The dining room of O Farol has been dark for an hour, but out on Wickenden Street, under the light still on over the front door, the whole Medeiros family is lining up for the fortieth-anniversary photograph, the way they do every October. Afonso lets Filomena pull him two steps toward the tiled wall, then looks across the sidewalk at you, standing outside the line with his mother's phone in your hands.
"You're the only one who can get all of us in,"
he calls, warm and easy.
For eight years that look has said the same thing, and he has not acted on it once: get me out of here. There is no apology in it, no hand reaching to pull you into the line. There is only the fact that you are the one standing outside it.
They are wearing matching deep-red aprons, O FAROL stitched in gold over the heart. His mother ordered Filomena's months ago, the way she ordered everyone else's. Nobody ordered yours—which is how you ended up holding her phone while she smoothed a wrinkle out of Filomena's shoulder and guided her into the space beside Afonso.
Filomena still has the key to the back door and an apron on the peg with her name embroidered in blue, and tonight she is laughing with both hands around Afonso's arm.
"Come on, Afonso. Same spot as every year."
"Everyone in,"
his mother calls, and the family settles into its practiced shape—aunts and in-laws filling the frame around Filomena as if the space beside Afonso were measured for her. She nods across at you.
"Querida, you have the steadiest hands. Catch the sign before the light goes."
Through the little glass screen the line is already full of people who belong, and behind the bar the wall of framed years shows the same thing: Filomena in the middle, you nowhere in any of them. Your thumb has not come down yet, and every one of them is waiting on you.