The drive from Portland to Seattle takes roughly four hours if you stay on I-5 and don’t stop. I stopped twice—once for gas outside Olympia, and once at a rest area just south of Tacoma where I sat in my car with the engine running and stared at the gift bag on my passenger seat. Inside it was a silver picture frame I’d spent three weeks choosing, the kind with delicate scrollwork along the edges and a velvet backing that felt expensive even before you saw the price tag.
I’d imagined my parents opening it at their anniversary dinner, imagined my mother holding it up to the light and saying something like, “Oh, Ava, this is lovely.” I’d imagined wrong, of course. I’d been imagining wrong about my family for thirty-one years. But hope is a stubborn thing, and that night it had dressed itself up in silver wrapping paper and rode shotgun all the way to Seattle.
The restaurant was called Harborview, one of those waterfront places where the lighting is deliberately golden and the menus don’t list prices because the assumption is you can afford whatever you want. My father had chosen it, which meant Lauren had chosen it and my father had agreed. That was how decisions worked in our family—Lauren expressed a preference, my parents validated it, and if I happened to be in the room, someone might glance in my direction the way you’d glance at a coat rack to make sure it was still standing.
I arrived twelve minutes early because I always arrived early. It was a habit born from years of trying to prove something I could never quite name—that I was dependable, perhaps, or that I cared enough to be punctual, or simply that I existed and was willing to show up even when showing up cost me something. The hostess led me to a long table near the windows where the Puget Sound stretched out like dark silk beneath a violet sky.
Place cards had been arranged along the white tablecloth in my mother’s careful handwriting. I found mine at the far end, near the corner, almost behind a decorative pillar. Lauren’s was dead center, flanked by my parents on one side and her husband, Greg, on the other.
Their son Mason’s card sat between Greg and my Aunt Patricia, who adored him with the kind of blind devotion usually reserved for saints and golden retrievers. I set my gift bag beside my chair and sat down. The water glass was already filled, and I began turning it slowly with my fingertips—a nervous habit I’d developed in childhood, something to do with my hands when the rest of me felt like it was disappearing.
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