He practiced not asking. At dinner on Saturday, Imani talked about the cake and the hat and Sasha coming, and Andre passed the rice and said nothing when Denise said, "Our birthday girl needs her sleep." Leon opened his mouth and closed it. The closed mouth was a skill he had. He told himself he would speak on Sunday if it mattered, not before, so as not to ruin the feeling. He did not define matter. He assumed he would know it when it arrived, the way a man assumes he will know a fire.
In the bathroom on Sunday morning he tried the sentence once more, smaller than he wanted, and turned the tap on when he heard her in the hall. The mirror gave him a boy's face, not a speech. He dried his hands and went to rinse his bowl.
***
A little after one, Denise brought the cake out.
Leon carried it behind her because she did not trust the platter in one person's hands, and because being behind her with the cake made him look like a participant. The frosting had set in the cool of the refrigerator and then begun, very slightly, to shine in the sun. Two layers. Thick chocolate, the knife-marks smoothed with a warmed spatula, a few candy flowers Tanya had brought pressed in at the edge at the last minute. It was a large cake for a yard. It looked like a yes. Andre, seeing it come through the sliding door, felt his stomach lift in the simple animal way of a child who has been good. He went to the stack of white paper plates and took one. He held it with both hands. He did not get in front of Imani. He knew the order. The order was sister, then guests if his mother was being host, then him if there was time. He could wait inside the order. He had a speech for the moment when the order reached him, and the speech was one sentence, and the sentence was polite.
People made the noise people make for a cake. Imani bounced, and Denise said, "Don't bounce it off your head, the hat is not a helmet," and everybody laughed, and the laugh was real. Pearl sat forward. The fascinator trembled when she moved. She had her hands folded on the purse so they would not do anything she had not decided to do.
Denise set the cake in the center of the white table. The light blue cups stood around it like a small audience. She took the knife, the long one from the kitchen, and wiped it on a napkin though it was already clean. She smiled. The smile was the one from the front desk, competent and bright, the smile that kept a waiting room from becoming a complaint. In it, for a moment, she was only a mother at a party she had paid for and arranged and not ruined. The blister on her heel throbbed. She ignored it. Ignored things were her proof that she could finish.
"All right, birthday girl," she said.
Imani stepped up with her plate already out, because she had never been taught to wait with an empty one. The plate shook a little. Her face was open, delighted, unedited. Denise cut a large slice, thick, a corner piece with a candy flower and enough frosting that the plate dipped when she set the slice down. She did it with ceremony. She liked ceremony when she was the one dispensing it. "There you go, baby. Don't let it fall."
"Thank you, Mama."