Daniel was standing at the sink when they arrived, holding a wineglass by its stem. It had a little price sticker on the foot, which he was trying to rub off under running water.
“Do you own any glasses?” he asked Mara.
“Some.”
“I meant good ones.”
“I haven't come to drink out of your hand.”
He looked at Iris, standing behind her mother with the green jacket over one arm. “See what you can do with her.”
“I've been trying for years.”
The kitchen smelled of roasted chicken. Elena was at the stove with a pan, turning the heat down. She looked over at Mara without a private signal. It made Mara feel, briefly, that the morning's conversation might not have happened. Then Elena asked Iris whether she had eaten, and Iris said she could eat again, and Mara recognized that she wasn't the only person who answered that question in this house.
Daniel put the glass on the counter. It matched three others, all with their little stickers still attached.
“Bought them this morning,” he said.
“Before or after?” Iris asked.
“After. Obviously. Before, we were drinking from jars like animals.”
“We didn't drink from jars,” Elena said.
“That's how I'll tell it. People like a journey.”
He had come in from buying a replacement part to find Elena waiting in the kitchen. She had called Mara afterward, asking her to bring Iris for the lunch they had been going to have anyway. Daniel had been in the background, saying he wanted to see the ticket, then saying he didn't want anybody carrying it around. The two requests had made Mara like him so much that she had promised both before sorting out which one she could do.
She showed him the photograph. He took her phone to the light, then away from it. He had already seen Elena's copy. The paper on her screen appeared no different.
“What are the other lines?” he asked.
“Other numbers.”
“I can see they're other numbers.”
“Then you're getting there.”
He grinned and held the phone toward Iris. She didn't take it.
“I've seen it, Uncle Dan.”
“You have to look at it here. It's different with the person in the room.”
Iris looked. Her hand came down on Mara's shoulder.
“It is weird,” she said.
“Thank you.” He gave the phone back, then took it again to look at the date. “And you haven't told anyone?”
Mara counted the people she had told that morning and the people they lived with. It had felt like almost nobody until she tried to number them.
“The people who need to know.”
“Right,” he said. “Nobody.”
The four of them sat around the table. The lamp parts had been cleared away, though Mara could see the dish towel folded beside Elena's bag on the counter. The bird began calling outside again. Daniel leaned past Mara to close the window because he couldn't hear the phone they had put in the middle of the table.
Leo answered from somewhere with traffic behind it.
“If this is a joke,” he said, “I'm hanging up.”
“No, you're not,” Daniel told him. “You call us back and we'll put you on hold.”
Mara heard the boy laugh. Not a boy now, though she kept the old name for his laughter, which had remained the same while the rest of him grew away from them.
“Mom?” Leo asked.
“I'm here.”
“You all right?”
Elena looked down at the chicken on her plate.
“Yes. I think so. It's a strange morning.”
“Dad sent me a message with five zeros missing. I thought you'd won enough for a used car.”
“I was excited,” Daniel said.
“You wrote one thousand, eight hundred and sixty.”
Iris put a hand over her mouth. Daniel looked offended, then bent toward the phone.
“You can have that bit. We'll keep the rest.”
They laughed together, and for a moment nobody was waiting for a different conversation. Mara took a piece of chicken and passed the dish to Elena, who moved the crisp skin toward her without asking. Iris ate the carrots Daniel had cooked with too much butter. Leo told them where he was, why he'd be late calling back, what he wanted them not to sign until somebody qualified had looked at it. Daniel said his son had got very old since moving away.
“I don't want you ending up on one of those programs,” Leo said.
“Too late,” Iris told him. “I've sold the story. We're being played by attractive people with complicated hair.”
When the call ended, Daniel took the phone off the table as if it were a plate he could put away.
“He's coming next weekend,” he said.
Elena lifted her head. “He said he might.”
“He will now.”
“Ask him.”
“I will ask him.”
He began cutting another slice of chicken. The knife was blunt, and he changed it for one from the drawer, making a great show of the extraordinary life they could lead once they had bought a knife that worked. Iris told him he owned several. He said then they could afford someone to remember where they were.
Mara was happy. It caught her unprepared, after the morning's tears and the ticket on its plate and Elena looking at her as though she could see all the way through the generous thing she had come to do. She wanted to keep eating here, with everyone able to be funny at once, none of them required to explain the long private part of what they meant.
Daniel said, “We'll have to work out where everybody goes.”
Elena's fork stopped.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you're not staying here.” He looked at Mara. “Either of you. Not if we can do something better.”
“You'd better get your share checked first,” Iris said.
“I'm thinking. We're allowed to think.”
“I like my apartment.”
“You like the people downstairs. You can take them.”
“I can't take my downstairs neighbors.”
“Why not? Everybody's being difficult before we've bought anything.”
Elena put her fork down. Mara saw it and took another carrot.
“Thursday's still Thursday,” Elena said.
Daniel looked at her, then at Mara.
“We're having lunch.”
“I know.”
“I haven't said anything about Thursday.”
“You said we'd work out where everybody goes.”
“That's what I mean. If you want somewhere different, let's at least look at what's possible now.”
Mara heard the good sense in it. There was no need to choose a cheap room on a bad afternoon when everything had changed overnight. She did not say this. Elena had asked her for one thing, and the car was hers, and the bags were already partly packed.
“She's got something arranged,” she said.
Elena looked at her. Daniel kept his eyes on the carving knife.
“I know she has.”
“We can still help her.”
“I haven't said we can't.”
Iris reached for the chicken dish. Her bracelet caught the handle of the gravy pitcher, dragging it a little way across the table. She stopped it just before it tipped.
“Sorry.”
“Here.” Daniel moved the pitcher out of her reach. “How many people did you drive yesterday?”
She told him about a man who had complained that the bus was going where it said it was going. Daniel wanted to know where else he'd expected it to go. Iris said apparently she should have asked him before deciding. Elena laughed, and the meal found a way to continue.
Afterward Daniel brought out the four new glasses. He had filled them with a little sparkling wine from a bottle somebody had once given him for repairing a refrigerator. He filled Mara's less because she was driving, then said she could leave it if she wanted. She thanked him and put it beside her, hardly touched.
“To the girls,” he said.
“Women,” Iris said.
“I haven't finished. To the girls who became women while I was finding the glasses.”
Elena raised hers. Mara did too. The rims touched in the middle of the table, a hard, clear little sound.
“You did it,” he told Elena.
She looked at him, holding the glass at her chin.
“We bought a ticket.”
“You kept buying it. That's something.”
For a moment her expression softened. He was proud of her, without trying to take any of the credit. Mara could see that Elena knew it. She wanted to make something of the look, to keep it for Thursday, but then Iris was asking whether anyone wanted coffee and Elena was standing to make it.
Mara followed her to the sink with the plates. They stood shoulder to shoulder while Daniel and Iris tried to call Leo back, each blaming the other's phone.
“I didn't change the plan,” Mara said quietly.
“You said we.”
“What?”
“We can still help her.”
Mara looked at the plate in her hands.
“I meant I'd come.”
Elena took the plate and ran it under the water. There was nothing else Mara could usefully carry. She dried her hands and went back to the table, where her brother was holding two phones to the same ear.