The Glass Of Water At The Lobster Dinner

Gordon died six years ago, on a Tuesday in October, of the heart the doctors had warned us about for a decade. I sold the diner two years after that, when my knees finally told me they were done standing twelve hour shifts, to a young couple from Aldridge who wanted to keep the name. I still drive past it sometimes. The rooster sugar bowl I used to keep behind the counter, chipped along one wing where a distracted teenager named Marcus Feld dropped it in 1998, sits on my kitchen windowsill now. I never could bring myself to throw it out.

The dinner invitation came ten days before it happened. Scott called and said Heather’s parents, Roger and Marlene, were driving up from Columbus and wanted to take everyone somewhere nice to celebrate his promotion at the insurance firm. Said it would be intimate. Said Heather had already picked the place, some restaurant in Aldridge called Corbett and Vane that had opened a few years back and was, according to Heather, one of the hardest reservations in the state.

I noticed the name on the confirmation text Scott forwarded me. Corbett and Vane. I remember smiling a little at the coincidence and thinking nothing more of it, because Corbett is not such an unusual name, and I had long since stopped expecting the world to hand me anything with my own name on it.

I got ready with more care than I wanted to admit, even to myself. The pearl gray dress I only wear for weddings and funerals. Small pearl earrings Gordon gave me the year the diner turned a real profit for the first time. A little lipstick. I even set my hair properly at the salon in town, because some foolish, hopeful part of me still believed that being treated with respect might begin with simply arriving looking like I deserved it.

Corbett and Vane sat on a corner in the restored part of downtown Aldridge, behind tall windows and a discreet brass sign, the kind of place where the host stand has a reservation book instead of a screen. High ceilings. White tablecloths. The kind of quiet that only very expensive rooms manage to hold onto even when they are full. The menus were black leather with no prices printed anywhere inside them.

Heather and her parents were already seated when I arrived, Roger in a blazer that fit like it had been tailored that week, Marlene in the kind of jewelry that makes a point of being noticed. Scott stood halfway up when I reached the table, the way a man rises when he has decided affection is something to ration rather than something to give freely, and sat back down before I had even settled into my chair.

My seat was at the corner. Not accidental. A chair placed just far enough off the main run of the table to make a point without anyone having to say it out loud.