Chapter 1 - Pasta Steam and the Empty Chair
The steam off the pasta would not stop rising. It curled up between me and my grandmother in the warm low light of the dining room, and for a second it blurred her face behind it. She was eating slow and neat, her blonde hair swept up the way it always was, her pearl bracelet clicking soft against her water glass every time she reached for it. My mom and dad were blurred shapes on either side of me, forks moving, nobody really talking. That was normal at her table. You ate what was put down and you waited to be spoken to.
What was not normal was the birthday. Her birthday was next Saturday, and all week at school I had been turning it over in my head like a good stone. I had already picked out the card with the pressed flowers from the drugstore. I had asked Mom if maroon was Grandma's favorite color because she wore that maroon blouse almost every time we came over. I did not want to get it wrong.
My name is Lily. I was twelve that fall, and that night I still thought birthdays meant everybody came.
Mom had served me first because the noodles were too hot. I watched the steam thin out and I twisted pasta around my fork the way Dad had taught me, against the spoon so it would not drip. The dining room lamps made everything yellow and close. Outside the windows it was already dark, but in here it was too warm. My sweater stuck a little at the back of my neck.
I looked at my grandmother down the table and I smiled before I even talked. I could hear how hopeful my voice sounded and I hated that for a second, then did it anyway.
"What should I wear?" I asked.
She did not look up right away. She finished chewing, wiped the corner of her mouth, set her fork down lined up straight beside her plate. Then she looked at me. Not mean. Just finished, like she had already decided this before we sat down.
"Oh, you're not invited to my birthday," she said.
My fork stopped halfway to my mouth. The pasta slipped back down. The steam kept coming up and I stared through it at my plate and could not make my eyes move. My ears went hot. I could hear the clock in the hallway ticking and somebody's glass sweating onto the wood. I counted the noodles on top of my pile so I would not cry. One. Two. Three. My hands were in my lap now. I did not remember putting them there.
Mom went very still beside me. I felt it more than I saw it, her knee pressing hard against the leg of the table, her breath catching and then going flat. Dad stopped chewing.
Mom's voice, when it came, was tight and careful. She was trying to keep it light and she couldn't.
"So Katie's kids aren't coming either?" she asked.
My grandmother tilted her head just a little, the pearls at her neck catching the light. She looked at my mother the way she looked at waiters when an order was wrong. Cold and sure.
May you like
"They're different," she said.
Nobody moved after that. The pasta went soft on my plate. My water glass had a fingerprint on it, mine, and I stared at that instead of at her. Mom's hand was close to mine under the table, not touching yet, just there, shaking a little. Dad's chair did not make a sound. My grandmother picked up her fork again.
