Chapter 7 - The Sunday Dinner That Wasn't
By Sunday afternoon, the sleet had turned into a steady, gray rain that washed the last of the yellow leaves into the street gutters.
The Hendrick family group chat, which had been silent since Thursday afternoon, suddenly chimed at four-fifteen.
Brenda: Dinner is at six. Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Graham, please bring the carving set your father left in your basement.
No mention of Thursday. No mention of the turkey that had vanished into North York. No mention of Renee’s visit to my hallway twenty-four hours earlier.
In Brenda’s world, reality was an Etch A Sketch: if something uncomfortable happened, you simply shook the frame until the gray screen cleared, set the table for the next meal, and expected everyone to sit in their assigned chairs with their hands in their laps.
Graham walked into our bedroom with his phone in his hand. He was wearing his good corduroy trousers and the brown leather shoes he always wore to his parents’ house on Sundays.
“Are you getting dressed?” he asked.
I was sitting on the edge of the bed in my jeans and an old wool sweater, folding Theo’s laundry into two neat stacks.
“No,” I said.
He stopped two feet from the dresser, his shoulders slumping in that familiar, aggrieved posture of a man who believed that peace was something you achieved by complying with the loudest person in the room.
“Margo, come on. It’s Sunday dinner. She’s making the roast beef. She’s trying to reset things.”
“She’s not resetting anything, Graham,” I said, setting a pair of small striped socks onto the pile. “She’s pretending Thursday didn't happen so she doesn't have to apologize. There’s a difference.”
“She is never going to apologize!” he shouted, the frustration finally cracking through his professional veneer. “She’s seventy years old! She doesn't know how to apologize! Why can't you just accept that about her and let us have a normal weekend?”
“Because it isn't normal!” I stood up, facing him across the unmade bed. “It isn't normal to go to a house where your wife is treated like an inconvenience and your son is treated like an afterthought! It isn't normal to spend three days recovering from a four-hour dinner! If you want to go eat roast beef with people who make you feel small, you go right ahead. But Theo and I are staying here.”
He looked at me as if I had spoken in a foreign language.
“You’re not letting me take Theo?”
“I’m not letting you take Theo into an environment where he learns that love is something you earn by being criticized,” I said. “If your parents want to see their grandson, they can drive twenty minutes south, walk up our steps, sit on our sofa, and drink tea from my mother’s pottery mugs. They have our address. They’ve had it for seven years.”
“They’re old, Margo! The drive into the city stresses my father!”
“Your father drove forty miles to a golf tournament in Caledon last weekend, Graham,” I said flatly. “His knees work fine when he wants them to.”
He stared at me, his chest heaving, his fingers clenching around his phone until the plastic case creaked.
“This is an ultimatum,” he said.
“No,” I replied, walking past him toward the hallway to check on Theo’s bath. “It’s a boundary. You’re just so used to having none that it feels like a wall.”
He stood in the bedroom for five minutes in silence. I could hear the floorboards creaking as he shifted his weight, the sound of the rain against the window, the distant sound of Theo singing a song about tugboats from the living room rug.
Then I heard his heavy leather shoes go down the stairs.
The front door opened. The cold air rushed into the lower hall. The latch clicked shut.
May you like
He didn't take the carving set.
I stood at the top of the stairs, looking down at the empty hall runner, listening to the sound of his car engine turning over in the drive, backing out into the wet street, and disappearing toward the highway.
