But I stopped looking toward the driveway.

I had looked at it every few minutes since three, and at some point in the afternoon I made myself stop, because I could feel Lily taking her cue from me, checking the window when I checked it, and I was not going to teach her to spend her own birthday waiting for people who had already decided where they would rather be.

Children learn disappointment by watching how the adults around them hold it, and I knew, the way you know a thing in your body before your mind has formed the sentence, that Lily was studying me at the window.

If I kept glancing at the driveway, I would be teaching her that the afternoon was incomplete, that it was a waiting room for people who had not come, that her own birthday was a lesser event until it was ratified by the arrival of grandparents who were at that moment eating cake in another house.