"Don't yes-ma'am your height. It's not good manners. It's just bones." She kept a hand on his shoulder a second longer than the conversation required. "You have a hat?"
Denise, setting the potato salad on the table, said, "He's nine, Mama. He doesn't want a paper hat."
Andre looked at the grass. He had wanted the hat. Wanting it now felt like wanting it after the sentence had been spoken for him, which made the want a kind of lie. He said, "I'm all right."
Pearl heard the all right. She had heard versions of it at Christmas, when his present came in a grocery bag with the receipt still in the bottom and Imani's came in paper with a bow the size of a hand. She had heard it at the school spring concert, when Denise stood up to take a picture of Imani in the second row of the chorus and sat down again before Andre's class sang. She had heard it in her own kitchen on a Wednesday, which was her afternoon with the children when Denise worked late, and Andre had eaten his snack in small bites so that Imani could have the last of the apple without a discussion. Pearl had told herself that boys were like that. She had told herself that Denise was tired. She had told herself that Walter's absence had emptied her of the right to rearrange her daughter's house. All of those sentences had been ways of staying in the chair.
"Go on and help your daddy with the cooler," she said to Andre, because she was not ready, and because a command that looked like trust was easier than a question that would split the afternoon open before the neighbors arrived. He went. She watched him go, the blue shirt, the careful walk, the empty hands. Something in her chest knocked once, like a gavel no one had picked up.
"Don't start," Denise said quietly.
"I didn't."
"You're looking like you're about to."
"I'm looking at my grandson."
"Then look happier. It's a birthday."