"It's a party, not an inspection."
"People take pictures."
"People take pictures of the kids." He kissed the side of her head. She allowed it, which was not the same as leaning in. What the street could see still worked: groceries, rides, a lease they hoped would become their name, the car warmed in February without being asked. The rest had been under renovation so long the drop cloths had become the furniture.
"Andre's on the cups," she said.
"I saw him. He's careful."
"He's slow."
"Careful looks slow if you're already late in your head." Leon said it mildly. He did not say it as a correction. He had learned that a correction in the morning became a silence at night, and he liked believing he was an easy man to live with. He talked about Denise as someone who had been through it: the hours cut in the spring, her father's death in March, the year Imani came early, and the year before that, when he had been halfway out the door with a woman from the parts counter. He had come back. She had let him. Andre had been two, old enough to notice an absence and too young for a story that would hold. The return was treated as a finished chapter. Denise kept that page open and never read it aloud, which Leon mistook for healing.
He watched his son set the cups in rows, open end down, exactly as instructed. Andre's tongue touched his upper lip when he concentrated. Leon felt the press of affection he often felt toward the boy and did not know where to put it so that it became a thing the boy could use. He raised a hand. Andre raised one back, a small wave, not a request. Good, Leon thought. He's all right. He looks all right.
"Ice is done," Leon called toward the kitchen, in case done was a gift.
"Bring the cake out when Tanya gets here, not before," Denise said. "I don't want it sitting in the sun while everybody hugs."
"Yes, ma'am," Leon said, and he smiled, because the echo of their son's manners moved him and because he did not hear, in his own mouth, the joke it also was.