She laughed, but it wasn’t funny. “Because I wanted to be the girl in the post,” she said. “I wanted that to be who I was. Every night you were on my couch I hated myself a little more, and that picture was the only way I could stand it. I could look at it and pretend.”
She sat down on one of the rocks with the box in her lap. “And then you never paid it,” she said, “and I never asked, and I thought, good, maybe she forgot, maybe she’ll never pay it and I’ll never have to take it. I got caught up on rent anyway. I took weekend shifts at a call center. I’ve been fine since Christmas.”
“I saved it out of my tips,” I told her. “Eight months. Tyler worked Saturdays cleaning out houses. Every penny in that box is from somebody’s hair or somebody’s chickens.”
I said, “I’m not telling you that to make you feel bad. I’m telling you so you know it’s real money. It’s yours. You earned it. You kept the lights on.”
“I didn’t earn it,” she said. “You were sleeping on my couch with your baby in the hospital. I charged you for the water you used to cry in the shower.”
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“You also stood at his window in your scrubs and cried,” I said. “I saw you. Nobody made you do that.”
She looked at me then. Her mascara was going. She pulled her sunglasses down off her head and put them on, and that is when I knew she was going to cry for real, because Nikki has been hiding behind sunglasses since she was twelve years old.
“I don’t want it,” she said. “Sierra, I can’t take it. I can’t take it after today.”
“It’s not mine anymore,” I told her. “I’m not taking it back. I said I’d pay you, and I paid you. What you do with it is up to you.”
She sat there a long time with the box on her knees. Then she said, “Okay.” Just that. She said, “Okay,” and stood up, and wiped her face under the sunglasses, and walked back up the hill to the shelter ahead of me with the box under her arm.
When I came back up to the shelter, the party had gone on without us the way parties do. Somebody had the music going on a phone speaker.
Tyler’s brother was showing the twins how to skip rocks. My mother was cutting the edge of the cake box with a pocketknife so she could slide the cake out without wrecking the icing.
Nikki was sitting at the picnic table holding Bo. Tyler had handed him to her. Bo had her sunglasses in his fist and was trying to put them in his mouth, and she was letting him, and she was laughing in a way that sounded like crying.
We did the cake before he got too tired. It was a small round cake with blue icing and a big number one on top, and one candle.
Mama had made the bakery spell his name right, just the two letters, after they wrote it the fancy way on his baby shower cake and she made them do it over.
I picked the cake up off the table and held it in both hands, down low in front of Bo, so he could see it.
Both of my hands were on the bottom of that cake. Tyler lit the candle with the lighter he keeps for the generator, cupping it against the breeze off the river.