A Place at the Table by White Susan Rebecca

Author:White, Susan Rebecca [White, Susan Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction, Literary, Retail, Fiction
ISBN: 9781451608892
Amazon: B00A280YMY
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 2013-01-01T07:00:00+00:00

Part Three

Amelia in Connecticut

13

Empty Nest

(Old Greenwich, Connecticut, 1989)

Late last night I returned home from my trip down to Atlanta, where I was helping our older daughter, Lucy, move into her freshman dorm at Emory University. Two weeks earlier my husband, Cam, and I dropped off Mandy, our youngest, at boarding school. Even though I was a boarding school kid myself, I was disheartened when Mandy asked if she could apply to Hotchkiss, then begged to be allowed to attend once she was accepted. While I had needed to escape my parents’ home, I liked to believe I had created a warm, safe nest for our daughters, a place I might have to give them a gentle push to dislodge them from. But that was not to be. Mandy flew out prematurely, and even our shy Lucy turned and headed back toward her dormitory before I had even pulled the rental car away from the curb.

Despite the melancholy I feel over the absence of our daughters, I decide to approach our first official night as empty nesters as a celebratory occasion. I take a cue from the playbook of Taffy, my southern mother-in-law, setting the table with good china, cloth napkins, the sterling silver that Taffy insisted Cam and I register for when we got engaged, the Baccarat crystal. I light the long white candles in the silver candleholders. I prepare Cam’s favorite meal: steak with béarnaise sauce, twice-baked potatoes, green beans sautéed in butter with almond slivers, and vanilla ice cream with homemade chocolate sauce for dessert.

Cam doesn’t speak much during dinner, other than to comment that everything is delicious. He wears his pin-striped suit from work, his red tie still on. I keep stealing glances at him, as if we are on a first date and I am trying to discover who he is. He is almost a handsome man. I mean, he is handsome, in that he dresses well and keeps in shape and has green eyes with long lashes. But his forehead is too wide and there is a beefiness to his lips that always makes me think of Vienna sausages. They’re strange things, those Vienna sausage lips. They are sexy to kiss, warm and thick and molten. Cam can get me wet just by kissing. But they indicate petulance.

After dinner, as I begin cleaning up, Cam lets our dog, Sadie, into the backyard for her nightly pee. We had another dog, Cleo, who died a few months ago, a reality I have not entirely adjusted to. Sometimes I’ll look at the couch and see Cleo lying on the back cushions, or see her little face pressed against the lowest of the windowpanes that frame the back door. It is so natural to see her waiting to be let in that I will head to the door to do so and then, halfway there, realize that what I saw was an illusion, a trick, the brain filling in what it expects to see, creating substance out of nothing at all.

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