The dining room still smelled of rosemary and beef stew and warm bread and candle wax when Linda made her announcement, and for one more second before she opened her mouth, I let myself believe the evening could still be saved.
I had been telling myself that for hours, the way you tell yourself a headache will pass if you just keep working through it. The stew was warm. The bread was fresh from the oven, the crust crackling when I sliced it. The table looked almost exactly the way it had on the holidays back when Anthony was still alive, the good china out, two candles burning, everything in its place, except for his chair at the head of the table, which had stayed empty for years because I had never once been able to bring myself to let anyone else sit in it.
I had spent the whole day in a state I recognized from a long time ago, from the early years of my marriage when money was tight and company was coming and I wanted so badly for everything to be nice. It is a particular kind of hope, the hope of a woman standing over a stove, the belief that if the food is good enough and the table is pretty enough and the candles are lit, then the people who gather around it will become, for one evening, the best versions of themselves. I had believed it that morning. I had believed it while the stew simmered and the house filled with the smell of it. I went on believing it right up until Linda pointed at my back door, and even then, for one more second, some stubborn part of me was still reaching for it.
Dylan’s spoon stopped halfway to his mouth. He was nine, my great-grandson, and he had the particular stillness children get when they sense a storm in a room full of adults who are all pretending the sky is clear. Sarah’s nervous little laugh died before it fully escaped her. My son, Edward, stared down at the plate I had filled for him, studying the gravy as if the answer to everything might be hiding under a piece of potato.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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