Pearl sat with her purse on her lap and the navy hat level, and she watched the hand on the shoulder. She had seen that hand before. Two Christmases ago, at the portrait studio, Denise asked for Imani alone first, while her face was still fresh. Andre waited against a fake lake. When his turn came, Denise said they mainly needed the girl for the church program. Pearl sat on the studio couch and said nothing, because Walter was in the parking lot with a bad hip and she would not add a scene to his pain. Walter was gone. The silence had stayed, which struck her now as a theft the dead had not agreed to.
Andre brought Miss Donnelle water and a chair in the shade. She called him a gentleman, and the word landed like a uniform. Gentlemen, he understood, did not ask for cake before it was offered. He had been waiting since Thursday. The waiting had started to feel like the birthday itself. He meant to hold his plate with both hands so nobody could say he had stuck it out like a beggar.
He knew the bubbles were pretty, that his sister was laughing, that his father was talking about a hose, and that his mother, when she passed him, touched Imani's hat and did not touch his head.
The not-touch was not new. That was what made it heavy. New things could be accidents. Old things had a payroll.
He held onto the sentence in the mirror, carefully, so as not to crease it.
***
The favoritism had not arrived as a decision. That was the part Denise could say, and it was even true, and it did not help.
When Andre was born she had been twenty-nine and furious and in love with him in a way that frightened her, because Leon was already half gone and a baby was a terrible thing to use as a rope. She had used him anyway. She had held him in the rocker at three in the morning and told him his father would be back, and then Leon was back, and the telling turned into a debt she could not look at without seeing her own mouth in it. Andre grew into a boy who watched. He watched the door. He watched her face to see which version of the afternoon he had walked into. Watching felt, to Denise, like an audit. She began to answer the audit with efficiency. Shoes, homework, bed. If she did the list, she could not be accused of failing the list. Love, in that system, was the list. Anything that asked to be more than the list was greed.
Imani came four years after the reconciliation, planned, announced, folded into the story they told at church as proof that a marriage could be repaired by wanting a thing together. She arrived early, small, a three-week argument with a hospital that Denise won by sleeping in a chair and learning the names of the nurses. When they brought the baby home, Andre stood at the crib with both hands on the rail, careful not to touch the blanket, and said, "She's real little." Denise, raw and triumphant and terrified of ever feeling that afraid again, heard in his voice a comparison. She said, "Don't lean on it." He stepped back. He was four. The step back became a habit so complete that by the time he was seven it looked like personality.
She told herself the boy was in enough pictures, and that a second child needed catching up. Catching up had no finish line. Every extra slice, every first turn, every afternoon the good dress came out and the good shirt stayed in the drawer, was a payment on a bill she had invented and then forgotten she invented. She called it fairness. Fairness meant Imani had been owed a fear the world had already tried to collect, and Andre had been born into an ordinary Tuesday, and ordinary Tuesdays did not get parties if the money was tired.