Page 178 of Sweet Ruin

“Yeah,” he growls. “Oh.”

There’s a fuzzy, warm feeling that happens in my chest when someone compliments my work, but it’s not pride. It’s not really a comfortable feeling at all, at least not for me. It’s my brain running around looking for the exit, for the obvious joke. Well, it’s really just butter and time. Anybody could do it. I have been doing it since I was nineteen.

For the first time, I make myself stand in the heat and just take it.

“Okay,” I say. “It’s good.”

“What is?” he asks, clearly pushing me toward the answer he has in mind.

“The food. My food.” I clear my throat. “They come back because it’s good.”

“Say the rest of it.”

“There is no⁠—”

But he glares at me until I fold. “Fine. Okay. They come back because it’s good,” I say, “because I made it, and I’m good.”

Finally, he smiles. “There. Was that so hard?”

“Yes, actually. It was excruciating. I need to lie down.”

And then, because why stop at excruciating when agonizingly torturous is still available, my phone goes off on the shelf beside the register.

Call from: MOM.

It’s the first time her name has come up since the twenty-fourth of December.

Kane looks at the phone, then at me. He waits for me to decide what to do on my own.

I pick it up with shaky fingers. “Hello?”

“Delilah,” my mother says in an oddly formal, choked voice. “You’re a very hard woman to reach.”

“I’ve been at work.”

There’s a pause with a lot of things in it. Then she starts in on a speech that she has obviously workshopped several times over.

Honestly, I don’t even hear most of it. I just get the gist. She talks about how bad the last month has been. About the neighbors, and Father Dunn asking after us, and how a family can’t just fall apart over one bad night, and how your father would be sick over this, Delilah, sick, and how we are the only people any of us have got. So many buzzwords tossed in the mix. Unity. Forgiveness. Family.

“The seventh of February,” she says. “I want us all to sit down together as a family. A Sunday dinner, like we used to do, and we’ll all start over. Doesn’t that sound nice?”

The seventh of February. One year to the day since we buried my father, which is also the day my husband and my sister ordered two steaks and two ice creams at the Marriott by the Brooklyn Bridge.

Does she even know how fucked-up that is?

“Alright,” I say.

She exhales. “Oh, good. Now, I’ll do the roast, and you can bring⁠—”

“No.”

“Pardon me?”

“I’m not bringing anything. No dessert, no rolls, no salad, no ice. Nothing.” I look at the case in front of me, at the empty trays and the smear on the glass where a man’s cheek was slammed down this morning. “I’m not coming at eleven to set up. I’m not counting the guest list. I’m not carrying the chairs up from the basement, and I’m not doing the dishes after. I’ll come at the time you tell everyone else to come, and I’ll sit down, and I’ll eat. That’s it.”

Silence.

“That’s a strange thing to make conditions about,” she says.