"That's what it's like."
"Every year?"
"Every year," said Gina, and then, because she had never in her life been able to leave a thing alone: "If you're around."
He was quiet for a moment. She felt his arms tighten around her.
"I'd like to be around," said Graham Ellsworth.
*
At the Feast of the Seven Fishes that night, there were nineteen people around a dining room table built for ten, and one extra folding table from the church basement pushed up against the end of it with a tablecloth that didn't match. Donna's four boys threw shrimp tails at each other under the table. Aunt Philomena did the baccalà again, and nobody said anything about last year, out of respect.
When Graham came in from the kitchen carrying a bowl of linguine with clams, which Rosemary had handed him as if he had been carrying bowls in her house for years, he found that there was a place set for him between Gina and Father Vince, and that at that place, propped against his water glass, was a small white card folded in half like a tent.