I stood in the kitchen for another minute, then took the rent paper and put it in my wallet.

The cupcake stayed on the table.

That evening, the grocery store’s fluorescent lights buzzed over the stockroom shelves.

At eight forty, I was stacking returned cartons when Marcus Reed came through the swinging door carrying a cardboard tray of damaged labels for the supervisor.

Marcus had played guitar with Dad years before I was born.

I knew him mostly as the man who stopped by our house with spare cables, old records, and stories that Dad rarely let him finish.

He set the tray on a shelf and watched me wrestle a carton into place.