Chapter 2 - The Table with Extra Places
The dining table was oak, fifteen feet long, cut from a single trunk that Charles had bought off an estate in Virginia when I was six years old. It had twenty-four legs, all carved like lion paws, and it was polished twice a week with turpentine and beeswax until you could see the grain of the wood five inches deep under the surface.
I sat at the far end, near the sideboard where the silver coffee pots were kept warm over small blue alcohol flames.
They hadn't set a place for me.
Mrs. Gable had tried—she had come out of the kitchen with a plate and a cloth napkin folded into a triangle—but my father had stopped her with a small movement of his left index finger.
"She's not staying for dinner," he had said without looking up from his beef. "She's just passing through."
So I sat on the low wooden bench by the window, my back against the cold glass, holding a glass of tap water that Amanda had brought me when Charles wasn't looking.
The water tasted of iron and soft city pipes.
"You're bleeding through the cloth," Amanda whispered. She was sitting on the edge of the bench beside me, her cream dress pulled tight around her knees so it wouldn't touch the hem of my jacket. "Evelyn, let me go get my bag from the car. That looks like a four-inch laceration."
"It's three," I said. "And it's closed."
"It's not closed. The scab is sticking to your trousers. If you move your leg, it's going to open again."
"Then I won't move my leg."
Across the table, my brother Daniel was cutting his meat with small, surgical precision. He was forty-two, two years older than me, and he had his father's eyes—that faint, pale grey that looked like pond ice before it breaks. He was an executive vice president at a logistics firm in Wilmington that did sixty million a year in defense sub-contracts.
He hadn't looked at me directly since I came in.
"Daniel," Charles said, leaning forward over his plate. "Tell Henderson about the port contract."
Daniel set his knife down. "It's cleared committee, Dad. We get the light-rail access at the south quay starting in November."
"Good," Charles said. He looked around the table, his chest swelling slightly under his blazer. "That's how things get done. Strategy. Patience. Not chasing after every small fire with a bucket of water."
He glanced at me then—just a flick of the eyelids toward the bench in the corner.
"Some people spend twenty years in the service and come out with nothing more than a ruined back and a stack of yellow paper," Charles continued, his voice dropping into that rhythmic, rhythmic cadence he used for speeches at the yacht club. "No capital. No equity. Just a pension that won't cover the tax on a decent lot in county."
"Dad," Amanda said again. Her voice was sharper this time.
"I'm merely making an observation, Amanda," he said mildy. "Evelyn chose her path. She wanted the excitement. She wanted to be the girl who flies through storms while her brother stays home and builds something that lasts."
"She was at sea, Charles," said Mrs. Vance, an older woman whose husband owned two dry docks in Norfolk. She had known my mother before the divorce. "They said on the news there was a carrier group stuck near the shoals yesterday."
"The news," Charles said with a short, barking laugh. "The news makes every breakdown sound like the Battle of Midway. It was probably a stalled diesel or a broken pipe on a tug. They always exaggerate to keep the budget up."
I looked at my fingernails.
There was still sand under the thumb on my right hand. Not ordinary beach sand—black, heavy mineral sand from the bank where the second engine had gone down. We had dug three men out of that bank with our hands while the water came up over our knees. One of them had been sixteen years old, an apprentice machinist from Ohio who kept asking if his mother was going to get his watch back if the salt water ruined it.
I had the watch in my pocket right now.
It was a cheap Timex with a blue plastic strap, wrapped in a piece of greaseproof paper from my field ration. I was supposed to give it to a lieutenant colonel at the gate in the morning so it could go back with the personal effects.
"Evelyn," my father said, his voice cutting through the hum of the silver coffee pots. "Are you going to stay in that jacket all night, or are you going to go upstairs and clean yourself up so my guests don't have to look at the mud?"
"I'm leaving in ten minutes," I said.
"Good. Because the smell of kerosene is starting to ruin the meat."
A young woman at the middle of the table—Daniel’s new assistant, a girl with bright teeth and a pearl necklace that looked brand new—looked over at me with a soft, sympathetic smile that made me want to kick her chair over.
"It must be very hard," she said in a small, flute-like voice. "Being out there in the cold."
"It's not cold," I said. "It's just wet."
"Evelyn doesn't feel the cold," Charles said, rising from his seat with his glass in hand. He tapped the side of the crystal with his gold ring—ding, ding, ding. "She's like her mother's family from Maine. Very sturdy. Very practical. Not much given to... refined feelings."
The guests turned their heads toward him.
"I want to thank you all for coming tonight," Charles began, his voice taking on that smooth, resonant tone that had sold forty thousand shares of stock in ninety-eight. "Seventy-one years is a long time to watch the world change. Some things get better. Some things get softer. But in this house, we still believe in the old things. Production. Results. Order."
He looked down the length of the table, his eyes lingering on Daniel, then on Amanda, and finally dropping past me as if the bench by the window were empty.
"We believe that a man's worth is measured by what he leaves behind—not by the noise he makes while he's doing it."
He raised his glass. "To continuity."
"To continuity," the table murmured.
They were all standing now, their glasses raised, their faces lit from below by the small candles floating in the crystal bowls along the runner.
The front door bell rang.
It wasn't the soft, musical chime that Charles had installed for the garden parties. It was the loud, double-stroke rattle of the old mechanical bell on the side porch—the one that was connected to the heavy iron gate at the bottom of the drive.
Nobody moved for a second.
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"Mrs. Gable," Charles called toward the kitchen door, his voice sharp with annoyance. "Did someone leave the outer latch open?"
The bell rang again. Longer this time. Three sharp, metallic clangs that vibrated through the oak panels of the front hall.
