She came up to the edge of the crowd around the cupcake table and stood there. She waited. That's the thing I can't stop seeing, even now. She didn't push in. She didn't call out. She waited at the edge while Carly handed out cupcakes to the kindergartners one by one, saying each name, and the kids took them and ran off, and the crowd thinned, and Elsie stood there with her hands behind her back, holding one wrist with the other hand, the way she stood in church.
When the last kindergartner had gotten one, and there was one cupcake left on the tray, Elsie stepped forward.
"Mom," she said. I could hear it. The wind had dropped and the music had cut out and I was maybe thirty feet away, behind the backstop, and I could hear it perfectly. "Can I have a cupcake too?"
Carly didn't look at her right away. She was folding up the empty cupcake carrier, the plastic kind with the snap lid. She said, "Elsie, these are for Finn's class. You know that."
"There's one left."
"That's Finn's. For later."
"He already had one," Elsie said. "I saw him."
And Carly looked at her then. She looked at her the way you look at a dog that's gotten into the trash. It wasn't anger, exactly. It was worse than anger. It was tiredness, a kind of flat, put-upon tiredness, the look of a woman who has been asked for one thing too many in a long day. "Elsie," she said, "it is your brother's birthday. Today is about Finn. Can you not make it about you for one day? Please? Go back to your class."
Elsie didn't move. For a second I thought she might cry, and I think if she had cried, Carly might have softened, because Carly is not a monster, and I'll get to that. But Elsie didn't cry. She said, very quietly, "Okay."