Chapter 24: Twenty-Nine

The year I turned twenty-nine, the cake came out of my own oven.

It was lopsided, because the oven in the flat ran hot on the left, and I had written that down in the folder under Landlord, Complaints.

Elias stood behind me in the narrow kitchen, holding the candles in one fist.

"Twenty-nine," he said. "That's a lot of candles."

"Put them in."

"You'll set off the smoke alarm."

"I'll write that down too."

He put them in.

The seventy-dollar table was now pushed against two other tables from the thrift shop, with a bedsheet across all three for a cloth.

There were seven chairs around it, and none of them matched.

The receptionist had come early to arrange the plates, and she had put a vase of roses in the middle.

They were not red.

"These ones are yellow," she said. "I'm trying to get you over it."

The park I had designed on the waterfront had opened in June.

There was no fountain, so the boardwalk did not ice, and a woman had written to the studio to say her daughter had learned to ride a bike on it.

Elias had read that letter aloud at a team lunch, and I had stared at my plate through the whole thing.

By seven the flat was full.

Dean came in first, with a bottle of something and a duffel bag.

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