Eventually Pearl asked whether Grandma Celeste would come. Daniel glanced at her in the rearview mirror. "She said she wanted to," he answered. "But I don't know if she will. Either way, tonight is your birthday, and we're going to enjoy it."
"What about Grandpa Richard?" Ruby asked.
"I told him not tonight."
"Good," Ruby said immediately. Then she thought about the gold watch and the way his voice had sounded when he said his mother was wrong about him. "Maybe another day," she added, almost too quietly to hear. "If he learns how to be nicer."
Daniel smiled to himself. He was not prepared to promise a future he could not control, but he was grateful that his daughter could leave the possibility open without feeling responsible for making it happen. "That's something adults will have to work on," he said. "You don't need to manage it for us."
The house on Lynen Street was yellow with white trim and a blue front door Grace had painted herself one spring while Daniel built a small bench for the porch. The yard was modest, with a maple tree near the sidewalk and a flower bed Grace was always threatening to reorganize. It had never appeared in a society magazine and would not have impressed Richard's business partners, but the girls recognized it from two houses away and began cheering before the car reached the driveway.
Inside, streamers crossed the living room from one corner to another. Paper airplanes hung on thin threads above the dining table, and a banner reading HAPPY NINTH BIRTHDAY RUBY AND PEARL stretched across the kitchen entrance. The air smelled of frosting, pizza, and the blueberries Grace had baked into a batch of muffins for the morning after. Birthday music played from a small speaker while children in paper wings raced around the sofa.
Grace met them at the door. She hugged Ruby first, then Pearl, then both girls together, asking a hundred questions she did not need answered immediately. When she looked over their heads at Daniel, something passed between them that required no words: relief, anger, gratitude, and a promise to talk when the children were asleep. He bent his head and kissed her forehead before she turned back to the girls.
"You've both got pilot wings," she said with delight. "I feel very underdressed for this party."
Ruby insisted on explaining every detail of how the captain had given them the pins, including the important fact that the captain had listened. Pearl showed her mother the word-search booklet and announced that Walter Finch had been a mail carrier for thirty-eight years. Then their friends surrounded them, the story became a jumble of birthday greetings and questions, and for a little while the flight turned into something that had happened before the party rather than the center of it.