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Min Foo’s was! Especially if you counted Joey’s watch, a black rubber, digital, multi-function affair whose face was about twice the width of his wrist.)
    “Biddy is doing the food,” Rebecca said, “and I tried to persuade them to hire NoNo for the flowers, but they said they always use Binstock.”
    “
Rich
people,” Joey said.
    “Well, yes, I guess they must be.”
    They were in the kitchen now. Rebecca started pulling boxes from the cupboard beside the sink. “Look at the decorations I bought,” she told the children. “Little rolled diplomas. Aren’t they cute?”
    But Lateesha was more attracted to a string of ancient, yellowing electric lights shaped like tiny wedding bells. “I want these,” she said firmly, and Rebecca said, “Well, but . . .” and then, “Oh, well, why not? We’ll pretend they’re school bells.” She held them up by the cord, which was the old striped, cloth-covered kind that was probably not all that safe. “These were strung across the mantel the first time I ever came here,” she said.
    “No, I want them high in the air.”
    “Well, we can do that.”
    They carried the boxes to the front parlor, and then Rebecca went back for a stepladder. When she returned, Joey was banging out the
Jaws
theme on the piano. “Here,” she told him, opening the ladder. “You climb up and hang the bells on those hooks along the moldings.” Then she gave Lateesha the little diplomas to set around, and she unfolded a crocheted cloth and spread it over the piano to hide all the stains and water rings.
    “The first time I ever walked into this room,” she told the children, “the bells were strung across the mantel and there was a kind of pagoda effect, a cupola effect, to the ceiling, from the twists of white crepe paper tied to the chandelier. It was my ex-roommate Amy’s engagement party and her family was making a huge, huge fuss. And I had come alone—I did have a boyfriend, but he was busy that night—and I walked in and I just about walked out again. Well, you know how fancy this place can look when the bald spots are covered up. There were flowers everywhere, white and purple lilacs, so many that the house was kind of shimmering with that heavy, mothball perfume lilacs give off. I was bowled over! And I didn’t know a soul; just Amy. She had transferred to Goucher, you see, after our freshman year at Macadam, and she had this whole set of Goucher girlfriends I had never met. So I was standing there with my mouth open, and Amy didn’t notice me because she was carrying on about her engagement ring—how she had wanted platinum but her fiancé wanted gold because his mother’s ring had been . . . and all at once I realized that the stereo was playing ‘Band of Gold.’ I thought, How appropriate! and I looked over at the DJ, who happened to be Zeb, only of course I didn’t know that. He was just this teenaged kid sitting behind a stereo, grinning straight into my face as if we shared a secret. He’d chosen that song on purpose! It made me laugh. And right at that moment, right while I was laughing, this man came up beside me and said, ‘I see you’re having a wonderful time.’ And that was your grandpa.”
    It felt peculiar to refer to Joe as a grandpa. He had died before he turned forty. In Rebecca’s mind he was forever young and handsome, and when she tried to imagine how he would have aged she had to guess from how Zeb had aged: those wide, spare, scarecrow shoulders grown stooped, the tangle of longish black hair threaded with thick strands of gray. Although Zeb lacked Joe’s expansive manner and his grace. He had always been more . . . shambling, you might say.
    She lifted the lid of the piano bench and sorted through the sheet music stored inside. Even at these teenaged affairs, some relative just about always ended up playing tunes for the others to sing along with. Songs from the 1950s, swing . . . She propped a folk-song collection on the music