The dining room table had both leaves in. The good tablecloth, the one with the lace border, the good dishes with the silver rim. Lena set out the lemon wedges and the bread and the butter in its glass dish and the bottle of Chianti in its straw basket, which nobody would drink, and the bottle of Lambrusco, which everybody would. She set six places and then stood with her hand on the back of the sixth chair, which was at the head of the table, and did not know what to do.
"Leave it," Theresa said behind her, quietly, carrying the calamari. "She wants it set."
So they sat down to dinner with an empty chair at the head of the table and a plate in front of it with nothing on it, and Rosemary said grace, the short version, and at the end of it she said, "And for Frank," in exactly the same voice she would use to say pass the bread, and everyone said amen, and Paul reached for the Lambrusco.
For a while it was almost ordinary. Paul talked about the Browns, who had gone twelve and four and had the best record in the conference and a young quarterback from Youngstown with an arm like a rifle and the gait of a man in a sack race, and how this was the year, this was finally the year, they were going to go all the way. Joey talked about Lazer Tag, which he had wanted with the burning intensity of a religious conversion since he had seen the commercial in October, and how Kevin Shea's cousin in Akron already had it, both guns and both sensors, and how you could play it in the dark. Theresa talked about the mall, which had been insane, a madhouse, she'd waited forty minutes outside the Kay-Bee Toys and twenty in line at the Orange Julius and had seen a woman nearly come to blows with another woman over the last Cabbage Patch preemie at Sears. Rosemary said very little. She ate a single smelt, cutting it into three pieces. She refilled the bread basket twice although no one had emptied it.
Then Joey, reaching for the shrimp, said in the bright, casual voice of a child who has been holding a piece of news under his tongue like a jawbreaker for an hour, "Aunt Lena had a snowball fight with Danny Rourke and she hit him right in the chest."
The table went quiet.
"Joey," Theresa said.
"She did, though."