Carly made the cupcakes. She made them the night before, and she asked Elsie to help, and the two of them stood in the kitchen until ten o'clock frosting them, while I sat at the table pretending to read the paper. They were vanilla with pink frosting and sprinkles, the plainest kind, because Elsie asked for the plainest kind, and on top of each one Carly had put a little gold star cut out of yellow fondant, which she'd stayed up the night before that one practicing, ruining a dozen of them before she got the points right. Elsie didn't say much while they worked. But at one point she held up one of the cupcakes to the light and said, "Mom, this one's crooked," and Carly said, "Then that one's mine," and Elsie looked at her, and smiled, just a little, and put it on the side.
At the party Carly brought them out on a big white plate, eighteen of them, with a candle in the middle one. We sang. Finn sang loudest and worst. Elsie blew out the candle and didn't tell anyone her wish. Then Carly took the first cupcake off the plate, the one with the candle, and held it out to her. Just to her. The way she'd held out cupcakes all spring to other people's children.
Elsie looked at it. Then she looked past it at Finn, who was standing on his tiptoes at the edge of the picnic table with his eyes fixed on the plate, his hands behind his back, holding one wrist with the other hand. I don't know where he learned that. I have a guess.
"Can Finn have one too?" Elsie said.
Carly stood there holding the cupcake out. Something went across her face that I couldn't read. "Yes," she said. "Finn can have one. After you."
Elsie took the cupcake. She held it in both hands. She didn't eat it right away. She looked at it, at the little crooked fondant star, for long enough that my mother glanced at me across the table, and Lily Vang said, "Aren't you going to eat it?" and Elsie said, "In a minute," and kept holding it, carefully, the way you'd hold something you weren't sure was really yours.
I don't know how the story ends. I want to be honest about that, because it would be easy to tie it up. I know I work at the shipyard in Superior now, on the day shift, repairing the same kind of boats I used to sail on, and that I come home at four-thirty every afternoon and climb the stairs and knock on Elsie's door. I know Carly still checks on Finn at night, and that some nights she checks on Elsie too, and that Elsie has started leaving her door open a crack. I know that there are still days when Carly looks right through her, and catches herself, and I can see her catch herself, and those days are getting fewer, but they aren't gone. I know that Elsie still says okay too fast. I know that she wrote a new story at the start of third grade, for a teacher who isn't Mrs. Fjelstad, about a lighthouse girl who comes down all hundred and twelve stairs one night and walks to the dock by herself to see what's there, and that she wouldn't let either of us read the ending.
And I know that on the afternoon of her eighth birthday, she sat at the picnic table in our backyard holding a cupcake for a long time, until the frosting started to go soft in the sun. Her mother stood beside her and waited. She didn't hurry her. She didn't turn back to the plate, or to Finn, or to anything else. She just stood there, with her hands empty, watching her daughter decide.