Imani held still for almost four seconds.
The blue party hat was on the dresser, elastic dangling. There had been two hats in the package. Denise had dropped one behind the dresser yesterday while she was hunting batteries, and she had not gotten on her knees to fish it out, because one hat looked like a decision and two hats looked like a discussion she did not have the afternoon for. She fitted the hat over Imani's hair and tightened the string. Imani turned to the mirror and beamed at herself with a seriousness that was almost professional. She had been stood in front of cameras often enough to know which shoulder came forward.
Andre stayed in the doorway. He had a way of occupying a frame so he could be sent out of a room he had not quite entered. He watched the hat. He did not ask for the other one. Asking for a hat was not the sentence he had practiced, and he understood, without anyone having taught it as a rule, that a boy only got so many asks in a day before the asks started being called something else.
"You need something?" Denise said.
"No."
"Then go put the cups on the table. Open end down, so they don't fill up with whatever's blowing around."
He went. The sliding door thudded the way it always did, not quite on its track. Imani spun, and the dress rose and settled, and Denise laughed in spite of the blister and the banner and the name she had not written. For a moment the house was only a house about to have people in it. She held the moment with both hands, the way she had held the frosting tub, because she knew how easily a thing like that tipped.
***
Leon came in from the driveway with a bag of ice on his shoulder and the look he wore when he had done the errand and wanted the errand to count as the whole of his usefulness. He was forty-four, broad from the county shop and from the years before the county shop when he had unloaded trucks, and he still moved like a man who expected doors to be wider than they were. He set the ice in the cooler on the patio and smiled at the banner as if the banner had included him in a decision.
"Looks good," he said.
Denise, coming out with a stack of napkins, said, "The left side's higher."