The banner would not hang straight.
Denise Harper stood on the kitchen chair she had dragged onto the grass, one sandal off because the vinyl strap had rubbed a blister on the drive back from the store, and she pinched the twine until the cardboard letters faced the fence instead of the sky. HAPPY BIRTHDAY. The letters were red with a gold shadow, the kind the drugstore sold in a sleeve. She had bought the sleeve on Thursday, which was Andre's actual birthday, and she had told herself that buying it on his day counted as remembering. The second line she had written herself in block marker on a strip of poster board, because the sleeve came with the words and not with anybody's child. IMANI, she had written, and then, because the board ran out before a second name could have fit without looking crowded, a star. She had meant, on some earlier morning in July, to write both names. The marker had bled through. She had told Leon there wasn't room. Leon had said they could tape on a second strip. She had said the fence already looked busy.
The balloons were tied to the wooden slats in clusters of three, blue and pink and a yellow one that had already gone soft at the knot. The fence was the landlord's fence, grayed by two summers, one board near the gate replaced with newer pine that didn't match. Denise had hosed the pollen off it at seven. Now it was a little past ten, and the grass smelled like water and the sweet chemical of the ribbons. A white plastic folding table stood in the middle of the yard with its legs locked, a slight bow in the middle where the cake would go. She had borrowed the table from Carol Odell next door and promised to bring it back before dark, which was the kind of promise she kept, because Carol noticed when a thing came back with a scratch and also when it didn't come back at all.
Inside, the house made the sound it made when Imani was happy. A drawer. A laugh that rose and broke. The tap of plastic heels Imani was not supposed to wear until the guests came. Andre was quieter. He was always quieter on mornings that had already chosen a center, and Denise would have said that was his nature if anyone had asked, and no one had asked in a voice that waited for the answer. People asked whether Imani was excited. People asked what Imani wanted. People looked at Andre and said he was getting tall, as if height were a subject that could be put down again without anyone having to pick up anything else.
Denise stepped off the chair and looked at the yard the way she looked at the front desk of the dental office before the first patient: edges, smudges, anything that could be held against her later. The paper plates were white, stacked, a little wind lifting the top one and setting it back down as if the yard were practicing. The cups were light blue, the cheap ones that went soft if you held a cold drink too long. She had bought two packs because last year they ran out. She wanted the afternoon to look like a picture a person could tape to a refrigerator without having to explain the edges.
She went in through the sliding door. The kitchen still smelled like the chocolate she had spread at six-thirty, thick and almost black, canned frosting beaten with a little butter so it would look like more than it was. The cake was two layers from a box, stacked, not quite level. She had covered the lean the way her mother had taught her to cover a lean, generously and without announcing the lesson. It sat on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator, too tall, so the light touched the top of it and not the milk.
"Mama, the zipper's eating me," Imani called.
"I'm coming."
Andre was at the table with a bowl he had already rinsed. He had eaten cereal standing up and washed the bowl because a washed bowl was a way of not being in the room and still having been fed. He wore the plain blue pocket T-shirt Leon had bought him in August for school, a single pocket over the heart and no picture on it. His hair was cut close from last Sunday. He had put on clean shorts without being told. His sneakers were by the door, lined up parallel, which was a thing he did when he wanted a day to agree with him.
"You eat?" Denise said.