I had been performing a version of this calculation for three years. Longer, if I counted the months of engagement when I had told myself that David’s passivity was a kind of gentleness, that his deference to his mother was simply the loyalty of a devoted son, that the things I found troubling would naturally resolve once we were properly settled into our life together. The arrival of a baby, I had believed with the particular optimism of someone who wants very much to believe, would shift things. It would make him present in a way he had not yet been. It would make him protective.
He was not going to become that man. I understood this now with a completeness that surprised me by how little it hurt, as though the grieving had happened gradually, over many ordinary evenings, and I was only now catching up to what my instincts had already finished processing.
I loaded the final platter and carried dinner to the table.
✦ ✦ ✦
The table looked the way Eleanor required it to look. The good china, the silver candlesticks, the folded cloth napkins she had brought in a bag from her car because she did not trust me to fold them correctly. Twenty people settled into their seats with the comfortable noise of a family that had been gathering like this for decades and had no reason to expect that today would be any different from any other holiday.
I walked to my chair at the head of the table and sat down. The simple act of sitting was so immediately, profoundly relieving that I allowed myself a single quiet exhale before I reached for my fork. I had eaten nothing since five-thirty that morning, half a piece of toast before the cooking began. My hands were trembling slightly. The plate in front of me held mashed potatoes and gravy, and I was focused on it with the single-minded concentration of someone who has been running on adrenaline for hours and is finally in sight of the finish line.
I leaned forward and brought the fork toward my mouth.
The blow came without warning. A hard, flat-palmed shove against the back of my neck, driving my face directly into the plate. The hot gravy hit my cheek first. The mashed potatoes filled my nose. For a fraction of a second, the only thing I registered was the physical shock of it, the sudden sensory overload, the adrenaline spike moving through my pregnant body in a single cold wave.
“Sit up straight!” Eleanor snapped. “You’re hunched over your food like a peasant. Show some decency at my family’s table.”
The room had gone completely silent. Twenty people with their forks suspended. The only sound was the soft, ambient tick of the grandfather clock in the hallway.
