The party did what parties do. It got loud, and then it found a rhythm. Someone put on a playlist of nineties R&B that Teresa kept requesting be turned up. The second-grade teachers organized a game where everyone had to guess the circumference of Nora's belly with a length of yarn, and Linda won, and was so delighted she had to sit down. Nora opened gifts in a lawn chair under the patio cover while Priya kept a list on her phone in a font size that suggested she was preparing exhibits. Onesies. A bouncer. Board books. A set of tiny socks with lemons on them, from the Nakamuras next door, who had come over the fence at Nora's insistence and stood near the vegetable beds holding paper plates.
Her father's box was last. Inside, wrapped in a dish towel, was a mobile: five small wooden boats, each one hand-carved and sanded smooth as soap, hanging from a frame of bent oak. They turned in the hot breeze. Each boat had a name painted on its stern in Frank's careful lettering—LEO, ROSA, NORA, and two that were blank.
"For her to name," Frank said, from the back of the crowd. He was holding a beer he hadn't opened. "When she's old enough."
Nora couldn't say anything. She held the mobile up and the boats spun and the women made the sound women make, and she looked for her mother, to share it, and her mother wasn't there.
Neither was Grant.
It didn't register right away. A party has a hundred moving parts and people step out of it constantly—to the bathroom, to the car, to take a call. She handed the mobile carefully to Priya and said, "We're almost out of lemonade," which was true; the pitcher on the drinks table held an inch of pale liquid and a lone mint sprig. "I made a second batch. It's in the fridge."
"I'll get it," said three people.
"I want to get it. I have to pee anyway. Everybody stay."
She went in through the kitchen door. The house was cool and dim after the yard, and quiet; the music came through the glass like music underwater. She used the bathroom. She stood at the sink afterward and looked at herself in the mirror—flushed, as her mother had said, hair coming loose, a smear of frosting on her collarbone—and she smiled at herself, because it was a good party. Because her father had carved her daughter five boats.
The second pitcher was in the refrigerator, Leo's pitcher, the heavy one with the diamonds. She'd made the second batch at one o'clock and it had chilled to perfect; the glass was so cold it fogged the instant she lifted it out. She hugged it against the top of her belly with both hands. It weighed probably six pounds full. She thought, idly, that she should have let someone else carry it.
She didn't go back out the kitchen door. The kitchen door led straight onto the patio and into the middle of the party, and she wanted thirty more seconds of quiet. She went out the side door instead, the one by the laundry room, which opened onto the narrow side yard under her mother's old bedroom window—a strip of gravel and trash cans and a hose reel that led around the corner of the house to the back lawn and the lemon tree.
She heard them before she saw them, and she didn't understand what she was hearing.
Her mother's voice, low, saying, "—not today, you promised, not today—"