The birthday party where she didn't sit on the cooler

Dana carried the cooler in from the curb herself, which made her sister nervous.

"That's forty pounds of ice," Celia said, following her across the lawn with a sheet cake in both hands and one small sandal hooked on her finger. "You don't have to prove anything."

"I'm not proving anything. It's a cooler."

She set it down by the back fence. Same fence, same backyard, same rented bounce house wheezing itself upright on the grass with a sandbag on each corner. Two years earlier, in almost exactly that spot, she had sat down on a cooler the minute she arrived and stayed there for two hours while the party happened around her.

Celia looked at the cooler, then at Dana, and decided to let it go. She has been Dana's older sister for thirty-eight years and knows which things to let go the first time.

The kids' table

The birthday boy was Nico, turning eight. He is technically their cousin Lorena's son, but in their family anyone who sits at the kids' table counts as a cousin, and anyone who can reach the grill counts as an uncle. Three of the uncles were already at the grill, disagreeing about charcoal.

Last year Dana had missed the party entirely. She'd been on the schedule that night and couldn't find anyone to trade with, so she sent a dinosaur kit and a video of herself singing happy birthday from her car on the third level of the parking garage, badly, at six in the evening, in scrubs.

This year she put in for the day in July, the morning the schedule opened. It landed on her second day off.

For a long time, the second day off had been the wet-sand day. She came off three nights on Friday morning, slept her window with the box fan going, and woke at noon on Saturday braced out of habit for the tax to come due. It didn't. She felt like what she was: a night nurse who had worked thirty-six hours that week and slept well afterward. Tired in the ordinary way. Not bouncing off anything.

What she noticed, standing in the backyard with a paper cup of lemonade, was that she wasn't looking for somewhere to sit.

Base

Pilar, Celia's oldest, is nine and runs every game at every family party whether or not anyone has asked her to. Around three o'clock she announced tag. The cooler was base. You could only stay on base for a count of five. She looked around for someone to be it and picked Dana, because Dana was the grown-up standing closest and, as Pilar put it, "you're not doing anything."

So Dana was it.

She chased Nico around the bounce house twice before she caught him by the piñata, a lopsided shark hanging from the lemon tree. She chased Pilar the length of the yard and lost her behind the folding tables. She got winded, put her hands on her knees, and wheezed a little, which the children found so funny that two of them ran back toward her on purpose just to watch it happen again. She caught one of them. She got grass stains on both knees of her jeans and a scrape on her elbow from a fence post she should have seen coming. A four-year-old she was only loosely related to informed her that her tag didn't count, because he was the birthday boy's friend.

Every so often she glanced toward the patio, where Celia sat with the aunts under the umbrella. Every time, Celia was already looking at her.

Around the cake, Celia cut the slices and passed plates down the line. When she got to Dana she held one out, and Dana took it and kept standing, eating with a plastic fork while Pilar explained the new rules, which were mostly the old rules but in Pilar's favor.

"Two years ago I had to bring your plate over to you," Celia said, quietly, so the aunts wouldn't turn around.

"You were being nice."

"I was being worried." Celia cut the next slice. "I'm allowed to stop now?"

Dana thought about it the way she thinks about most things now, carefully, without claiming more than she knew. About the green notebooks. The winter she stopped running and had to start again. Her doctor, the box fan, Kemi talking the whole first mile. The thing she had researched and checked before she trusted it, and the months when none of it seemed to be doing anything at all.

"Mostly," she said.

Celia seemed to find that more convincing than a yes.

One more round

The bounce house came down at dusk. It folds in on itself slowly, like a tired animal lying down, and every kid at the party stood around to watch it go. Then they wanted one more round of tag before the cars left, and nobody had the heart to say no.

The porch light came on. The cooler, emptied of everything but meltwater and one orange soda, was still base. Celia sat on it with Nico's new dinosaur in her lap and enforced the count of five.

Dana was it again. She faced the fence, covered her eyes, and counted to ten out loud, slowly, so everyone would have a fair start.

Somewhere around seven she heard the cooler lid creak and a pair of sandals slap off across the grass.

At ten she opened her eyes and turned around. The whole yard was running. Pilar, Nico, the cousins who were cousins and the ones who only counted as cousins, and Celia, with a plastic dinosaur in one hand, laughing, heading for the lemon tree as fast as her sandals would let her.

The cooler sat by the fence with its lid up, and nobody on it.