It is February and the ground is soggy and the first dogwood buds are poking through the trees, pale and wet, obscene, how they insist upon themselves. It is Mel and Becca’s eighth birthday.
Their mother has brought out the special dishes. The cake is mudslide brown because Becca likes chocolate and Mel likes Becca happy. It is adorned with tiny sugar-spun ponies, glossy-backed and glistening and perfect. Too perfect to eat.
There are ten plates and ten goodie bags. There are three of them at the table: Mel, her mother, her sister. No one else has shown up. It is thirty minutes past noon, and every minute drags on as if to mock them further.
Mel cries like a small child would: hot, questioning tears that set Becca off, and now they are both crying, in paper hats, beside the empty plates, and the fact that Mel has upset Becca, like a reinforcing loop, makes Mel cry harder.
She asks why no one came. No one came because the girls in her class call her four-eyes and Becca worse things. They say Mel and Becca are the ghost girls from The Shining, except they are not interesting enough to be evil. They are only dull.
Out of love or pity their mother lets them unwrap their gifts, the toy horses they have been dreaming about for six months, the ones whose stories they already know by heart---Seattle Slew and Secretariat, bay and chestnut and brazen. Mel and Becca prop them up side by side. They decide they are not lonely; they are together.
It is Mel’s twenty-ninth birthday and Becca has given her a handwritten card, each side crowded with a different flower or animal: magnolia, thoroughbred, azaleas, bulldog, daffodil, goldfinch. Mel smiles each time she looks.
Dr. Langdon runs up behind her. She can tell it is him because he moves differently than Robby despite being the same height: long and loping and loose-limbed, coltish. He shoves something into her hand and says, “Happy birthday, Mel. You didn’t think we forgot, did you?”
A birthday card. Confetti. Robby’s signature, Dana’s, Samira’s, Javadi’s, Perlah’s, Trinity’s, Cassie's, Langdon’s. Mel stops reading. The tears come up so quickly they feel sprung from a trap. Happy ones, she thinks. Someone remembered; he remembered.
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