at Proctor High School for thirty-one years and never once in all that time used a microphone.
"I apologize for nothing," she announced, from the hall. "The Genesee Street bridge was down to one lane and a man in a Dodge Ram tried to explain merging to me with his hands."
She came into the kitchen doorway and stopped.
Grandma Ardis is small. People forget that, because of the voice. She is five foot one in her good shoes and she was wearing her good shoes that day, and her camel coat with the big buttons, and the scarf with the horses on it, and she had a gift bag from the Hallmark store in one hand and her cane in the other. She is my father's mother. She has his eyes, or he has hers, a gray that goes almost green in some light, and she turned them on the room and I watched her take it in the way I imagine she used to take in a classroom when she came back from the copy room and found it too quiet.