The card beside Sabra’s plate said Our neighbor.
She picked it up. Niko was trying to push seventy-four candles into a cake that had room for twenty.
“Is that for the woman who lends you a ladder?” she asked.
He glanced at the card. “Vey made those.”
“Did she choose the words?”
“I told her who was coming.”
Niko put down a candle. Its lower half had turned pink with icing. Sabra had bought that icing with him. She had helped him take the cake from its tin. They had eaten the broken bit standing in his kitchen, and he had kissed sugar off her thumb.
They had been together eighteen months. At sixty-eight, she did not mind living in her own house. She liked her yellow bedroom and leaving books on both sides of the bed. She minded coming from that house to be introduced as though she had wandered over to borrow a tool.
“I’m going to say it after dinner,” Niko told her. “In the toast.”
“Before the candles or after the fire brigade?”
He smiled, hoping the joke had got them past it.
She set the card down again.
“I’m not doing this for another evening.”
The smile went. Through the open kitchen window came the sound of his son Mikel asking a small child to stop throwing gravel into a drain.
“My children know,” Niko said.
“Yes. They know. Why must the rest of the world guess?”
He looked toward the hall. There was a photograph of his wife there, taken on a windy beach. She had died four years earlier. Sabra knew the photograph. Niko had told her how he had nearly dropped the camera in the sea. She had never asked him to move it.
“I don’t want Vey to think—”
“Ask her what she thinks.”
“It isn’t as simple as that.”
“No.” Sabra lifted the cake knife and moved it out of the way of his elbow. “But calling me something else isn’t making it simpler.”
Vey came in carrying a bag of ice. She was fifty, with her father’s straight back and none of his skill at pretending not to hear things.
“Are we discussing me?” she asked.
Niko said no. Sabra said yes. The bag split between them.
For a minute all three knelt on the tiles, gathering ice before it slid under the stove. Niko laughed once, but neither woman joined him. He put the wet cubes in a bowl for the drinks and left the dirty ones in the sink.
“I want to introduce Sabra properly tonight,” he said at last.
Vey stood with a cold patch across one knee.
“Good.”
He looked surprised enough to annoy Sabra all over again.
“That doesn’t mean everything feels good,” Vey added. “You keep telling people she’s your neighbor. Then you hold her hand when you think I’m not looking. It’s a very odd thing to make me watch.”
Niko rubbed icing from his fingers with a cloth.
“I thought I was giving you time.”
“Time to work out whether your hand was attached to hers?”
“I was putting it off,” he said.
Vey nodded. She did not thank him for saying it.
Niko went to the back door and called Mikel in. Mikel arrived with his son under one arm. The boy had both shoes but only one sock.
“Sabra is my partner,” Niko told them. “I’m going to use that word when the guests arrive. I should have been using it already.”
Mikel looked at his sister, then at Sabra.
“I assumed that was settled.”
“It was settled between us,” Sabra said. “It went away whenever the doorbell rang.”
The boy began asking for cake. Mikel shifted him onto a chair.
“If you’re making a speech, please make it short,” he told his father. “He ate three peas for lunch. We’re running out of polite time.”
Niko reached into his shirt pocket. He had written a toast on the back of a shopping list. Sabra saw what your mother would have wanted above a crossed-out line about the future.
“No,” Vey said.
He followed her gaze.
“You don’t know what she would have wanted,” Vey told him. “Neither do I. You can tell people what you want.”
Niko folded the paper. He did not put it back in his pocket.
Sabra had imagined this conversation many times. In her better versions, Vey had hugged her. In the worse ones, Vey had asked her to leave. Now Vey was pouring ice into a jug and keeping her face turned toward it.
“I wanted you to be happy about us,” Sabra said.
“I know.”
“I think I wanted it tonight.”
Vey looked up.
“I can be glad you treat him well and still miss my mother at his birthday.”
Sabra took a glass from the cupboard. Her hand shook a little, which made her angry with herself. She set it down before answering.
“Yes. You can.”
Niko reached for her hand. She let him take it. Then the boy demanded cake again, louder, and they went back to finding plates.
Their first guest was Len, a man who had known Niko since both had worked on the buses. Len arrived early because he had lost his reading glasses and could not make out the time on the invitation.
“Your neighbor has been busy,” he said, looking at the table.
“My partner,” Niko said. “Sabra.”
Len paused. Niko held the door open and waited.
“Well,” Len said to Sabra, “you’ve done a better job with the table than he ever did with a bus timetable.”
“Don’t blame him for the timetable,” she said. “He can be late perfectly well on his own.”
Niko laughed. He took Len’s coat without looking toward Vey to check her face.
At dinner, Sabra answered a woman’s question about where she lived. Two streets away, she said. Yes, she and Niko were together. No, she had no plans to sell her house. The woman asked about the yellow bedroom she had heard so much about, and Sabra found herself describing the dreadful curtains she still liked.
Niko stood for his toast before anyone could light the candles.
“Thank you for coming,” he said. “I’m very glad you’re here. And I’m glad Sabra is here with me.”
That was all. Mikel’s son hit his spoon against his cup in fierce approval of the speech ending.
Vey ate cake. She spoke to Len about a loose gate at his house. Later she kissed her father and went upstairs to call a friend. She said she would come down before leaving. Niko did not ask her to stay beside him.
Mikel took his sleepy boy to a spare room. The remaining guests carried chairs back to the wall. Len found the old music player and chose a tune with a beat Niko could follow if he did not think too hard.
Sabra put the neighbor card in the stack with the others. She did not keep it.
“Will you?” Niko asked, holding out both hands.
She went to him. He put one hand too high on her back and corrected it when she raised an eyebrow. They had never managed a full dance without somebody’s foot being in the wrong place.
On the third turn, he stepped on her shoe.
“You promised me this floor was level,” she said.
“I was badly informed.”
She laughed against his collar. Then she pulled him into the next turn before he could stop to apologize.
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