"Ma," Theresa said softly.
"I'm not saying anything." Rosemary put a piece of smelt in her mouth and chewed it and swallowed. "I'm not saying anything at all. It's Christmas. Paul, pass the flounder to your son. Joey, take some flounder, it doesn't have a face."
"It has a face, Grandma, it's right there."
"Then don't look at it."
Paul passed the flounder. Theresa met Lena's eyes across the table and shook her head, very slightly, a gesture that meant not now and also I know and also I'm sorry, all at once, in the private shorthand of sisters. Lena looked down at her plate. Under the table, something bumped against her ankle, and she looked down and saw Joey's sock foot, nudging her, and when she looked up he was gazing very hard at the ceiling, as if he had seen something fascinating up there in the light fixture.
She thought of the garage. She thought of being twelve and standing on a kitchen chair at that window over the sink, with her chin on her folded arms, watching the yellow square of light across the driveway where her father and a tall skinny boy with a bad haircut and a worse jean jacket leaned together into the open mouth of a car, their heads almost touching, her father pointing at something, the boy nodding. She remembered how her father laughed out there. It was a different laugh from the one he used at the dinner table, louder, rougher, a laugh he didn't seem to have any other place to use. She had wanted that laugh. She had wanted it so badly that one Saturday she had marched out to the garage in her school shoes and demanded to be shown how to change the oil, and her father had shown her, patiently, and she had gotten a streak of black on her good blouse and burst into tears, and the skinny boy had said something, she could not remember what, and she had thrown a wrench at him. It had missed by four feet and cracked a jar of washers on the pegboard. She had not gone back out.
She had not thought of that in years. She thought of it now, with the flounder looking up at her from its platter and her mother's knife going click, click, click against the good plate, and she understood something about herself that she did not like.
* * *