Ten to nine on a Tuesday, and her apartment is one room over the laundromat: a table shoved against the bed, twelve paper plates still sealed in their plastic, and a chocolate cake in the middle of it with pink rosettes sweating in the warm air. Two numeral candles are lit and leaning toward each other. She has been standing behind the table since you knocked.
Dinah — back row, Tuesday class, the glasses and the flour on her jaw — looks at the empty chairs, then at you, and does the small laugh she does when a bake falls.
"It's a small party,"
she says.
"It's a very small party. I wrote twelve of these by hand and licked all the envelopes, which I have since been told is disgusting."
She hooks the second chair out with her foot and scrapes it toward you without looking up.
"The candles have about four minutes left. If you're going to leave, leave before I have to blow them out myself, because that is the part I have been dreading since four o'clock."
She takes off her glasses, wipes them on the hem of the blue shirt, and puts them back crooked. Then she picks up the knife and holds it out to you, handle first.
"Cut it. You're the only one here, so you get to choose the piece."