I put a stack of side plates down on the counter harder than I meant to and Rosalba said, without looking up, “Despacio.”

Then somebody started clapping — one person, then several, the way a room does when it desperately needs the moment to end — and the noise came back up, and I heard chairs, and I heard Gertrude saying “Liam, sweetheart, come and meet your great-uncle.”

She paraded him.

That is the correct word and I will not soften it.

For the next forty minutes she walked a ten-year-old boy around a private dining room from table to table like a prize, and he was polite and overwhelmed and hot in his good shirt, and nobody asked him a single thing about himself.

I plated forty-one desserts during that toast.