"Finn had his day," I said, and heard how it sounded, and didn't take it back.
I took Elsie down to Canal Park. We parked up on Lake Avenue and walked down past the shops and the old warehouses to the pier by the Aerial Lift Bridge, and I bought her a cupcake at the bakery on Canal Park Drive, the one with the red awning. She stood in front of the glass case for a long time. She kept looking up at me as if to check whether I'd changed my mind.
"Any one you want," I said.
"Any one?"
"Two if you want."
She picked a plain vanilla one with pink frosting and sprinkles. The simplest one in the case. Then she looked at the case again and said, very carefully, "Can I get one for Finn? For later? He likes the chocolate."
I had to stand there a minute before I answered her. "Yeah, Els," I said. "You can get one for Finn."
We sat on the concrete wall of the ship canal with the box on her lap and the lake out in front of us, huge and flat and silver, going on forever the way it does. She ate her cupcake in tiny bites, the frosting first, then the cake, then the paper, which she licked clean and folded into a square. The tourist board on the bridge said a laker was due in at six-forty, coming in light from Indiana Harbor for a load of taconite, and at six-thirty you could see it out on the horizon, just a dark line with a white house at the stern, and Elsie watched it come the whole way in.