Sunday Dinners

Margaret had set the table the same way for thirty years. The good plates for the people who mattered. The everyday plates for everyone else. Nobody in the family had ever said a word about it, which was, Lena had come to understand, exactly how the arrangement worked.

Lena was the one who married in. For six years she had carried the gravy boat from the kitchen and tried to find the chair that would let her belong.

The chair

There was a chair at the far end of the table, next to the window. It was the chair Lena had been given on her first Sunday, with an apology from her husband that she had not understood until much later.

"It's nothing," he had said. "Mum likes the family close to her. You'll get used to it."

She had got used to it. She had also started counting, quietly, how often the seat beside Margaret was filled by someone else.

Being made to feel like a guest in your own marriage is a slow thing. It doesn't arrive as an insult. It arrives as a seating plan.

The thing about the will

The conversation turned, as it always did eventually, to the house. Margaret spoke about it the way other people speak about the weather, lightly, as though the outcome were already settled and merely waiting for the paperwork.

Lena listened. Then she asked a question that nobody had asked before, and the room went very still.

She did not get an answer that night. She got a kitchen full of silence, and a husband who, for the first time in six years, would not look at her across the table.

Sunday dinners went on. Lena stopped going to every one.

This is a fictional demo story. Its characters and events are invented.