The cake. The candles still smoking a little. Mrs. Okafor with her fork in the air. Delphine with her mouth open. Me with my empty hands. Niva holding the camera to her chest like a baby she had been handed by a stranger on a bus. My father standing between us.
Her eyes went to the camera. They stayed there for a long second. Something moved across her face, quick, and was gone.
Then they went to my father. And then they went, I swear to this, directly to the gap behind the radiator, as if she had been in the room the whole time and seen exactly where it fell.
She set the Hallmark bag down on the counter by the door. She did not take her coat off.
"Benno," she said. She is the only person alive who calls my father by his full name, the one on his birth certificate, the one his own father picked. Everyone else calls him Ben. "Pick up that tag."
My father did not move.
I have thought a lot about why. At the time I thought it was stubbornness, the way a dog plants its feet at the vet's door. Later I understood it was something closer to the opposite. He did not move because if he moved at all he did not know which way he would go, toward the radiator or out the back door into the yard, and so he stayed exactly where he was, with his hands empty at his sides and the gray toner shadows in the creases of his knuckles.
"Ma," he said. "Not today."
"Today is the day it is," said my grandmother. "I didn't pick it. Pick up the tag."
"It's garbage. It's nothing. It's a piece of—"