“All right.”
Carol came with bread. Gabriella arrived with strawberries and, for the first time in months, no case full of papers.
They unpacked Anthony’s classroom books around the dining table. Sophie found paper stars, a cracked ruler, and photographs of children who would now be older than her father.
At the bottom of one box lay a long, flat bundle wrapped in an old bedsheet.
Margaret frowned.
“I thought that was a shelf.”
Edward lifted it carefully.
It was the missing extension leaf for the dining table.
Margaret put a hand over her mouth.
Anthony had taken it away to repair a split shortly before his final illness. In the confusion afterward, she had assumed it was still in the garage or had been discarded.
A folded sheet was tucked beneath the wrapping.
Margaret recognized his handwriting before she touched it.
Maggie—
Fixed the split. Don’t let Eddie tell you to buy a new table. This one knows us.
Turn it over before you put it in.
She stopped reading.
Edward stared at the floor, his smile trembling at the corners.
Together, he and Carol turned the leaf over.
On the unfinished underside were years of pencil marks.
Edward, age nine, had written his name in enormous crooked letters. Beneath it, a much smaller hand had added Sophie and a backward numeral four. Ben’s contribution was a palm print in faded green paint.
Margaret remembered Anthony keeping the children occupied one afternoon while she baked. She had scolded him for letting them disappear into the garage in their good clothes.
Along one edge, Anthony had written a sentence.
For all the dinners we haven’t had yet.
Margaret sat down.
The beautiful thing he had left was not a warning. It was room.
Gabriella reached for her glass, then set it down without drinking.
Sophie leaned against Margaret’s shoulder.
“Grandpa kept my backward four.”
“He kept everything,” Margaret whispered.
Edward stood on the other side of the table, crying without trying to hide it.
