“Steel. Like you drew. Relax.”
I left.
Behind me, I heard the click of his desk drawer locking.
Guests started arriving at four.
The caterer was short-handed.
Someone passed me a tray of sparkling wine.
I took it automatically.
That was how things often happened in my family. A task appeared, I was nearby, and somehow that became enough reason for it to belong to me.
A woman in a camel coat took one look at my gray sweater and the tray.
“Are you with the caterer?”
Mom was close enough to hear.
“Dina’s the practical one,” she said. “She’d rather stay off camera.”
The woman took a glass.
I considered telling her my name.
Instead, I kept moving so nobody would bump the tray.
On the console near the dining room was the seating chart in Mom’s copper-colored handwriting.
I read every name twice.
I knew exactly how Mom wrote my name.
It wasn’t there.
Later, one of Glenn’s clients stopped in the dining-room doorway.
Laura Prescott.
She looked at the pale marble covering the far wall.
A violet streak ran through one slab like a horseshoe.
“Where did this come from?” she asked.
I opened my mouth.
Glenn called her from across the room.
“Laura!”
She turned and joined him.
I watched her go.
The stone bothered me.
It was not what I had specified.
Glenn had changed the finish during construction, which was not unusual by itself, but I had never received an updated materials schedule.
I added that to the growing list of questions I planned to ask when the dinner was over.
Kelsey started her livestream at six.
She placed her phone on a tripod and spent twenty minutes talking viewers through the flowers, the candles, the table setting, and the room.
“My mom wanted something timeless,” she said to the camera.
I was standing near the kitchen.
She never mentioned who designed it.
Mom circled the table touching napkins.
Glenn asked me to bring another case of wine from downstairs.
I carried the crate upstairs against my hip.
Halfway up the steps, I heard Glenn raise his glass.
“To my girls, Sharon and Kelsey, who make this house what it looks like.”
Twelve glasses lifted.
I stood outside the frame holding the wine.
A young catering worker named Tyler saw me.
“I can get that.”
“I’ve got it.”
The crate left red pressure lines across my palms when I set it beside the bar.
At some point, someone had tied a linen apron around me.
I don’t remember who.
I found Mom in the pantry holding dessert plates toward the light, checking them for spots.
“Mom.”
She kept turning the plate.
“It’s my birthday.”
She looked at the clock.
Then at me.
“Oh, that was today.”
For half a second, I thought she might laugh from embarrassment.
She didn’t.
“We’ll do something next week.”
She set the plate down.
“Make sure you clean up after us. The caterers leave at nine.”
Kelsey appeared behind her with her phone angled toward the floor.
“Can you take the garbage out before the dessert shot? The bags are in frame.”
I untied the apron.
Folded it.
Placed it beside the plates.
“I heard you,” I told Mom.
Then I went downstairs.
I packed my laptop.
Three days of clothes.