Guest Pending
Patricia liked an audience.
She had the round oak table and the two leaf inserts and the rule about nobody starting to eat until she sat down, and she had refined over twenty-three years of Sunday dinners the particular art of the family gathering as theater, in which she was always the director and the lead and the final judge of how the performance had gone. She passed rolls like communion and corrected people with a laugh so soft you almost missed what it contained, which was the specific pleasure of a woman who has found a way to be unpleasant that cannot be directly named.
I had been attending these dinners for four years. I had learned the seating arrangement and the serving order and which topics led where and when the laugh meant something other than amusement. I had learned these things the way you learn the geography of a difficult landscape: not because you love it but because you need to navigate it and the navigation requires knowledge.
That Sunday she served ham with a honey glaze, green beans cooked with bacon until the color was gone from them, and the potato salad she always referred to as too rich for store people, by which she meant that people who shopped at certain stores would not understand it. I had brought iced tea in a plastic pitcher because Eric had asked me to make peace, which is what Eric always asked of me in relation to his mother, make peace, bring something, try harder, she means well underneath it.
I was trying. I was genuinely trying that afternoon.
Then she put the folders on the table.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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