The Sunday dinners at my parents’ house always started the same way. My mother would make something that took all afternoon, my father would open a bottle of wine he’d been saving for a reason that didn’t quite materialize, and whoever arrived first would get recruited into setting the table.
That Sunday in March, I arrived first.
I was arranging the good cloth napkins — the ones my mother bought at a craft fair fifteen years ago and brings out whenever she wants the table to feel like an occasion — when Ethan and Olivia came through the front door. Olivia was carrying flowers, which was exactly the kind of thing she did. Pale yellow tulips in a grocery store wrapper, already trimmed to fit the vase she’d learned my mother kept on the windowsill.
My brother had been with Olivia for three years. They’d gotten engaged in October, at a rented cabin upstate, in a proposal Ethan described to me over the phone with genuine enthusiasm. She’d said yes before he finished the sentence. He’d sounded so happy that I’d felt something uncomplicated for about four minutes — just pleased for him, the way a sister should feel. Then he mentioned the venue they were already looking at, and my stomach did a small, quiet thing I couldn’t quite name.
That was five months ago.
Now it was March, the tulips were in the vase, and my mother was bringing out the roast she’d been tending since noon, and I understood — with the particular clarity of someone who has been here before — that this dinner had a purpose.