"She blew out the candles like she was putting out a fire in somebody else's house," Mrs. K said. "Fast. Like she wanted it over."
"Birthdays happen on the day," Nora said, "and they happen at a table, with the people. That's not a rule of mine. That's just what a birthday is. Everything else is catering."
She made her requests the way she had learned to make them in this house: small, specific, and in writing on Mrs. K's list, where they acquired the force of logistics. Balloons β the ordinary kind, from the drugstore, that you blow up with your own lungs and tie with string. The dining table. The cake at the table, not before it. Paper crowns. And one further item, which she delivered in person, at the kitchen door, to the only man in Boston nobody delivered requests to.
"Thursday is Maisie's birthday," Nora said. "Dinner is at six. She'd like you to be home by six."
Marcus looked up from the papers Shay had brought him. "I'd like a great many things about Thursday," he said, "and the day is not built that way. Send the arrangements through Mrs. K."
"The arrangements are Mrs. K's. This is the invitation." She put it on the desk: construction paper, purple, folded once, with a drawing of a table and four stick figures and, in Maisie's large, new handwriting, DAD COM HOME AT 6. "She made it on Tuesday. She's checked the door every night since to see if it worked early."
He looked at the purple paper for a long moment. "Miss Bennett β "
"Six o'clock," Nora said, "is when the candles happen. Not six-thirty, not a phone call at six to say the candles are noted. I am aware of what your Thursdays are. She is aware of what her birthdays have been. One of those has to give, and I've decided it isn't going to be the six-year-old." And because she had discovered that the truth, in this house, landed best when it was also practical: "There'll be cake left either way. Cake is not the part she'll remember."
Thursday came up grey and kind. Nora and the children blew up balloons until the kitchen looked like a fairground and Mrs. K, scandalised and indispensable, produced from some inner cupboard of herself a string of paper flags she admitted β under direct questioning and with great reluctance β to having made for Eleanor's last birthday party in this house, and had kept. Jack hung them with a stepladder and a supervisor's commentary. Maisie wore her crown from breakfast. At five-forty the house was set: the long dining table with its cloth, the war table banished to being what it had been built as, a place where people ate; the cake in the middle with six candles unlit; the purple invitation, at Marcus's request relayed through Shay, propped against his water glass.
At five-fifty-five, Maisie took up her station in the hall, facing the front door, crown straight, hands clasped, like a tiny official delegation.
Jack stood beside her for a while, for solidarity, and then did what love does in nine-year-olds and drifted back to the cake to guard it from Frankie, who had not yet arrived and could not be trusted. "If he doesn't come by six-ten," Jack said to Nora, in an undertone, practising his man's voice, "we do the candles anyway. She shouldn't have to watch a door all night. I watched the door last year." He said it without self-pity, as a scheduling fact. "It isn't good for a birthday."
"No," Nora said. "It isn't."
The door opened at six o'clock exactly, into weather and the smell of the street, and Marcus Doyle came in out of whatever Thursday he had dismantled to do it, with his coat wet at the shoulders β and stopped, at the sight of the delegation.
"You came home at six," Maisie said, in the tone of a scientist confirming a result.
"So I did," he said, and took off his coat, and Shay took it away, and that was all, and it was everything.
Dinner was Mrs. K's best with the brakes off. Frankie arrived at six-twenty with a present wrapped in newspaper and ate three helpings and taught Maisie to balance a spoon on her nose, badly, on purpose, until she laughed so hard she hiccupped, and Jack, forgetting every drill he'd ever set himself, laughed with his mouth full. Marcus said little. He watched his daughter the way a man watches weather he used to know. When the cake came he carried it in himself β a thing no one in the room had ever seen β and set it before her with the candles lit, and the dining room went quiet in the new way, the gathering way, not the shut way.
"Make a wish," Nora said. "Out loud or in your head. Out loud works too. Some people say out loud works better, because then the room can help."
Maisie looked around the table β at Frankie with his newspaper wrapping, at Jack with his flags, at Nora, at her father β with her face lit from underneath by six small flames.
"I wish," she said clearly, "for it to be like this."
She blew out all six candles in one breath, a year stronger than the girl who had put out last year's like a fire in a stranger's house, and the room applauded, and Frankie whistled, and Jack banged the table with both hands β and in the middle of it Nora saw Marcus rise, quietly, in the candle-smoke and the noise, and excuse himself with a nod that was nearly steady, and go out into the hall.
She found him a minute later at the dark window on the landing, with his daughter's purple invitation in his hand, doing nothing at all.
"She'll want the flags left up," Nora said, from the doorway. "Probably for a month. Possibly until the sunflowers come up."
"Leave them," Marcus said, to the window. His voice was not under his control, and he plainly knew it, and had stopped spending anything on hiding it from her. "Leave everything."
Chapter 10: The Piano
The piano tuner came on a Tuesday, recommended by Mrs. K out of the deep past, a small man named Mr. Abernathy with a leather case and the bedside manner of a surgeon visiting a very old patient.
"It'll take the day," he said, standing in the music room doorway with his hat in his hands, looking at the covered shape by the windows. "An instrument left that long β the strings'll have opinions. Some of them strongly held."