Pearl turned her face toward her daughter. Denise had braided her hair back tight, the way she did when she needed her face to be a finished thing. The floral dress was new, or new to this year, a V-neck in a loud garden of pinks and yellows that would have been joyful on a woman who was not holding her mouth so carefully. She was pretty. She had always been pretty in a way that made people offer her the first chair and then act surprised when she had opinions from it. Pearl loved her with the exhausted, specific love of a mother who has memorized the child's weather and still gets caught in it. She also saw, and had been seeing for longer than grief could explain, the way Denise's weather fell on one child and not the other.
"Whose birthday?" Pearl said.
Denise's eyes flicked to the banner and back. "Both of them. We said that. Andre had his day on Thursday. This is the party. Parties are expensive, Mama. I'm not made of two parties."
"Thursday was pancakes."
"Thursday was what we could do on a Thursday. Leon was off. I wasn't. You know how that office is."
"I know how you are when you've decided a thing is already fair."
Denise smiled, because Carol Odell had come out onto her porch and a smile was a fence of its own. "Not today," she said through the smile. "You want to be a help, you can put the forks out. You want to be a judge, you can do it at your own table."
Pearl put the forks out. The forks were plastic. One of them was already cracked along the handle. She set that one at the bottom of the pile, where a child might not take it first, and she felt the smallness of the gesture, how proud a person could be of moving a cracked fork and still not have moved.
***
By noon the yard had people in it.