Charlie's fingers curled in the air and then into his own palm. He sat back on his heels. His blue eyes went shiny without quite spilling. The birthday shirt suddenly looked like a costume someone else had put on him.
On the coffee table, Heidi's black tablet lit up and rang. The screen showed a clean incoming call: Frank Bennett. Grandpa. Face and voice both, the little camera icon already waiting.
Heidi answered with a smile she assembled in under a second.
Frank appeared in the rectangle, sixty-eight, white hair combed neatly, glasses catching indoor light, a blue checked button-down that made him look ready for church or a hardware store, either one. He was smiling the wide, uncomplicated smile of a man who had tracked a package and waited for this exact minute.
"Did Charlie open his truck?" Frank asked.
Heidi angled the tablet so the living room filled the frame. Balloons. Cake on the counter in the background. Boys on the floor. She forced the smile wider toward the camera.
"They're sharing," she said.
Charlie stood up so fast his knee bumped the coffee table. He stepped in front of her, into the camera's patient eye, indignant in the pure way only a four-year-old can be when the world has broken a rule he thought was fixed.
"Mom gave it to him," Charlie said.
Frank's smile vanished. The change was not gradual. It was a door closing. His mouth flattened. Behind the glasses his eyes went sharp in a way Heidi remembered from her own childhood, from report cards and broken windows and the time she had lied about a neighbor's cat.
"Put me on speaker," Frank said.
Heidi's face tightened. For a second the tablet was only a black slab in her hands, and the living room's brightness felt like a spotlight she had not agreed to stand under. She tapped speaker. Frank's voice filled the carpeted space, larger than the screen, closer than the balloons.
"Cody," Frank said. "Put the truck down."
Cody's hands were already on the red plastic. He looked from the tablet to his mother to Charlie, who was still standing with his birthday shirt pulled slightly crooked from the scramble. Cody set the truck on the carpet. The tires made a soft thud.
"Dad," Heidi began, and the word came out too light, as if she could float the conversation back to cake and cousins. "It's just—Cody's older. He'll take care of it. Charlie will break the wheels in a week. You know how he is with—"
"I know how you are with things that have his name on them," Frank said.
Silence took the room. Even the refrigerator in the kitchen seemed to pause its hum.