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we sighed in unison, rising slow and weary from our chairs.
    Mom produced the candle that had graced my own first-birthday cake: a ladybug-strewn white stub she’d kept in the bottom drawer of her jewelry box for nigh on thirty-one years.
    She sank it into a yellow-frosting rosette on Parrish and India’s cake, added a tiny pink grocery-store taper “to grow on,” then lit both wicks with a stout kitchen match while I doused the living room lights.
    I looked at my mother’s face in the flickering glow, and pictured the old white-edged snapshot of myself in a high chair with a paper hat on my head as she leaned forward into the frame, slender-armed and laughing, touching another match flame to that ladybug candle’s wick for the first time.
    The eighth of March, 1964: my mother not yet turned twenty-five and me in a little blue smocked dress with a white Peter Pan collar, my swinging feet in tiny red socks. The colors have faded long since, but on that square of glossy paper I gaze upward with awe, drinking her in.
    And now I watched Mom lift up my daughters’ cake and start walking toward the living room, the door frame briefly illuminated as she stepped through it.
    Ellis started snapping pictures, the two of us singing “Happy
birth
-day Parrish and India” along with Mom before we grown-ups blew out the little teardrops of flame in their honor.
    I’d made party hats the week before, tall medieval princess cones of gem-toned poster board.
    This was the type of project I got up to during the girls’ naps, basically
stuff I do when I have enough energy not to fall asleep on my feet, drooling, but am still goddamned if I’m going to waste a single rare moment of clarity on cleaning the fucking house
. Ditto the extensive front-porch Christmas decor.
    These things weren’t earth-shattering, by any means, but even the tiniest modicum of creativity made me feel like a human being again. Albeit briefly.
    Maybe that’s why I’d left all the crap up on the porch: as testament to even my smallest actual accomplishment in the world above and beyond pushing a vacuum hose back and forth across the orange shag on my hands and knees. Again.
    I mean, you vacuum the rug, and it looks like shit again by the nextmorning. But first-birthday pictures stick around, and I wanted my kids to know full well that they had been adored when they were little.
    Parrish’s birthday hat was emerald green with a fat striped bee glued on, its waxed-paper wings glitter-veined. Perry’s was dark sapphire with tinfoil stars, comets, and moons. Ellis’s read G LAMOUR B UNNY in tiny pearls on lavender, Mom’s E MPRESS OF A LL S HE S URVEYS in rhinestones across a faux-ermine-trimmed field of scarlet. Hadley’s was hot pink with leafy vines of lemon-lime sequins, India’s saffron with a jade-colored Buddha seated atop a garnet lotus, the words OM MANE PADME HUM written beneath him in Sanskrit.
    After the cake, the girls started opening their presents, a project that required heavy guidance from the rest of us. Parrish kept sticking the bows in her mouth, Perry wept when he tipped his ice cream and cake onto the floor and stepped in it, and Hadley and India pretty much shellacked each other’s hair with frosting while the grown-ups were scraping Perry’s sticky mess out of the shag fronds.
    At that point, of course, the phone rang.
    “Go ahead, we’ve got this,” said Ellis, shooing me toward the kitchen. “If it’s Dean tell him everything’s under control.”
    I got it by the fifth ring.
    “Hey Bunny,” said my husband, “how’re the girls?”
    “Very happy and slathered with melting ice cream and crumbs,” I replied. “How are you? How’s New Orleans?”
    “Exhausting. Sorry I haven’t called before this, but they’ve been running me ragged. I’m just back up in the room for a quick shower and then we’ve got another dinner with clients.”
    “Anywhere good?”
    “Some Cajun place. Which doesn’t exactly narrow it