"Then it won't cost you anything to pick it up."
Mrs. Okafor set her fork down very gently on her plate. Delphine looked at Niva, and Niva looked at the table, and I looked at all of them, and I understood that we could stay like this for a long time. My father is a man who can stand still. He stood still through my mother's leaving, through the lawyer's office, through the year the Bosch plant cut overtime and the year after that when they cut the second shift and he got moved to days and lost the night differential. He has a great talent for standing still while things happen to him. And my grandmother has a great talent for waiting. Between the two of them, I thought, the cassata was going to go stale.
So I got up.
I did not decide to. I want to be honest about that too. There was no moment where I thought: I will take charge here, I will be the one. My legs just did it. I pushed my chair back and it scraped on the linoleum, loud, and everybody looked at me, and I walked around the end of the table past my father, close enough that my arm brushed his sleeve, and I knelt down by the radiator.
The radiator in our kitchen is the old cast-iron kind, painted silver so many times that the ridges have gone soft. Behind it, between the last fin and the wall, there is a gap about three inches wide that goes down to the floor and is full of everything this house has ever lost: a pen cap, a hair elastic, a single dried pea, the little plastic bell from the cat's collar. It is always warm back there in October, when the landlord first turns the boiler on. I put my hand in and felt the heat on my wrist, and felt the dust, and felt the stiff twisted shape of the tag, and pulled it out.
"Maya," my father said behind me. Just my name. Not angry. Something worse than angry. Tired, and asking.
I stood up with the tag in my palm.
It was creased in a twisted line down the middle where he had wrung it, and one corner had torn where the string had pulled through the punched hole, and it had a gray smudge on it, from his fingers or from behind the radiator, I couldn't tell which. I flattened it against the counter with the side of my hand. It would not lie completely flat. It wanted to curl back up into the shape he had made it.
The front side, the side that had been face down on the table, was written in pencil, in block capital letters, the careful kind that someone makes when they are trying not to have handwriting. Not a kid's capitals. Neat and even and a little too pressed, so the pencil had dented the card.
It said: