***
Pearl Bennett arrived at eleven-twenty with a glass dish of potato salad and a purse that had survived three pastors and one husband. She was sixty-eight and did not move like a woman who wanted help out of a car, so Leon, who had come down the walk to offer it, ended up carrying the salad and feeling vaguely incorrect. She wore a patterned blouse in blue and gray, small shapes that might have been leaves if you stood close, and a dark navy hat with a floral fascinator pinned at the side, the flowers cloth and a little tired, the pin serious. She had worn the hat to Walter's funeral in March. She had worn it to church since. Denise had asked her, once, whether she wanted a new one. Pearl had said the old one already knew the way.
"Yard looks like a yard," Pearl said, which was praise if you knew her and an accusation if you were Denise and already braced.
"It's a party, Mama."
"I can see that." Pearl's eyes went to the banner and stayed there long enough to read the second line. She did not speak the missing name. She had not spoken it in so many rooms that the not-speaking had become its own furniture, a chair she sat in and hated and did not, most days, get up from. "Where are my babies?"
Imani came out of the house at a run and stopped just short of a collision because Denise had trained her, not always kindly, that grandmothers were not jungle gyms. "Hi, Grandma. I'm seven."
"Not until the clock says so," Pearl said, and then she cheated, as she always cheated for this child in ways she told herself were simply delight. "All right. You're seven in my heart. Look at this dress. Turn around."
Imani turned. The hat stayed on. Pearl made the sound older women make when a child has been successfully decorated, a sound with no words in it, and Imani glowed as if the sound were a prize. Andre came across the grass at a walk. He did not run toward people anymore. Running had been corrected out of him in small ways: don't knock the table, don't make your sister fall, don't act hungry, we see you. He stopped in front of Pearl and said, "Hi, Grandma," and held his arms in a shape that could become a hug if she started it.
Pearl started it. She pulled him in against the blue-gray blouse and felt the narrowness of him, the way he kept his hands light on her back, ready to be finished when she was finished. He smelled like cereal and the soap Denise bought in the large bottle. Over his shoulder Pearl looked at the banner again. HAPPY BIRTHDAY. IMANI. A star. The star did not stand in for a boy. She had told herself, driving over, that she would not make a scene before the scene even had guests. She had told herself that for years. Walter used to say she had a courtroom in her chest and a church in her mouth, and that the church usually won, which he had meant as a compliment. Since March the church had been winning by default. Grief had made her polite. Politeness, she was beginning to understand, was not the same thing as peace, and it was not the same thing as love, and it could sit in a folding chair all afternoon while a child learned the wrong lesson in front of it.
"You get taller every time I blink," she said to Andre.
"Yes, ma'am."