I went back into the bedroom and turned on the TV to a channel that Helen’s set couldn’t receive—she didn’t have cable—so that a variable fuzzy noise filled the room. I dialed my parents’ line, and made a point of pausing between sentences to reproduce the effect of a bad transatlantic connection. I sang “Happy Birthday” as I had done on my mother’s birthday morning every year. My mother told me that she was going to go out that evening for the first time since her hair had gone. “Your father’s made a reservation,” she said, and named a favorite restaurant as though it were the café at the gates of hell.

I remember that, when I was little, my father once came home without a cake for my mother’s birthday. She sat through her birthday dinner with a set expression, and my father couldn’t work out what was wrong; unsure whether there was really anything wrong at all, he preserved his sunny manner through two courses. At the end of the roast beef, he stood up to help clear the table. “And what’s for dessert?” he asked brightly.

“I didn’t get anything for dessert,” said my mother, “because I didn’t think it would be necessary this evening.” I can still hear the injury in her voice. Of course, my mother never ate cake, but she expected icing sugar and candles and she expected to be surprised. My father never failed again; cakes and champagne marked the passage of each of my mother’s years. Now, it was my mother who, for my father, was going to have a festive evening, to open presents and seem glad. “It’s the first evening out for the wig,” she said, as though it were anyone’s treat but her own.

• • •

I got to the restaurant half an hour early that evening, sat at our usual table, had a drink, and watched the other diners. I was calm in expectation of my mother’s arrival; I knew the facial expressions with which she always registered her surprise, and I looked forward to them placidly. I had worked out in advance all the nice things I would say about the wig, which my optimistic father had said looked so like her own hair that only she could tell the difference. I felt certain that I would make the day as rich for her as any of her birthdays had ever been.