best impression, but I didn’t want her to think I was nuts. I thought about putting the knife back, but decided against it. I’d never be able to eat and act normal with it sitting there staring at me.
“I hope you like beef, dear,” she said as she looked back up, a pleasant smile on her face.
I thought about the knife again. Maybe in the land of the rich, beef didn’t require one. Not like the tough three-dollar kind of “steaks” I could occasionally afford. “I love it,” I told her honestly.
The talk was small. Exceptionally small. She didn’t bring up Mom and neither did I. Neither of us mentioned my father or my mother’s eventual husband, Alan Brahms, and I was grateful for that. I didn’t ever want to talk about either of them.
The fact that a man came in and out, filling water glasses and putting dishes in front of us, was surprisingly uncomfortable. I had thought it would be just like a restaurant, but it wasn’t. It felt like I should be the one serving dinner to him. He was wearing a black suit and I was in a Henley, for fuck’s sake.
When he replaced our empty soup bowls with plates of seriously fancy bacon wrapped steak and asparagus spears with bright yellow sauce, he closed the door behind him, and I couldn’t hold myself to conversations on how chilly this autumn was anymore.
“Why did you invite me here?”
She didn’t seem taken aback, but the question definitely bothered her. Her lips tightened, and she stared at her dinner plate for a moment before picking up her fork. She reached for her knife, then glanced up at me, and didn’t pick it up. Instead, she cut into the steak with her fork. She took a bite, chewing it slowly, eyes distant and thoughtful.
“I only had two children. Your mother and an older boy, Roger. Roger is his father’s son, through and through. Your mother was . . .” Her face went slack as she stared off into space. “She was what I always wanted for myself. She grew the backbone I always dreamed of, told her family she wouldn’t accept the marriage they arranged, and cut her own path in life.”
I blinked in shock. My mother had graduated college in nineteen-ninety. She hadn’t been born in the dark ages and raised in a convent. Who the hell was arranging marriages in the fucking nineties?
She didn’t wait for me to respond, just went on. “When your mother refused to marry the man her father chose, he cut her out of our lives. Even when you were born, he didn’t have any interest in changing that, since you weren’t the”—she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then looked up at me, meeting my eye as she continued—“you weren’t the grandchild he wanted. He didn’t like your father.”
I couldn’t keep in a bitter chuckle at that, and when she looked up at me, I shrugged. “I mean, he wasn’t wrong. My father was an ass.”
“I realized that last year after your grandfather died. I contacted your father in hope that it would . . . smooth the way to speak to you. He told me if you ‘took up’ with me, he would disown you.” She sighed and stared at her plate some more. “I had already waited thirty years to speak to you. It didn’t seem likely that you’d have much interest in me contacting you, so I did what I always do. I let someone else tell me how to live my life.”
For a long time, all I could do was stare at her. I tried to see any of my mother in her, but it wasn’t there. She was at least forty years older than my mother would ever be. But there was something else. Something in her lack of eye contact, her defeated posture, and the way she’d spent decades letting someone else run her life.
There was me.
“Sounds like your husband was an ass, too,” I said, finally cutting a piece off the steak. The bacon was the hardest part to cut through, the meat parting easily under the solid silver fork. No doubt it was actual silver, too. The old families ate off silver because it grounded magic, so it stunted people’s abilities to fling spells at the dinner table. That way you could invite your political enemies to eat and be mostly sure it wouldn’t lead to bloodshed.
Her shoulders trembled, and for a